Robert Penn Warren Quotes About Past

Quotes about: Past

• The past is always a rebuke to the present.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Past, History, Rebuke

  Robert Penn Warren, Floyd C. Watkins, John T. Hiers (1980). “Robert Penn Warren talking: interviews, 1950-1978”, Random House (NY)

• If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Past, Burden, Accepting

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.656, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Distance, Past, History

  Robert Penn Warren (1977). “A Time to Hear and Answer: Essays for the Bicentennial Season”, University of Alabama Press

• Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Past, Reality, Events

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.578, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. That is what all of us historical researchers believe. And we love truth.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Love, Life, Believe

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.342, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Past

  Robert Penn Warren's Acceptance speech for the 1970 National Medal for Literature, New York City, New York, December 2, 1970.

• This is not remarkable, for, as we know, reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events. We seem here to have a paradox: that the reality of an event, which is not real in itself, arises from the other events which, likewise, in themselves are not real. But this only affirms what we must affirm: that direction is all. And only as we realize this do we live, for our own identity is dependent upon this principal.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Real, Past, Identity

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.578, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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