Top 89 Quotes About Present Tense
#1. The past is something for you to learn from and the future is something that you hope is going to happen, but I'm always speaking to my actual fans in present tense.
Katt Williams
#2. And the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history ...
James Joyce
#3. Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense.
David Foster Wallace
#4. In the sentence "She's no longer suffering," to what, to whom does "she" refer? What does that present tense mean?
Roland Barthes
#5. When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense.
Deborah Levy
#6. That was one of your favorite themes: that profusion, replication, popularity wasn't necessarily devaluing, and that time itself made all things rare. You loved to savor the present tense and were more conscious than anyone I have ever met that its every constituent is fleeting.
Lionel Shriver
#7. Paintings exist in the present tense, yet somehow, because of how it's structured, it can move backwards through time as well.
Joe Bradley
#8. Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.
John Green
#9. Being a writer can be a very lonely profession, but having a network of people who can sympathize with everything you're going through - from contract issues to the terror of changing your novel from past- to present-tense - is an invaluable asset.
Lisa Graff
#10. Rodgers and Hammerstein didn't mean anything to me. I just wanted to have a hit, I just wanted to be like those people on the radio. It was all of a case of the present tense with no projecting into the future, particularly.
Art Garfunkel
#11. Screenplay is the toughest form of writing for me, because you need to be in present tense. You need to be describing things as they occur.
Guillermo Del Toro
#13. Where you come from now is much less important than where you're going. More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It's the place where you become yourself.
Pico Iyer
#14. We must set up a strong present tense against all rumors of wrath, past and to come.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#15. I love you present tense. It's okay, Gus. It's okay. It is. It's okay, you hear me? Okay, okay.
John Green
#16. Photographs are so strange; they are always in the present tense, everyone captured in a moment that will never come again.
Natasha Solomons
#17. What is the difference between an author and a writer? A writer, as we know, writes; an author has written. What does an author do? Auth? Authorize? An author authors. But never in the present tense. No one says, when asked what he or she is doing, I'm authoring.
Roy Blount Jr.
#18. To remember was an act not of excavation but of self-creation in the present tense.
Laura Secor
#19. That part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn't obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading.
Ben Lerner
#20. It was like being trapped forever in the present tense of the first line of a first reader.
Craig Raine
#21. Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.
Angela Carter
#22. I love you present tense," I whispered, and then put my hand on the middle of his chest and said, "It's okay, Gus. It's okay. It is. It's okay, you hear me?" I had - and have - absolutely no confidence that he could hear me. I leaned forward and kissed his cheek. "Okay," I said. "Okay.
John Green
#23. Rewrite your major goals every day, in the present tense, exactly as if they already existed
Brian Tracy
#24. Most times, my mind is just an ongoing, present-tense, first-person monologue. It's like I'm writing a novel, constantly, but only in my brain.
Andrew Shaffer
#25. What do you really want? Sit down and write it out on a piece of paper, write it in the present tense. You might begin by writing, 'I am so happy and grateful now that ... ' and then explain how you want your life to be in every area.
Bob Proctor
#26. Hope requires a very careful symbolization. It must not be expressed too fully in the present tense because hope one can touch and handle is not likely to retain its promissory call to a new future. Hope expressed only in the present tense will no doubt be coopted by the managers of this age
Walter Brueggemann
#28. Memory is dramatic present tense. You create it as you remember it.
Allen Wier
#29. We tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense.
Dennis Potter
#30. Worse, you all present tense and have to deal with sudden past tense all around you. It's like realizing somebody rob you a year late.
Marlon James
#31. From a craft standpoint, telling a story in the first-person present tense over the course of 500 pages is a daunting challenge.
Joseph Boyden
#32. Great acting is all about being in the moment, being in the present tense.
Tom Hooper
#33. Lilianna: Ask me again later.
Tate: Okay Lil'Miss. Magic 8 Ball.
Lilianna: Really, ask me again in a few weeks. I'll have a better read on the relationship in the present tense then.
Tate: You'll have a better read on the present in the future. Yeah, I think that's called History class.
H.R. Willaston
#34. We're in an age when everything's present tense. People don't know how to be still and surrender to the music.
Pete Hamill
#35. That's the past tense, Tom,' returned Mr. James Harthouse, striking the ash from his cigar with his little finger. 'We are in the present tense, now.' 'Verb
Charles Dickens
#36. Winners live in the present tense. People who come up short are consumed with future or past. I want to be living in the now.
Alex Rodriguez
#37. One moment you can say the words 'I am'. And the next, you have no first person, no present tense, and no entitlement, as a subject, to act on verbs of any kind.
Lynne Truss
#41. The way those old memories kept bubbling to the surface in the present tense was disturbing. It was as if the past had never died; as if on some level of time's great tower, everything was still happening.
Stephen King
#42. People's - most people's job is talking about the future or like money not even in the present tense. It's not even paper.
Colin Quinn
#43. Learning to live in the present tense-one that's free from the failures of the past and the anxieties of the future-is a wonderful gift, and one you always should be striving for.
Rick Pitino
#44. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
Adrienne Rich
#45. In 2007, I sold my first book, 'Grimspace.' It says it's SF on the spine. I believe it to be SF, though it's certainly written differently. I write in first person, present tense, and the protagonist is a woman with a woman's thoughts, feelings, and sexual desires.
Ann Aguirre
#46. Everything is beautiful. We have all this beauty in the world and all we have to do is reach out and touch it, it is all there and all ours for the taking.
Cecilia to Henry Chinaski, liberty taken changing past tense to present tense (173)
Charles Bukowski
#47. A good affirmation has five basic ingredients: it's personal, it's positive, it's present tense, it's visual, and it's emotional.
Stephen Covey
#48. Jah know, sometimes I don't learn till too late, and to know something too late? Well is better you never know as my mother used to say. Worse, you all present tense and have to deal with sudden past tense all around you. It's like realizing somebody rob you a year late. So
Marlon James
#49. Mrs. Leene says I should think about people in the present tense.
"It forces you to take responsibility for them," she says.
Adam Rapp
#50. Wisely the Hebrews admit no Present tense in their language;
While we are speaking the word, it is is already the Past.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#51. The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true--both objectively and subjectively--is habitually provisional.
Chuck Klosterman
#52. People tend to vote the present tense - not the subjective.
Diane Sawyer
#54. We can't handle violence in women characters but we CAN handle what's done to women in our present tense every second of the day worldwide? Or next door? Or in political or medical discourse? Please. That idea just makes me want to crap on a table at a very fancy restaurant.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#55. A money-lender
he serves you in the present tense; he lends you in the conditional mood; keeps you in the conjunctive; and ruins you in the future.
Joseph Addison
#56. Everything is always happening all at once, in the present tense, forever, the beginning and the end and the denouement and the remaindering.
Catherynne M Valente
#57. Chronocanine Envy:
Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one's dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, Life must be lived forward.
Douglas Coupland
#58. A lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. So they tell it backwards and they tell it in the present tense and they cut loose the pages and shuffle them around - all that kind of stuff.
Philip Pullman
#59. I never think of what it's going to be like later. I only think in the present tense. The only time I think backwards is when I have to reissue something.
Henry Rollins
#60. Facebook is about sharing experiences that you've had. Foursquare is more about the present tense and the future tense.
Dennis Crowley
#61. In the past, people have looked at photos as a record of memory. The focus has been on the past tense. With Instagram, the focus is on the present tense.
Kevin Systrom
#62. Quoting God's Word in the present tense infuses our hearts with holy restraint and diffuses our reactions so we don't spew.
Lysa TerKeurst
#63. Eternal life truly begins the moment you're born again. It's a present tense - not future tense - reality. If you're a believer, eternal life is now!
Andrew Wommack
#64. I've always thought that you live in the present, you live in a specific present. You are writing, present tense, so write in the present as it is.
Douglas Coupland
#65. Politics is history in the present tense.
John Avlon
#66. Sometimes I would have to take my glasses off simply so the world would smudge and recede for a moment and cease to seem so relentlessly present tense.
Hanya Yanagihara
#67. Only in the present tense is the subject married to its verb. The action - all action, past and future - comes at the end. At the very end, when there is nothing left to do but act.
Jill Alexander Essbaum
#68. Live in the present tense, facing the duty at hand without regret for the past or worry over the future.
William DeWitt Hyde
#69. It's difficult to get an audience to want to keep up with you, stay present tense. But there's never been a big lag in my career between product. I've constantly tried to pull my audience up into what I'm doing present tense, and they've been usually happy to go there with me.
Kenny Loggins
#70. Appeasement is a vote to live in the present tense, to hold the comforts of the moment.
Mark Steyn
#71. The phrase "I have children" is always present tense. They are always with me. Even when I am by myself, I "have children.
Jim Gaffigan
#72. Don't give up on your dream. If you do, you aren't just giving up on its present-tense reality. You're giving up on its future-tense potential. Were
Mark Batterson
#73. A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
V.S. Pritchett
#74. To be honest, we live in an exciting time where form is concerned. My sincerest hope is that more people will notice this and agree to play and invent - the only way to not succumb to the complacency and market-driven schlock of the present tense is to continually interrogate it from the inside out.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#75. I begin with songs. They provide a sort of skeleton grammar for me to flesh out. Songs of longing for future tense, songs of regret for past tense, and songs of love for present tense.
Mary Doria Russell
#76. A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.
Joshua Foer
#77. The tense of the body is the present indicative; but the soul has a memory and a present and a future. I have conceived some extremely recondite pains for Mr. Trellis. I will pierce him with a pluperfect.
Flann O'Brien
#78. It must be asked here: why does the patient go on being worried by this that belongs to the past? The answer must be that the original experience of primitive agony cannot get into the past tense unless the ego can first gather it into its own present time experience ... .
Mark Epstein
#80. (by the way ... I realize I switch from present to past tense, and if you don't like it ... ram a nipple up your scrotum. -printer: leave this in.)
Charles Bukowski
#81. A man's conscience shouts so much more loudly in the past tense than it ever manages to achieve in the present.
Jasper Kent
#82. You didn't promise to kill me," Wayne said, pulling on his socks. "You promised to have killed me. That there be the present perfect tense.
Brandon Sanderson
#83. I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it:
The past, present, and future walk into a bar - it was tense.
Kelli Russell Agodon
#84. I don't view myself from the past present or future tense i like to think of the world from my own personal point of view at whatever time i feel that is relayed to me in conjunction with my well being to progressively grow successfully finacially as well as mentally.
Riff Raff
#85. The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense.
Lex Martin
#86. But why would it matter? We aren't ... or ... uh ... weren't ... "
Which is it, Jess? "Aren't" or "weren't"? Present or past tense? Now or then?
"We haven't been talking to each other."
Past imperfect tense. How appropriate.
Megan McCafferty
#87. When I'm writing, I can always play around with tense. I can always make past present. I can always kind of manipulate, and I can always be delusional in a way that's completely self-serving. With film, it's like, the camera can't really lie. It can manipulate to a certain extent.
Jose Antonio Vargas
#88. Sluka shook her head. We're talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It's like their only reason for existing was so they could die.
Alastair Reynolds
#89. Is life like this? Is it a past that goes by, then crumbles away, and a present that runs in the wake of the past, and a future that can only be grasped if one talks of it in the present or past tense?
Kahlil Gibran
