# Quote — Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

> Cass Mastern lived for a few years and in that time he learned that the world is all of one piece. He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of things. Your happy foot or your gay wing may have brushed it ever so lightly, but what happens always happens and there is the spider, bearded black and with his great faceted eyes glittering like mirrors in the sun, or like God's eye, and the fangs dripping.

- Author: [Robert Penn Warren](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-penn-warren.md)
- Book: [All the King's Men](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-penn-warren/all-the-kings-men.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/All_the_King's_Men#Chapter_4) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-penn-warren/all-the-kings-men/cass-mastern-lived

## More from this book

> The person that loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass. So there are two you's, the one you yourself create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be a perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-penn-warren/all-the-kings-men/the-person-that.md)

> Nothing fazed him, not insult or anger or violence or getting his face beat into a hamburger. He was a true businessman. He knew the value of everything.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-penn-warren/all-the-kings-men/nothing-fazed-him.md)

> The subject of my future, as a matter of fact, was one on which I had never cared to dwell. I simply didn't care. I would think that I'd get a job, any kind of job, and do it and collect my pay and spend the pay and go back to the job on Monday morning, and that would be all. I had no ambitions.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-penn-warren/all-the-kings-men/the-subject-of-my-future.md)