“… the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.”
Variant: A past tense, future perfect kind of night.
Source: White Teeth (2000)
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Zadie Smith 81
British writer 1975Related quotes
“There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.”
On The Art of Making Up One's Mind
The Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1915/1915-h/1915-h.htm (1898)
“The truly golden age of the people does not lie in the past, but in the future.”
quoted from Arun Shourie (2014) Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud. HarperCollin
“Pleasure is always in the past or in the future, never in the present.”
Il piacere è sempre o passato o futuro, non mai presente.
29th September 1823, Festival of Saint Michael the Archangel.
Zibaldone (1898)
“The past has lost, as it always loses; the future has won, as it always wins.”
Source: Time War (1974), Chapter 15, “The Crisis Point” (p. 155)
“I've always been more interested in the future than in the past.”
As quoted in The Reader's Digest (October 1994), p. 185
“But two or three days later I was talking about the whole thing in the past tense.”
Be Here Now (1971)
Context: I thought at that moment, "Wow, I've got it made. I'm just a new beautiful being — I'm just an inner self — all I'll ever need to do is look inside and I'll know what to do and I can always trust it, and here I'll be forever."
But two or three days later I was talking about the whole thing in the past tense. I was talking about how I "experienced" this thing, because I was back being that anxiety-neurotic, in a slightly milder form, but still, my old personality was sneaking back up on me.
1970s, How do we tell truths that might hurt? (1975)