Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.
Robert Penn WarrenYet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?
Robert Penn Warren[A]nd soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.
Robert Penn WarrenFor what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Robert Penn Warren