Present Tense Quotes - Page 2

• My last defense / Is the present tense.

  Gwendolyn Brooks

  Live In The Moment, Lasts, Defense

  Gwendolyn Brooks (2005). “The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks”, p.81, Library of America

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• In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.

  Adrienne Rich

  America, United States, Danger

  Adrienne Rich (2002). “Poemas, 1963-2000”, p.70, Editorial Renacimiento

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• "Sinner" is a present-tense description of everyone, including those who have put their faith in Christ. Of course, those who have called Jesus "Lord" are justified, meaning that they are no longer guilty. Also, they have been given the Spirit, which makes them slaves to Christ rather than to sin. But we all are sinners. Perfection awaits eternity.

  Edward T Welch

  Jesus, Perfection, Spirit

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• 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

  Mean, People, Radio

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• 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

  Grateful, Writing, Law Of Attraction

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• There's a desire for me in the work, even when I'm looking at the past, to be looking from the present. It's to be here now. It's looking in the present tense.

  Zoe Leonard

  Past, Desire, Be Here Now

  Interview with Molly Prentiss, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 13, 2016.

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• The nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous. [...] If you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.

  Dennis Potter

  Boys, Wonderful, Celebrate

  "We tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense". Interview with Melvyn Bragg, www.theguardian.com. March 15, 1994.

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• 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

  Motivational, Past, Anxiety

  Rick Pitino (1997). “Success is a Choice: Ten Steps to Overachieving in Business and Life”, Broadway

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• I think everybody came into it with the understanding that they would go through an experience that is literally not by the book, that is not executing the script and then going home, but living and breathing these characters and being in the moment with each other, and improvising and creating a lot of present-tense intensity between characters.

  Oren Moverman

  Book, Home, Character

  "Rampart Director, Oren Moverman Interview". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• 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

  Play, People, Complacency

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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

  Character, Doors, Ideas

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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

  Thinking, Tense, Backwards

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  Emotional, Ingredients, Affirmation

  Stephen R. Covey (2004). “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change”, p.133, Simon and Schuster

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• Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense.

  David Foster Wallace

  Art, Unique, Evaluation

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• I think that to believe is to acknowledge that it's a choice in that present tense and that doubt is always an option. You’re not dealing with a fact like one plus one equals two—I’m gonna choose to believe that. It’s kind of one of those things where you are choosing to believe that someone loves you. That is always going to be your choice. So for me, I think that’s what makes the faith that I have volatile and explosive and dangerous and troubling. That’s what most of my songs are about.

  Jon Foreman

  Song, Believe, Love You

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• What do you really want? Sit down and write it out on a piece of paper. Write it in the present tense.

  Bob Proctor

  Writing, Pieces, Paper

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• 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

  Challenges, Stories, Crafts

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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

  Beautiful, Taken, Past

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• 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

  Past, Feet, Ice

  Margaret Atwood (2012). “Bluebeard's Egg”, p.257, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.

  Joshua Foer

  Meaningful, Two, People

  Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.59, Penguin

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• 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

  Literature, Kind, Speak

  "The Fault in Our Stars". Book by John Green, January 10, 2012.

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• I love you present tense.

  John Green

  Love You, Tense, Hazel Grace

  John Green (2012). “The Fault in Our Stars”, p.270, Penguin

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• Trust perfected is prayer perfected. Trust looks to receive the thing asked for and gets it. Trust is not a belief that God can bless or that He will bless, but that He does bless, here and now. Trust always operates in the present tense. Hope looks toward the future. Trust looks to the present. Hope expects. Trust possesses. Trust receives what prayer acquires. So, what prayer needs, at all times, is abiding and abundant trust.

  Edward McKendree Bounds

  Prayer, Doe, Needs

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• 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

  Teacher, Past, Years

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• We must set up a strong present tense against all rumors of wrath, past and to come.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Strong, Past, Wrath

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