. . . For meaning is never in the event but in the motion through event. Otherwise, we could isolate an instant in the event and say that this is the event itself. The meaning. But we cannot do that. For it is the motion which is important.

— Robert Penn Warren

For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. Furthermore, it is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. Furthermore, it is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. Furthermore, it is where you go when you hear that their's gold in them-their hills. Furthermore, it is where you go to grow up with the country. Furthermore, it is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

— Robert Penn Warren

For what blessing may a man hope for Bhutan immortality in The loving vigilance of death.

— Robert Penn Warren

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

— Robert Penn Warren

Furthermore, a society with no sense of the past, with no sense of the human role as significant not merely in experiencing history but in creating it can have no sense of destiny. And what kind of society is it that has no sense of destiny and no sense of self? That has no need or will to measure itself by the record of human achievement and the range of human endowment? And here we may pause to ask what our society measures itself by. Is it only by the ability to gratify immediate appetites, capacity for consumption, and the GNP?

— Robert Penn Warren

He thought of night coming on. He thought of the loneliness of tonight, this first night in the ground. This, he thought, was the moment when the dead must first feel truly alone. This was the moment when the dead, in loneliness, feel the first stirrings of the long penance of decay. This was the moment when the dead realize the truth: This is it, it will never be different. To be dead, he thought, that was to know that nothing would ever be different.

— Robert Penn Warren

He would get up and go out into a world which seemed very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamiliarity like the world of boyhood to which an old man returns.

— Robert Penn Warren

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

— Robert Penn Warren

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

— Robert Penn Warren

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.

— Robert Penn Warren