Robert Penn Warren Past Quotations

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.

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.

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

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

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

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