“Fellows like Willie Stark are born outside of luck, good or bad, and luck, which is what about makes you and me what we are, doesn't have anything to do with them, for they are what they are from the time they first kick in the womb until they end. And if that is the case, then their life history is a process of discovering what they really are, and not, as for you and me, sons of luck, a process of becoming what luck makes us.”
More from Robert Penn Warren
“I wondered if ever my heart would beat again, / As I wandered the moonlight’s dream, past…”
“Everything seems an echo of something else.”
“[On Lincoln] No man has ever distinguished more carefully between 'is' and 'ought to be.'”
“Perhaps he could not tell his greatness from ungreatness and so mixed them together that…”