"Past tense" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... point to their own date, some I have dated, and some are undated. Whenever it could answer my purpose to transplant them from the natural or chronological order, I have not scrupled to do so. Sometimes I speak in the present, sometimes in the past tense. Few of the notes, perhaps, were written exactly at the period of time to which they relate; but this can little affect their accuracy, as the impressions were such that they can never fade from my mind. Much has been omitted. I could not, without effort, constrain ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... smile at such a speech? made with all the sincerity and simplicity possible—simplicity scarcely affected by the instinct which made Bice aware before she said it, that to use the past tense would spoil all. The Contessa smiled. "Well," she said, ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... ococ haa tin pol cuchi, "formerly, when the water will not entered to my head" i. e., before I was baptized. This complicated construction of the negative (ma), a future (ococ from ocol) and the sign of the past tense (cuchi), also occurs on an earlier page (98), where we have the sentence uacppel haab u binel ma [c]ococ u xocol oxlahun ahau cuchi, six years before the end of the 13th ahau. Ocol haa, syncopated ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various
... show that rack "is merely the past tense, and therefore past participle, [reac] or [rec], of the Anglo-Saxon verb Recan, exhalare, to reek;" and although the advocates of its being a particular description of light cloud refer to him as an authority for their reading, he treats it throughout ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 73, March 22, 1851 • Various
... change; for instance the verb 'to drive' forms the praeterite 'drove' by an internal change of the vowel 'i' into 'o'. But why, it may be asked, called 'strong'? In respect of the vigour and indwelling energy in the word, enabling it to form its past tense from its own resources, and with no calling in of help from without. On the other hand 'lift' forms its praeterite 'lifted', not by any internal change, but by the addition of 'ed'; 'grieve' in like manner has 'grieved'. Here ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
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