...by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it's too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet 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 selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?
Robert Penn WarrenMore and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
Robert Penn WarrenYour business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.
Robert Penn Warren