"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
... world succeeds to revolution. All that I say in this paper is in a paulo-past tense. The Monterey of last year[2] exists no longer. A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by the railway. Three sets of diners sit down successively to table. Invaluable toilettes figure along the beach and between the live oaks; and Monterey is advertised ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... resignation. They represent distinct stages in the sobering process which man's primitive intoxication with sense-happiness is sure to undergo. In the one the hot blood has grown cool, in the other it has become quite cold; and although I have spoken of them in the past tense, as if they were merely historic, yet Stoicism and Epicureanism will probably be to all time typical attitudes, marking a certain definite stage accomplished in the evolution of the world-sick soul.[75] They mark the ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... irrevocable. Which had he been—wise or fortunate, or only trivial? Perhaps, everything considered, merely fortunate; and he wondered how she would have met an infidelity of his? He put his question in the past tense because now, Lee congratulated himself, all the danger was passed: forty-seven, with responsibilities that increased every month in importance, and swiftly growing children; the hair above his ears was patched ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the genius but not the material results of trade. That he is not a business man—and a successful one—my position here at the present time is a sufficient proof," she said triumphantly. "And I must also protest," she added, with a faint sigh, "against Mr. Brimmer being spoken of in the past tense by anybody. It is painfully premature ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... days unnoticed until such time as I could summon up sufficient resolution to put an end to my dead life. I had been ambitious—dwelling again amid the bitterness of the months that followed my return, I write in the past tense. I had been eager to make a name, a position for myself. But were I to claim no higher aim, I should be doing injustice to my blood—to the great-souled gentleman whose whole life had been an ode to honour, to her of simple faith who had known ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... upon him with an air carried from his supper hour, bland, dispensing. Well! Let us have it. "What did you wish to see me about?"—with a use of the past tense as connoting something of indirection and hence of delicacy—a nicety customary, yet unconscious. Bobby had arrived in his best clothes and with an air of such formality that Mr. Deacon had instinctively suspected ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... learned the difference between the present and past tense of the verb. And here her simplicity rebukes the clumsy irregularities of our language. She learned jump, jumped—walk, walked, etc., until she had an idea of the mode of forming the imperfect tense of regular verbs; ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... a dead man's grave? It would have gone to pieces, as all similar associations would have gone. What had happened after that moment of depression which scattered them every man to his own, and led some of them to say, with pathetic use of the past tense to describe their vanished expectations, 'We trusted that it had been He which should have redeemed Israel'? What was the force that instead of driving them asunder drew them together? What was the power that, instead of quenching ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... coincide, and cannot be expected to coincide with those of the English verb; that—except in narrative—the aorist as a rule is more exactly represented in English by our perfect with "have" than by our simple past tense; and that in this particular the A.V. is in scores of instances more correct than the R.V.; the present Translator has contended (with arguments which some of the best scholars in Britain and in America hold to be "unanswerable" and "indisputable") in a pamphlet ...
— Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, Preface and Introductions - Third Edition 1913 • R F Weymouth
... could "look into the seeds of time" and say what would be and what would not be. The event was on the knees of the gods. Those who spoke with responsibility adhered strictly to the tense of the verb, the past tense: "kept." None rashly used, explicitly or by implication, the future tense: "will keep." In strictest truth they recited what had been, and, from their knowledge of the President's character and convictions, said that he would not be driven into war by the clamour of his critics, that he would ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... Inn. She can't ever make a hit as a poem producer though 'cause she hasn't got high cheek bones and teeth like a squirrel. Alla was pensive all through the first act, and while she was making her change from a lady-in-waiting to a bathing girl she remarked that she was going to write an ode—past tense of I O U, I guess—entitled 'Thoughts on Hearing Ben Teal Conduct a Chorus Rehearsal.' They won't let ...
— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey
... effort which I have seen in so many places and felt everywhere." Mr. MASEFIELD however soon abandoned this manner and made the rest of his way in a good solid pedestrian style. But he did not disdain to go so far in flattery of the Americans, his audience, as to use the word "gotten" for the past tense of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 12, 1919 • Various
... Insurance, Statistics, and History of the State of Texas was an official of no very great or very small importance. The past tense is used, for now he is Commissioner of Insurance alone. Statistics and history are no longer proper nouns ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... Topeka last night; ten fifteen to ten seventeen. We got the night long distance operator out of bed, and she confirmed it; Rivers took the call himself. He gets a lot of long distance calls in the evenings; she knew his voice." He corrected himself, shifting to the past tense and glancing, as he did, at the chalk outline on the floor, now scuffed by many feet, and the dried bloodstains. "You say this puts Gresham in ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... still more from the ravages of small-pox and other epidemics, which ships touching on their way from the East Indies brought into the country. In A.D. 1713 whole tribes perished in this way. I speak of the Hottentots in the past tense, for they are now, as a distinct race, almost extinct in the Colony, although a good deal of their blood has passed into the mixed coloured population of Cape Town and its neighbourhood—a population the ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... cities that are only now beginning to be self-conscious and seriously purposeful in doing more than the things conventionally and for the most part selfishly done by cities generally. In the conjugation of their busy, noisy life they do not often use the past tense, never the past-perfect, and they have had for the most part little concern as to the future, except the rise in real-estate values and the retaining of markets. When in Pittsburgh I asked a prominent man, ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... human experience in the periods of sickness and the close of life. If there was a closer association of these two characters in the later Georgian era, it is, at least, a satisfaction to be able to write of such things entirely in the past tense. At a time when even to maintain the decencies and comforts of domestic life was often a struggle with untoward surroundings, it may seem to show a desire to load the past times with more than their share of trials and misfortunes, to suggest that the most painful of all experiences of ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... Sometimes he suggested sport, and they shot at alligators, and at rare intervals they came to human aggregations in the waste of trees, and stayed for a day or so, and drank and sat about, and, one night, danced with Creole girls, who found Holroyd's poor elements of Spanish, without either past tense or future, amply sufficient for their purposes. But these were mere luminous chinks in the long grey passage of the streaming river, up which the throbbing engines beat. A certain liberal heathen deity, in ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... always been a man of social ease and wit. The last time I saw him, at the age of eighty-five, in his house in Andover, I thought, one need not say, "has been;" and to recall his brilliant talk that day gives me hesitation over the past tense of this reminiscence. On the whole, with the exception of Doctor Holmes, I think I should call Professor Park the best converser—at least among eminent ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... (to recline). "The ship lays on her side." A more common error is made in the past tense, as, "He laid down on the grass." The confusion comes of the identity of a present tense of the transitive verb to lay and the past tense of the intransitive verb ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... the past tense. I was seized and obsessed by the fear that I should never see him again, and at the same moment I realized sharply that this was the one thing I wanted—to see him. I pushed through the people, gained the street, and fairly ran down the alley that led to the side entrance of the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... I ought to have married a clever woman. She wasn't clever, thank God! Yet somehow she had a sort of originality—I don't know what it was." (Tyson had lately fallen into the habit of talking about his wife in the past tense, as if she were dead.) "It was something that no clever woman ever has. I know them! Upon my soul I do believe I loved her." He paused, pondering. "I wonder how it would have answered though if I'd married a ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... tracts of desert, hardly conforms to the traditional idea of Indian scenery, nor when once Bengal is left behind is there any of that luxuriant vegetation which one instinctively associates with hot countries. In bars in the United States, any one wishing for whisky and water was (I advisedly use the past tense) accustomed to drain a small tumbler of neat whisky, and then to swallow a glass of water. In India everything is arranged on this principle; the whisky and the water are kept quite separate. The dead-flat expanse of the Northern plains is unbroken by the most insignificant of ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... no doubt that you and the original of this picture are closely united by ties of consanguinity, for your resemblance to her is very striking. You spoke in the past tense, however, so I suppose the lady is ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... very handsome. It is melancholy to talk of women in the past tense. What a pity, that of all flowers, none fade so soon as beauty! Poor Lady A. F—has not got married. Do you know, I once had some thoughts of her as a wife; not that I was in love, as people call it, but I had argued myself ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... recovered from the effects of his encounter with Joy, but he survived to joke with Field over the past tense in which this paragraph is couched, and to afford me valuable assistance in completing this character-study ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... 178: The past tense for the future: implying that the hour of retribution is so certain, that it may be considered ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... stab there is in those words, thou hast been! when the sense of them becomes absolutely clear to us. One feels one's self sinking gradually into one's grave, and the past tense sounds the knell of our illusions as to ourselves. What is past is past: gray hairs will never become black curls again; the forces, the gifts, the attractions of youth, have ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
