Quotes & Sayings About Past Tense

She had come out tonight because she believed there had to be a present tense, somewhere, and she'd followed Gav and Barnesy because she'd hoped they knew where it was. Is. And they'd dragged her to yet another haunted house. Where was the now? In bloody America, probably, apart from the bit that Tucker lived in, or in bloody Tokyo. In any case, it was somewhere else. How could people who didn't live in bloody America or bloody Tokyo stand it, all that swimming around in the past imperfect? — Nick Hornby

They never experience the past tense. It's just another thread to them. They don't remember stuff, they relive it. — Peter Watts

If I speak of Vienna it must be in the past tense, as a man speaks of a woman he has loved and who is dead. — Erich Von Stroheim

It surprised me that I was already using the past tense. People I knew. As if I didn't know them anymore. — Ashley Newell

Those were her best days, although there was always something feckless about her, something so slack and almost fearful in her too frequent smile, so that when you saw Mignon being happy, you always thought: "It can't last." She had the febrile gaiety of a being without a past, without a present, yet she existed thus, without memory or history, only because her past was too bleak to think of and her future too terrible to contemplate; she was the broken blossom of the present tense. — Angela Carter

It was an honor to work with Samantha Morton on this Casablanca-esque, silent-film-esque, Americana photobooth Woolworth's hay day period piece of surrealism/ realism/ story time tell-tale-ism, black and white 35 mm film, washed in strange light, over this love hate tune, heartbreak song, life-goes-on lullaby, The Last Goodbye. It's a doorway into the future of the fatal past-tense. Get it? — Alison Mosshart

We may use the past tense properly to indicate that at a certain time a certain word of God was spoken, but a word of God once spoken continues to be spoken, as a child once born continues to be alive, or a world once created continues to exist. And those are but imperfect illustrations, for children die and worlds burn out, but the Word of our God endureth forever. — A.W. Tozer

I can't change it. It's part of who I was. Past tense. All I know is that I want you, all the fucking time, every day, endlessly. I don't know how to deal with that. I don't know how to make sense of it without overwhelming you, and I don't want to tell you anything that's going to jeopardize it. — Helena Hunting

I cannot stand the words Get over it. All of us are under such pressure to put our problems in the past tense. Slow down. Don't allow others to hurry your healing. It is a process, one that may take years, occasionally, even a lifetime - and that's OK. — Beau Taplin

Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge. — Margaret Atwood

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

It is important to note that multiculturalism does not share the postmodernist stance. Its passions are political; its assumptionsempirical; its conception of identities visceral. For it, there is no doubting that history is something that happened and that those happenings have left their mark within our collective consciousness. History for multiculturalists is not a succession of dissolving texts, but a tense tangle of past actions that have reshaped the landscape, distributed the nation's wealth, established boundaries, engendered prejudices, and unleashed energies. — Joyce Appleby

(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

He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense. — James Joyce

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

No one has ever been modern. Modernity has never begun. There has never been a modern world. The use of the past perfect tense is important here, for it is a matter of a retrospective sentiment, of a rereading of our history. I am not saying that we are entering a new era; on the contrary we no longer have to continue the headlong flight of the post-post-postmodernists; we are no longer obliged to cling to the avant-garde of the avant-garde; we no longer seek to be even cleverer, even more critical, even deeper into the 'era of suspicion'. No, instead we discover that we have never begun to enter the modern era. Hence the hint of the ludicrous that always accompanies postmodern thinkers; they claim to come after a time that has not even started! — Anonymous

Harold had become, over the past week, a connoisseur of silences. He was an expert at differentiating the particulars; was this a Tranquil Silence, marked by slow sighs and peaceful smiles? Or was it a Tired Silence, marked by ornery chair shifting? Or a Tense Silence, full of tight breaths and cautious glances? — Graham Moore

She paused and saw him tense in expectation. He wouldn't like to hear this, but better from her than one of the others. "You aren't the only pilot I have in my service. And you aren't the only person with a dark past, though the illegal things that you did, you were forced to do by the Core. But I will tell you what I've told the others. This is your last chance. You screw up with me and you get shipped up river. I don't offer second chances - I offer last chances."
Nope, he didn't like it. She saw the hand not holding the bottle of beer curl into a fist.
Sin and Del, from Sunscapes Trilogy, Book 1: Last Chance — Michelle O'Leary

I really such a terrible mother?' she asked Bertie. 'Why the past tense?' Bertie said. Sow — Kate Atkinson

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

The only pleasure of endurance is its past tense. — Wes Fesler

Try to find the real tense of the report you are reading: Was it done, is it being done, or is something to be done? Reports are now written in four tenses: past tense, present tense, future tense, and pretense. Watch for novel uses of CONGRAM (CONtractor GRAMmer), defined by the past imperfect, the present insufficient, and the future absolutely perfect. — Amrom Harry Katz

From August 25 to 28, I'm sharing the Amazon proceeds of all versions of Love Is Never Past Tense with Orphan World Relief — Janna Yeshanova

At that stage of your life, there'll be no past or future for you; until I give you my breast, you'll have no memory of contentment in the past nor expectation of relief in the future. Once you begin nursing, everything will be in reverse, and all will be right with the world. NOW is the only moment you'll perceive; you'll live in the present tense. In many ways, it's an enviable state. — Ted Chiang

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

Oh, God, Alaska, I love you. I love you,' and the Colonel whispered, 'I'm so sorry, Pudge. I know you did,' and I said, 'No. Not past tense. — John Green

Still," I said, "I am sorry. But I was desperate to rescue my sister."
"I understand," the sagging dragon assured me. He explained, "I, too, had a sister, once."
The past tense didn't escape me. "What happened to her?" I asked, feeling we were connected, two of a kind after all, sharing similar personal tragedies.
"I had to eat her," the dragon said, "to keep her from stealing my gold. — Vivian Vande Velde

Because love is never in the past tense. — Scott D. Brillon

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

The wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect. — Zadie Smith

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

I loved him so much. Love him so much. I don't know why I use the past tense. It's not as if love dies with the beloved. — Kate Atkinson

I'm focussing on what I haven't attained, not what I have. A lot has come to me early. I don't want to get consumed with that. 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. My goal is to play one full game in the now, but I haven't even gotten past the first inning yet. I start thinking about where my mom is or if my dogs have been fed. The average human has 2,000 thoughts a day. The really accomplished have 1,500 because you can focus longer. I need to learn how to focus longer. — Alex Rodriguez

You said you loved me, is that now in the past tense?" "No, it's not." "Good. — E.L. James

Memory is igneous more than ingenious, igneous, and like granite, intrusive, heaved up within oneself, the whole range of one's life, mountains' forbidding height looming over the plains where one lives, mountains formed by the life already lived, but toward which one is always walking, one's own past ahead of him, seeking the improbable path already forged, this path back through oneself, this path we call the present tense, which becomes the continental divide when the tense shifts and the path is lost, path from which the walker emerges only to turn around and see the peaks pulled up by his feet, and the snowy pass, and alpine heights, where those stranded must sometime feed on themselves to survive, where sometimes, through the icy crust, the crocus blooms. — Dan Beachy-Quick

Amber was past tense. We were covering her inanimate face in the white sheet of was. — Lorrie Moore

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

One's my favorite number. The word won being the past tense of win, and we can all say at the end of the day that we won once again, can't we? Some days making it to the end of the day is quite a victory. — Jennifer Brown

After lunch I tried to watch television, but I found that even with two-thirds of my brain focused on fretting about my coming demise, the remaining third of my intellect was a little too smart to put up with the bright and brainless daytime drivel on all the channels. I turned off the set and just sat on the couch, letting one tense and miserable thought chase another, until finally, at half past five, the front door burst open and Astor stormed in, flung her backpack on the floor, and rushed to her room. She was followed by Cody, who actually noticed me and nodded, and then Rita, carrying Lily Anne. — Jeff Lindsay

Christopher forced her to look back at him. "Loved?" he asked hoarsely. "Past tense?"
"Present tense," she managed to say.
"You told me to find you."
"I didn't mean to send you that note."
"But you did. You wanted me."
"Yes." More tears escaped her stinging eyes. He bent and pressed his mouth to them, tasting the salt of grief.
Those gray eyes looked into hers, no longer bright as hellfrost, but soft as smoke. "I love you, Beatrix."
Maybe she was capable of swooning after all. — Lisa Kleypas

Anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows only too dearly that languages can be full of pointless irregularities that increase complexity considerably without contributing much to the ability to express ideas. English, for instance, would have losed none of its expressive power if some of its verbs leaved their irregular past tense behind and becomed regular. — Guy Deutscher

Welling up in my eyes, and then wipe my forehead too so it looks like I was just sweating. "Yeah. I'm ready." I declined the idea of having some kind of reception after the funeral. I hated the idea of everyone mingling around, eating casseroles and pie, and talking about Gramps in a steady stream of past tense phrases and stories. Gramps' death didn't need to take up everyone's day, either. When we arrive back at the house — AnnaLisa Grant

I am as much a scholar as a warrior. T'isten'ur - a name with curious echoes. Tiste Andii, the Dwellers in Darkness. And, more rarely mentioned, and then in naught but fearful whispers, their shadow-kin, the Tiste Edur. Grey-skinned, believed extinct - and thankfully so, for it is a name sheathed in dread. T'isten'ur, the first glottal stop implies past tense, yes? Tlan, now T'lan - your language is kin to that of the Imass. Close kin. — Steven Erikson

And it occurs to me that there's no real difference between us, the living and the dead; it's just a matter of tense: past-dead and future-dead — Rick Yancey

Brit had wanted it to say LOVED. Those were the directions she gave me for the granite carver. But at the last minute I changed it. I was never going to stop, so why make it past tense? I — Jodi Picoult

My past lives alone. That's why my loneliness wants to live in the past — Munia Khan

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

Remember? Ohh, I wouldn't do that! Remembering's dangerous. I find the past such a worrying, anxious place.
"The past tense", I supposed you'd call it. Ha ha ha. — Alan Moore

Prayer is asking God to do something, future tense; praise is believing that God has already done it, past tense. — Mark Batterson

Play me something that makes me feel;
This soul inside me is made of steel.
Brain is breathing, but heart's not beating
And, babe, I need you to make things real.
Walk inside me without silence,
Kill the past and change the tense.
Empty gnawing and the ache is soaring;
Take me places that make more sense. — Melina Marchetta

We must set up a strong present tense against all rumors of wrath, past and to come. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this. — Margaret Atwood

It's so difficult to write in motion and get rid of the past tense, and also to create a sense of impermanence. — Gerald Vizenor

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

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

Live in the present tense, facing the duty at hand without regret for the past or worry over the future. — William DeWitt Hyde

I would not admire hitting against Ryne Duren, because if he ever hit you in the head you might be in the past tense. — Casey Stengel

"Never speak of me in the past tense". My presence here will be many times greater without the burden of my tortured body. — Rajneesh

There's no past tense when you lose someone, Jed. You just keep on loving them. — Garrett Leigh

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

He was already looking at their relationship through the lens of the past tense. It puzzled her, the ability of romantic love to mutate, how quickly a loved one could become a stranger. Where did the love go? Perhaps real love was familial, somehow, linked to blood, since love for children did not die as romantic love did. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

No, cool is fine," he said. "Yes, it's a cool place. It was much cooler seven years ago, and it was actually cool ten years ago, before I even got to the city. You see, what those kids over there" - he pointed at the empty booth - "don't realize is that cool is always past tense. The people who lived it, who set the standards they emulate, there was no cool for them. There was just the present tense: there were bills, friendships, messy fucking, fucking boredom, a million trite decisions on how to pass the time. Self-awareness destroys it. You call something cool and you brand it. Then - poof - it's gone. It's just nostalgia. — Stephanie Danler

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

The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveller's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you for instance how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations whilst you are actually travelling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own father or mother. — Douglas Adams

Chevy Stevens is in top form. ALWAYS WATCHING is a tense and twisty exploration of dark memories, hidden pasts, and a place that seems like heaven but might be hell. This is a deep and exciting novel, as unsettling as it is gripping. — Lisa Unger

What libraries give you is all three tenses - the past tense - the present tense in which we live and the future that we can only imagine. These places have teachers who are living and dead and we are lucky to have them. If I sit here and read Aristotle, he is speaking to me across a thousand years - more than a thousand years. That sense that I am in the company of the great greatest people who ever lived is a humbling experience but a liberating experience. — Pete Hamill

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

A man's conscience shouts so much more loudly in the past tense than it ever manages to achieve in the present. — Jasper Kent

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

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

The last thing I have to say is that ice is the past tense of water. I've always wanted to write that sentence and now I have. — Rita Mae Brown

Love has no past tense. — Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Through the eyes of the brave, the future makes past tense perfect sense. — Auliq Ice

I mean being a knight," she said."Was it worth it?"
The drama, the heartache, the stress? The friendships, the conspiracies, the pranks, the bonding ... Was it worth it?Oh, yeah.But then her words sunk in. Was. Past tense. For I was no longer an active knight of Rose & Grave.I was a patriarch. — Diana Peterfreund

Childhood is a tissue of lies that endure in the past tense — Elena Ferrante

For he is in a past-tense, future-perfect kind of mood. — Zadie Smith

The shortest verse in the Bible is 'Jesus wept.' The only thing wrong with it is the past tense. — R. K. Milholland

The Bible does not deny that we were various things - addicts, homosexuals, hateful, prideful, pornographic masturbators - but that is what we were (past tense) (1 Cor. 6:9-11; Titus 3:3-5). The emphasis in Scripture is on what we are and what we are called to be. The Christian does not say, Hello, my name is _ and I am an X Y or Z." The Christian says I was dead, but now I am alive. The Christian says I am a struggling sinner, yet I am a saint. The Christians says I am a new creation; I am transformed. — Paul O'Brien

Few fallacies are more dangerous or easier to fall into than that by which, having read a given book, we assume that we will continue to know its contents permanently, or having mastered a discipline in the past, we assume that we control it in the present. Philosophically speaking, "to learn" is a verb with not legitimate tense. — Robert Grudin

Having sex with a dead grammar teacher is a violation of past tense usage. — Dana Gould

Time in China has no immediacy as in America. Here I find the swift passage of our few earthly years accepted as naturally as the fall of flower and leaf ... I hear and speak a language in which grammar has no tense. Both scholars and illiterates, in ordinary daily speech, tell an event of centuries ago as casually as an incident of the hour. Only as my knowledge has accumulated have I been able to know whether something related happened just then or in some past dynasty. — Nora Waln

She was one of those women who are usually referred to in the past tense, of whom one says: 'She had a certain freshness and bloom about her,' and whose freshness and bloom passed unnoticed even when she still had them. — Gabriel Chevallier

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends have been evasive about it, at the time. — Margaret Atwood

The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense. — Lex Martin

I have learned that love is not a button which you can switch it on when wonderfully sizzling and switch off when heart broken. When you love you cannot put a past tense to it because if you do then it was never love in the first place. But if love was there, then it persists in different forms such as mutual respect but never hatred. — Gloria D. Gonsalves

Was. What does was actually mean? The verb to be. Past tense of is. Does it mean that someone is no longer being? — Melina Marchetta

distinguish hearsay from what we've seen with our own eyes; when we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense. It is a useful distinction to make as we "remember" our earliest life experiences, our cradles, our baby carriages, our first steps, all as reported by our parents, stories to which we listen with the same rapt attention — Orhan Pamuk

It was the English word she used. It was in English that the past was unilateral; in Bengali, the word for yesterday, kal, was also the word for tomorrow. In Bengali one needed an adjective, or relied on the tense of a verb, to distinguish what had already happened from what would be. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Loved. You can't use it in the past tense. Death does not stop that love at all. — Ken Kesey

The past is always tense, the future perfect. — Zadie Smith

That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; — Margaret Atwood

At one stage in the history of English, the past tenses of verbs were marked by a regular vowel change process; instead of "help/helped," we had "help/holp." Over time, -ed became the preferred way to mark the past tense, and eventually the past tense of most verbs was formed by adding -ed. But the old pattern was preserved in verbs like "eat/ate," "give/gave," "take/ took," "get/got" - verbs that are used very often, and so are more entrenched as a linguistic habit (the very frequently used "was/ were" is a holdover from an even older pattern). They became irregular because the world changed around them. — Arika Okrent

There are tenses that define us now: past tense, back then; future tense, not yet. We live in the small window between them, the space we've only recently come to think as still, and really it's no smaller than anyone else's window. — Margaret Atwood

Those are the only two things you should tell the police officer in that context, and they are both in the present tense. (You might as well cooperate with such a request, by the way, because the Fifth Amendment does not normally give you the right to refuse to tell the police your name anyway. That is it. But if the police officer tries to strike up a conversation with you about the past, and where you were thirty minutes earlier, and who you were with, and where you had dinner, and with whom - you will not answer those questions. You will not be rude, but you will always firmly decline, with all due respect, to answer those questions. — James Duane

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

She was
I keep using the past tense; I ought to say she is
one of those people who, at first sight, look plain, are quiet, unassertive, unmemorable even. But who, when they start to talk and you get to know them, become more and more attractive and impressive, and you see that in fact they are beautiful. Not conventionally beautiful, not celebrity beautiful, but beautiful all through. — Aidan Chambers

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

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

They ask themselves: "What will he do?" "How will he react?" "Will he go mad?" "Will he bite?" "Will he be armed?" They're pumped up with fear. Adrenaline pumping, fingers tense on the trigger, brains racing. And I'm cool as a cat! The name 'Charles Bronson' causes panic! The name 'Mickey Peterson' causes stress! The police all love to arrest me, as I'm the most exciting madman they will ever arrest! It's a fact. So here I am years later, and I'm still the madman. There is no escaping my past. — Stephen Richards