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Quotes About Tenses

There are four simple moods,—the Infinitive, the Indicative, the Imperative and the Subjunctive.
~ Joseph Devlin
attention to the difference in tenses. The verbs believe and receive are in the present, but the verb shall have is in the future. The inspired writer is telling us something of the greatest importance by this seemingly minor difference in the grammar of the sentence.
~ Joseph Murphy
The Russian verb is weak in tenses, strong in Aspects. [...] These aspects are in the very blood of the Slav. [...] These aspects I believe to be of profound psychological significance and this significance has not I think so far been fully understood.
~ Jane Ellen Harrison
Hebrew is a language which has no tenses at all , it has only aspects.
~ Jane Ellen Harrison
There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water. — Janet Frame, Faces in the Water . (The Women's Press Ltd December 31, 1985)
~ Janet Frame
When I start a new novel, I often write 'test chapters' in different tenses and from different points of view in order to figure out which is best to tell the tale.
~ N. K. Jemisin
Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant nothing would. No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.
~ Robert A. Heinlein
We prefer to say that Larry has a problem with tenses. For example, 'our product is available now' might mean it'll be available in a few months or that Larry was thinking about one day developing the product.
~ Jeffrey Pfeffer
H. Bauer ... was already arguing that some elements of Hebrew, such as the consecutive tenses, had a close relationship with Akkadian.
~ Angel Sáenz-Badillos
the preterite function of the Proto-Semitic prefix-conjugation has been preserved in BH's 'consecutive' (or 'conversive') tenses, the origins and significance of which are still not absolutely clear.
~ Angel Sáenz-Badillos
In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer, all this under the instance of 'reality' — and no longer through the elaborations of the text, whether fictional or poetic, which itself is never credible down to the root.
~ Roland Barthes
One moment you can say the words 'I am'. And the next, you have no first person, no present tense, and no entitlement, as a subject, to act on verbs of any kind.
~ Lynne Truss
What I assert, deny, question, in the present, I still can. But mostly I shall use the various tenses of the past. For mostly I do not know, it is perhaps no longer so, it is too soon to know, I simply do not know, perhaps shall never know.
~ Samuel Beckett
Tenses are a way of ordering the chaos around time.
~ Audre Lorde
As time passed away, life moved on, As life moved away I moved on, As I moved away, tenses changed My present became past, Future stood at large. And my present became big empty void.
~ Ratish Edwards
Space is an arena where the rowdy particles that are the building blocks of life perform their antics. All spring, things fall; the general law of increasing disorder is on the rise. What is it to be a cause without an effect, an effect without a cause, to abandon time-bound thinking, the use of tenses, the temporally related emotions of impatience, expectation, hope, and fear? But I can't. At the edge of the lake I watch ducks. Like them, my thinking rises and falls on the same water.
~ Gretel Ehrlich
For instance, it's a little better now than it was two or three years ago, but something like 70% of the poems I receive seem to be written in the present indicative.
~ Peter Davison
It is very easy to get ridiculously confused about the tenses of time travel, but most things can be resolved by a sufficiently large ego.
~ Terry Pratchett
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~ Gary Weaver
I hate all these crazy verbs, using a subjunctive to get what's happened in the future and the past mixed up.
~ Kerstin Gier
But enough already of what grammarians will recognize as the third conditional: if + pluperfect + would.
~ Nick Hornby
People conjugate to the present; politics to other tenses. (Peuple conjugue au présent; - Politique aux autres temps.)
~ Charles de Leusse
As mystery and miracles took charge of the past and present, prophesy took charge of the future and rounded the tenses of faith.
~ Thomas Paine
The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time? Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?
~ Jeanette Winterson