186 Quotes by Robert Penn Warren

Have you everStared into the owl's eyes? They blink slow, then burn:Burn gold in the dark inner core of the snow-shrouded cedar.

And he said, 'Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.

…they always gave good reasons for the things they did, and then when they got old they lost their reasons for doing anything and sat on the bench in front of the harness shop and had words for the reasons other people had but had forgotten what the reasons were.

I don’t care about anybody being handsome", she said, "but I never did go for anybody that reminded me of a box of spilled spaghetti. All elbows and dry rattle.

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

I reckon I am a smart aleck, but it is just a way to pass the time.

The struggle for power conducted along logical lines is much more likely to occur in smoke-filled rooms than at the polls. The party system is a grid, a filter, a meat chopper, through which issues are processed for the consuming public. The Civil War confirmed our preference for this arrangement. We like the fog of politics, with the occasional drama of the flash of a lightning bolt that, happily, is usually nothing more than a near miss.

A diamond ain't a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt. That right?

Los verdaderos escritores son aquellos que quieren escribir, necesitan escribir, tienen que escribir.