Robert Penn Warren Quotes

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

Do we always grind through the present, doomed to throw a gold haze of fond retrospect over the past?

We all have appointments with the past.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.

The past is one evil less and one memory more.

Nobody ever lived in the past.

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

The past is not a package one can lay away.

The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable.

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

I was born in 1949 - which seems like a long time ago... Actually, it is a long time ago, when I think about it.

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

Legends are all to do with the past and nothing to do with the present.

The good old days are now.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

There is always something rather absurd about the past.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.

As a historian, I've spent much of my career warning people about the dangers of nostalgia.

So often, we don't realize that the very moments in which we live become our history, our story.

All the things that are in the past are in the past.

We have to learn from the past.