A Quote by John Green

Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind. — © John Green
Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.
I believe there should be a witness to every act in this world. So when I write about a film, when I speak volumes about it, I felt there should also be a witness to attest to its credentials, and this is especially for the conviction of future generations.
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.
Facebook is about sharing experiences that you've had. Foursquare is more about the present tense and the future tense.
The concept of a literature of witness - of bearing witness - has embedded in it the need for action. One must not simply hide in the shadows and type; one must also stand in the light.
If I speak of Vienna it must be in the past tense, as a man speaks of a woman he has loved and who is dead.
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.
Don't you talk to me about members of the Royal Family, you know I am not going to talk about them. Diana's dead. Talking about dead people is history.
What libraries give you is all three tenses - the past tense - the present tense in which we live and the future that we can only imagine. These places have teachers who are living and dead and we are lucky to have them. If I sit here and read Aristotle, he is speaking to me across a thousand years - more than a thousand years. That sense that I am in the company of the great greatest people who ever lived is a humbling experience but a liberating experience.
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.
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
If the future, as imagined in literature, is really the present taken to extremes, then the past is also the present, but boiled down.
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.
The privilege I've had as a curator is not just the discovery of new works... but what I've discovered about myself and what I can offer in the space of an exhibition - to talk about beauty, to talk about power, to talk about ourselves, and to talk and speak to each other.
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)
You were not supposed to show off in Negroland because you are supposed to be perfectly decorous and well behaved. You were also not supposed to tell any stories that reflected badly on the group because that reflected badly on the race. I use past tense, but it still feels like present tense.
Past tense offers authority, distance, and present tense offers emotional immediacy.
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