Tense Quotes - Page 10

• Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.

  William Carlos Williams

  Moving, Rain, Dark

  William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.174, New Directions Publishing

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• 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

  Ruins, Mood, Lending

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• The condition of the theater is always an accurate measure of the cultural health of a nation. A play always exists in the present tense (if it is a valuable one), and its music -- its special noise -- is always contemporary. The most valuable function of the theater as an art form is to tell us who we are, and the health of the theater is determined by how much of that we want to know.

  Edward Albee

  Art, Play, Special

  Edward Albee (2009). “Stretching My Mind: The Collected Essays of Edward Albee”, p.63, Da Capo Press

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• Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it's a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. "Atheistic humanism" became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumamism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction. Post-Christian European culture is already post-cultural and, with its surging Muslim populations, will soon be post-European.

  Mark Steyn

  Christian, Atheist, Hands

  "America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It". Book by Mark Steyn, 2006.

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• The actor's tense, he's being taped and things are not falling naturally. That's what I hate about Boadway. I feel like I'm giving a whole lot for nothing. I like to capture things and hold them there and share them with the whole world.

  Michael Jackson

  Hate, Fall, Giving

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• A really intelligent nation might be held together by far stronger forces than are derived from the purely gregarious instincts. A nation need not be a mob of slaves, clinging to one another through fear, and for the most part incapable of self-government, and begging to be led; but it might consist of vigorous self-reliant men, knit to one another by innumerable ties, into a strong, tense, and elastic organisation.

  Francis Galton

  Strong, Intelligent, Men

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• If there's a character type I despise, it's the all-capable, all-knowing, physically perfect protagonist. My idea of hell would be to be trapped in a four-hundred page, first-person, first-tense, running monologue with a character like that. I think writers who produce characters along those lines should graduate from high school and move on.

  Craig Johnson

  Running, Moving, School

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• 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

  Past, Thinking, Views

  Source: larryvillechronicles.blogspot.com

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• 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

  Past, Fans, Happens

  "Katt Williams: Scary, Crazy or Genius?". Interview with Kelley L. Carter, www.ebony.com. April 11, 2013.

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• A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Natural, New Yorkers, Native

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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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• 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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• There is no way to understand the public reaction to the sight of a Freak smashing a coconut with a hammer on the hood of a white Cadillac in a Safeway parking lot unless you actually do it, and I tell you it's tense.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Food, Sight, White

  Hunter S. Thompson (2011). “Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist”, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  Time, Flower, Fall

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• Twitter has allowed the conversation to broaden and become more inclusive. At times, the conversation is really tense but that's because we're talking about really important issues. It's not going to be easy but at least the conversations are happening.

  Roxane Gay

  Talking, Issues, Important

  Source: logger.believermag.com

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• Everyone longs for love's tense joys and red delights.

  Jane Kenyon

  Joy, Delight, Red

  Jane Kenyon (2005). “Collected Poems”, Graywolf Press

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• The general public have a warped view of the speed at which an investigation proceeds. They like to imagine tense conversations going on behind the venetian blinds and unshaven, but ruggedly handsome, detectives working themselves with single-minded devotion into the bottle and marital breakdown. The truth is that at the end of the day, unless you've generated some sort of lead, you go home and get on with the important things in life - like drinking and sleeping, and if you're lucky, a relationship with the gender and sexual orientation of your choice.

  Ben Aaronovitch

  Drinking, Sleep, Home

  Ben Aaronovitch (2011). “Moon Over Soho”, p.33, Del Rey

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• Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE.

  Tristan Tzara

  Color, Opposites, Roaring

  "Dada manifesto" by Tristan Tzara, translated by Robert Motherwell, (1918); as quotes in "Dada Painters and Poets" by Robert Motherwell, New York, (pp. 78-81), 1951.

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• I have a problem with writer/directors, personal. I can't work well with both of them on the set, if both of them are giving instructions. Writers tend to be in love with what they wrote. You can't always translate the words into the meaning, sometimes the meaning is better served without the words, difficult to make a writer to try to understand that. It gets, sometimes, tense.

  Morgan Freeman

  Giving, Trying, Directors

  Interview with Richard Jobson, www.theguardian.com. July 14, 2000.

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• For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don't feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say 'When I grow up,' there is always an edge of disbelief - how could they ever be other than what they are?

  Ian Mcewan

  Children, Growing Up, Memories

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• I'm a very anxious, nervy kind of loser in many ways, and I get very stressed and a little tense.

  Ed Weeks

  Stressed, Littles, Way

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• the old man dance, where I tense up, shuffle my feet intermittently, complain about the music volume, and sit down for a rest.

  David Thorne

  Men, Feet, Complaining

  David Thorne (2011). “The Internet is a Playground: Irreverent Correspondences of an Evil Online Genius”, p.321, Penguin

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• Even the wisest man grows tense
  With some sort of violence
  Before he can accomplish fate,
  Know his work or choose his mate.
  
  Poet and sculptor, do the work,
  Nor let the modish painter shirk

  William Butler Yeats

  Wisdom, Art, Fate

  William Butler Yeats (1997). “The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I: The Poems, 2nd Edition”, p.334, Simon and Schuster

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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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• 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

  Passion, Past, Diversity

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