A Quote by Gwendolyn Brooks

My last defense / Is the present tense.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Quote Topics

Defense Last Present Present Tense Tense

Quote Author

Gwendolyn Brooks
American - Poet
June 7, 1917 - December 3, 2000

Try to find the real tense of the report you are reading: Was it done, is it being done, or is something to be done? Reports are now written in four tenses: past tense, present tense, future tense, and pretense. Watch for novel uses of CONGRAM (CONtractor GRAMmer), defined by the past imperfect, the present insufficient, and the future absolutely perfect.

Amrom Harry Katz

I begin with songs. They provide a sort of skeleton grammar for me to flesh out. Songs of longing for future tense, songs of regret for past tense, and songs of love for present tense.

Mary Doria Russell

It's difficult to get an audience to want to keep up with you, stay present tense. But there's never been a big lag in my career between product. I've constantly tried to pull my audience up into what I'm doing present tense, and they've been usually happy to go there with me.

Kenny Loggins

Hope requires a very careful symbolization. It must not be expressed too fully in the present tense because hope one can touch and handle is not likely to retain its promissory call to a new future. Hope expressed only in the present tense will no doubt be coopted by the managers of this age

Walter Brueggemann

Everything is beautiful. We have all this beauty in the world and all we have to do is reach out and touch it, it is all there and all ours for the taking." -- Cecilia to Henry Chinaski, liberty taken changing past tense to present tense (173)

Charles Bukowski

Facebook is about sharing experiences that you've had. Foursquare is more about the present tense and the future tense.

Dennis Crowley

Past tense offers authority, distance, and present tense offers emotional immediacy.

Tim Winton

I've always thought that you live in the present, you live in a specific present. You are writing, present tense, so write in the present as it is.

Douglas Coupland

But why would it matter? We aren't ... or...uh...weren't ..." Which is it, Jess? "Aren't" or "weren't"? Present or past tense? Now or then? "We haven't been talking to each other." Past imperfect tense. How appropriate.

Megan McCafferty

Defense all starts with the ball and the rim-protector is the last resort, the last line of defense. I take pride in that.

DeAndre Jordan

In the past, people have looked at photos as a record of memory. The focus has been on the past tense. With Instagram, the focus is on the present tense.

Kevin Systrom

And the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history.

James Joyce

Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it's a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. "Atheistic humanism" became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumamism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction. Post-Christian European culture is already post-cultural and, with its surging Muslim populations, will soon be post-European.

Mark Steyn

As the name of the agency suggests, 'Department of Defense,' the defense refers to the United States of America - not the defense of South Korea, not the defense of Ukraine, not the defense of Syria or Germany.