"Present tense" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Tom,' returned Mr. James Harthouse, striking the ash from his cigar with his little finger. 'We are in the present tense, now.' ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... across a good deal of "acosmistic" philosophy in our survey of Christian Platonism; and the sentimental rationalist is with us in the nineteenth century; but neither of the two has any right to appeal to St. John. Fond as he is of the present tense, he will not allow us to blot from the page either "unborn to-morrow or dead yesterday." We have seen that he records the use by our Lord of the traditional language about future judgment. What is even more important, he asserts in the strongest possible manner, at ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... bound in sole leather in camp as they were completed. After some deliberation I decided to publish this journal, with only such emendations and corrections as its hasty writing in camp necessitated. It chanced that the journal was written in the present tense, so that the first account of my trip appeared in that tense. The journal thus published was not a lengthy paper, constituting but a part of a report entitled "Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and its Tributaries. ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... showing 'em the way through the Narrers to ketch the Shark!" he growled; and he kept on his way till the imperative mood present tense was tried, and then he made for the side of the cutter, to receive what was to him a regular knock-down blow, or, as he put it, a wind taking him on a ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... her right arm behind her in her left hand—an attitude absolutely necessary to the situation—and replied: 'One is indicative mood, present tense, third person singular, verb active to say. Other is indicative mood, present tense, third person plural, verb ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... swung on gates together, met at odd seasons, in strange places, and finally eloped: all this might have been put in the mouth of a jealous elder sister, say Elizabeth, and you would not have been less popular than several favourites of our time. Had you cast the whole narrative into the present tense, and lingered lovingly over the thickness of Mary's legs and the softness of Kitty's cheeks, and the blonde fluffiness of Wickham's whiskers, you would have left a romance ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... ones had been kissed and sent off to bed, with mamma going with them to hear their prayers, Jock, on being called for, repeated a Greek declension with two mistakes in it, Bobus showed a long sum in decimals, Janet, brought a neat parallelism of the present tense of the verb "to be" in five languages-Greek, Latin, French, ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... forty, and five, and the next moment you are freezing at an imaginary eighty; you are never the plain forty-four that you should be by dates. (The most philosophical language is the Gaelic, which has NO PRESENT TENSE - and the most useless.) How, then, to choose some ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... children of our law; do not come out of the Sunday School, nor weigh their food, nor punctually keep the commandments. If we will be strong with her strength we must not harbor such disconsolate consciences, borrowed too from the consciences of other nations. We must set up the strong present tense against all the rumors of wrath, past or to come. So many things are unsettled which it is of the first importance to settle;—and, pending their settlement, we will do as we do. Whilst the debate goes forward on the equity of commerce, and will not ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... I want to know—(2) if you find the present tense of my Prose Narrative discordant with the past tense of the text. I adopted it partly by way of further discriminating the two: but I may have misjudged: Tell me: as well as any other points that strike you. You can tell me if you will—and ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... and number. The forms given above are not those that would be used in counting, but are for specific use, being varied according to the thought it was intended to express. For example, naiooktaich there is 1, is present tense; naiooktaichcus, there was 1, is imperfect; and encoodaichdedou, there will be 1, is future. The variation in person is shown by ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant
... "you are right, but only if you use the present tense instead of the past and if you fully gauge the extent to which the trouble with my wife has been complicated for me. The question is, am I to blame for the course that my wife's mental suffering took, or may I acquit myself ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... which the English can only indicate by circumlocutions. These pronouns are best shown in the form in which they are prefixed to a verb. The following are examples of the verb katkahtos, I see (root atkahto) and kenonwes, I love (root nonwe), as conjugated in the present tense:— ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... that he has long admired the dignity of Miss Portman's mind, and the simplicity of her character," continued her ladyship, with an arch look at Belinda; "and though he was too much a man of genius to begin with the present tense of the indicative mood, 'I love,' yet I was, and am, convinced, that he does ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth |
