“Perhaps you don’t desire poetry as much as you would like to have my torchy knowledge of your possible futures, but I dare say poetry will do you far more good. For knowing the future only makes you timid and complacent by turns, while poetry can shape you into the kind of souls who can face any future with boldness and wisdom and nobility, so that you need not know the future at all, so that any future will be an opportunity for greatness, if you have greatness in you.”

— Orson Scott Card

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Prentice Alvin (1989), Chapter 15.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Orson Scott Card 586

American science fiction novelist 1951

Jack Cady (1932–2004) American writer

Source: Kilroy Was Here (1996), p. 145

“You have a responsibility to your future self, who is someone you might not even know, might not even understand yet. Because until you die, that future self has as much of a life as you do. […] Your life is not disposable.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: Two Boys Kissing

“This is how fast your life can turn around. How the future you have tomorrow won't be the same future you had yesterday.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Rant

Variant: The future you have, tomorrow, won't be the same future you had, yesterday.
Source: Rant

“I'm going to tell you a secret. Our lives are shaped by the future, not by the past. Once you decide how you want your life to be, all you need to do is live into that future.”

Wendy Mass (1967) American children's writer

Source: Heaven Looks a Lot Like the Mall

“There is never any turning back Gemma. You have to go forward. Make the future yours.”

Libba Bray (1964) American teen writer

“I don't know any more than you what the future will hold. But my point of view is different. You see despair and I see cause for hope. I read the future in a way that is more agreeable than you do.”

Alain-René Lesage (1668–1747) French writer

La Tontine (1709)

“And today, I want to share with you my vision of what our future can be. I want the Cuban people -- especially the young people -- to understand why I believe that you should look to the future with hope; not the false promise which insists that things are better than they really are, or the blind optimism that says all your problems can go away tomorrow. Hope that is rooted in the future that you can choose and that you can shape, and that you can build for your country.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2016, Remarks to the People of Cuba (March 2016)

“If you could not accept the past and its burden, there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and […] if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future.”

Robert Penn Warren book All the King's Men

Source: All the King's Men (1946)

“You need to focus on what’s in front of you, what your character’s going through in that exact moment. I don’t want to know the future. I don’t want to know too far ahead.”

Andrea Brooks (1989) Canadian actor

Source: Katie McGrath and Andrea Brooks Interview: Supergirl Season 5 https://www.showbizjunkies.com/tv/supergirl-katie-mcgrath-andrea-brooks-interview/ (September 23, 2019)

“It is possible for you to project to a future event in which you will be involved and by an act that you make in the projection, alter the course that this future will take. Such an action would therefore appear to happen twice, once in your present and once in your future. But in the future, you would be the one whose course is altered from this traveling self from the past.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 322, quoting from Session 262

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