If you want him to do it, you've got to change the picture of the world inside his head.

— Robert Penn Warren

I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great many things, but that is different. We get very few of the true images in our heads of the kind I am talking about, the kind that become more and more vivid for us as if the passage of the years did not obscure their reality but, year by year, drew off another veil to expose a meaning which we had only dimly surmised at first. Very probably the last veil will not be removed, for there are not enough years, but the brightness of the image increases and our conviction increases that the brightness is meaning, or the legend of meaning, and without the image our lives would be nothing except an old piece of film rolled on a spool and thrown into a desk drawer among the unanswered letters.

— Robert Penn Warren

I know nothing I’m doing is important,' he said. 'Sure, I’m just a waste product of history. Maybe nothing I’m doing is even real, after all. But I was born right here, in this old house, and I look out the window and know what I’m seeing, and I know some people I like to be with, and I like what I do all day long, and maybe that’s all that realness is, anyway

— Robert Penn Warren

In the last analysis, be always of whatever truth you would live. For fire flames but in the heart of a colder fire. All voice is but echo caught from a soundless voice. Height is not deprivation of valley, nor defect of desire, But defines, for the fortunate, that joy in which all joys should rejoice.

— Robert Penn Warren

It is hard to remember.”“Remember what?”“All that goes into the making of any one moment we live. There are things one must try to remember. Do you know what is the hardest thing to remember?”“No,” Adam said.“Well, I’ll tell you, my son,” Aaron Braunstein said. “The hardest thing to remember is that other men are men.” He leaned to set his cup down. “But that,” he said, “is the only way you can be a man yourself. Can be anything.

— Robert Penn Warren

I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five, but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sunscreen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. 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. It was just where I went.

— Robert Penn Warren

Let us leave in suspension such debates about the economic costs of the War and look at another kind of cost, a kind more subtle, pervasive, and continuing, a kind that conditions in a thousand ways the temper of American life today. This cost is psychological, and it is, of course, different for the winner and the loser.

— Robert Penn Warren

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passed from the stink of the Dixie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something (All The King's Men)

— Robert Penn Warren

No, the Boss corrected, I'm not a lawyer. I know some law. ... but I'm not a lawyer. That's why I can see what the law is like. It's like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain't ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shank bone's to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind. The best you can do is do something and then make up some law to fit and by the time that law gets on the books you would have done something different.

— Robert Penn Warren

Politics is action and all action is but a flaw in the perfection of inaction, which is peace, just as all being is but a flaw in the perfection of nonbeing. Which is God. For if God is perfection and the only perfection is in nonbeing, then God is nonbeing. Then God is nothing. Nothing can give no basis for the criticism of Thing in its thinness. Then where do you get anything to say? Then where do you get off?

— Robert Penn Warren