Simple Present Tense Quotes

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Let me clarify something for you, Damon. There is the simple present tense, which is used to describe things that take place in the present, simple past tense that describes things that occurred in the past. And then there is the tense that is used to describe the chances something has to happening. You should know about it, you just used it. It is called the simply impossible tense.
Danka V. (The Unchosen Life)
All great, simple images reveal a psychic state. The house, even more than the landscape, is a "psychic state," and even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy. Psychologists generally, and Francoise Minkowska in particular, together with those whom she has succeeded interesting in the subject, have studied the drawing of houses made by children, and even used them for testing. Indeed, the house-test has the advantage of welcoming spontaneity, for many children draw a house spontaneously while dreaming over their paper and pencil. To quote Anne Balif: "Asking a child to draw his house is asking him to reveal the deepest dream shelter he has found for his happiness. If he is happy, he will succeed in drawing a snug, protected house which is well built on deeply-rooted foundations." It will have the right shape, and nearly always there will be some indication of its inner strength. In certain drawings, quite obviously, to quote Mme. Balif, "it is warm indoors, and there is a fire burning, such a big fire, in fact, that it can be seen coming out of the chimney." When the house is happy, soft smoke rises in gay rings above the roof. If the child is unhappy, however, the house bears traces of his distress. In this connection, I recall that Francoise Minkowska organized an unusually moving exhibition of drawings by Polish and Jewish children who had suffered the cruelties of the German occupation during the last war. One child, who had been hidden in a closet every time there was an alert, continued to draw narrow, cold, closed houses long after those evil times were over. These are what Mme. Minkowska calls "motionless" houses, houses that have become motionless in their rigidity. "This rigidity and motionlessness are present in the smoke as well as in the window curtains. The surrounding trees are quite straight and give the impression of standing guard over the house". Mme. Minkowska knows that a live house is not really "motionless," that, particularly, it integrates the movements by means of which one accedes to the door. Thus the path that leads to the house is often a climbing one. At times, even, it is inviting. In any case, it always possesses certain kinesthetic features. If we were making a Rorschach test, we should say that the house has "K." Often a simple detail suffices for Mme. Minkowska, a distinguished psychologist, to recognize the way the house functions. In one house, drawn by an eight-year-old child, she notes that there is " a knob on the door; people go in the house, they live there." It is not merely a constructed house, it is also a house that is "lived-in." Quite obviously the door-knob has a functional significance. This is the kinesthetic sign, so frequently forgotten in the drawings of "tense" children. Naturally, too, the door-knob could hardly be drawn in scale with the house, its function taking precedence over any question of size. For it expresses the function of opening, and only a logical mind could object that it is used to close as well as to open the door. In the domain of values, on the other hand, a key closes more often than it opens, whereas the door-knob opens more often than it closes. And the gesture of closing is always sharper, firmer, and briefer than that of opening. It is by weighing such fine points as these that, like Francoise Minkowska, one becomes a psychologist of houses.
Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space)
The one truth she had, a truth she was now proud of and pleased with, a truth she had not only come to terms with but welcomed openly, with every fiery molecule of her being. A truth that she scribbles hastily but firmly, pressing deep into the paper with the nib, in capital letters, in the first-person tense. A truth that was the beginning and seed of everything possible. A former curse and a present blessing. Three simple words containing the power and potential of a multiverse. I AM ALIVE.
Matt Haig (The Midnight Library)
A boat beneath a sunny sky, Lingering onward dreamily In an evening of July – Children three that nestle near, Eager eye and willing ear, Pleased a simple tale to hear – Long has paled that sunny sky: Echoes fade and memories die: Autumn frosts have slain July. As a child, I don’t understand exactly what it is about. I can’t read the significance of Alice reaching the final square and becoming a queen. But I feel the sadness in the poem, and, in this later now, I know why. It’s because everything is in the present tense, even though it cannot all be; either some of it has passed, or some of it hasn’t happened yet. The sky is sunny, but it has paled. The boat is lingering, but it is gone. It’s July, but it’s autumn. This is a riddle, a paradox. Lewis Carroll must be either looking back into the past, feeling the sunshine and the drifting boat as if he were still there . . . or looking forward from the present, imagining a time when the sky and the boat and the summer will have vanished. Which is it? Doesn’t matter. Wherever he stands, he feels both at once. The current, the retrospective, the projected, all are written in the present tense because they are all, always, mixed up together. Because, even as something is happening, it is gone. Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt? Where is the boat? Where is the summer? Where are the children?
Victoria Coren (For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker)
So she stopped trying to think about what to write and, in sheer exasperation, just put down the first thing that came to her, the thing that she felt inside her like a defiant silent roar that could overpower any external destruction. The one truth she had, a truth she was now proud of and pleased with, a truth she had not only come to terms with but welcomed openly, with every fiery molecule of her being. A truth that she scribbled hastily but firmly, pressing deep into the paper with the nib, in capital letters, in the first-person present tense. A truth that was the beginning and seed of everything possible. A former curse and a present blessing. Three simple words containing the power and potential of a multiverse. I AM ALIVE.
Matt Haig (The Midnight Library)
We're in her bedroom,and she's helping me write an essay about my guniea pig for French class. She's wearing soccer shorts with a cashmere sweater, and even though it's silly-looking, it's endearingly Meredith-appropriate. She's also doing crunches. For fun. "Good,but that's present tense," she says. "You aren't feeding Captain Jack carrot sticks right now." "Oh. Right." I jot something down, but I'm not thinking about verbs. I'm trying to figure out how to casually bring up Etienne. "Read it to me again. Ooo,and do your funny voice! That faux-French one your ordered cafe creme in the other day, at that new place with St. Clair." My bad French accent wasn't on purpose, but I jump on the opening. "You know, there's something,um,I've been wondering." I'm conscious of the illuminated sign above my head, flashing the obvious-I! LOVE! ETIENNE!-but push ahead anyway. "Why are he and Ellie still together? I mean they hardly see each other anymore. Right?" Mer pauses, mid-crunch,and...I'm caught. She knows I'm in love with him, too. But then I see her struggling to reply, and I realize she's as trapped in the drama as I am. She didn't even notice my odd tone of voice. "Yeah." She lowers herself slwoly back to the floor. "But it's not that simple. They've been together forever. They're practically an old married couple. And besides,they're both really...cautious." "Cautious?" "Yeah.You know.St. Clair doesn't rock the boat. And Ellie's the same way. It took her ages to choose a university, and then she still picked one that's only a few neighborhoods away. I mean, Parsons is a prestigious school and everything,but she chose it because it was familiar.And now with St. Clair's mom,I think he's afraid to lose anyone else.Meanwhile,she's not gonna break up with him,not while his mom has cancer. Even if it isn't a healthy relationship anymore." I click the clicky-button on top of my pen. Clickclickclickclick. "So you think they're unhappy?" She sighs. "Not unhappy,but...not happy either. Happy enough,I guess. Does that make sense?" And it does.Which I hate. Clickclickclickclick. It means I can't say anything to him, because I'd be risking our friendship. I have to keep acting like nothing has changed,that I don't feel anything ore for him than I feel for Josh.
Stephanie Perkins (Anna and the French Kiss (Anna and the French Kiss, #1))
The present simple tense is usually introduced as a way of talking about habits: I get up at six o’clock. I have tea and toast for breakfast. I leave for work at seven o’clock. In a further unit, the present continuous is likely to be introduced as describing an activity going on at the time of speaking: He’s working in the study I’m writing a letter. They’re playing outside. And in a later unit we are likely to return to the present simple tense while introducing adverbs of frequency to describe how often we do something: I always brush my teeth. He never forgets his wife’s birthday. We often go to the cinema. If we take the message as the input to learning, we are not restricted in this way, allowing us for example to talk about our habits using more complex and varied structures at the early stages of learning. The
George Woolard (Messaging: Beyond a Lexical Approach)
Part 2: Setting a Sankalpa Setting a sankalpa, a personal resolve, enhances your yoga nidra experience immensely and helps transfer the benefits received into daily life. It’s a statement that conveys a positive trait to deeply benefit you in living your life in a more healthy and meaningful way. You may use this time to formulate one that has meaning for you, letting it come to you. Tune in with your heart and soul for the one that lights you up and ignites your energy. Keep it simple, positive, and brief. Use the present tense as if it’s already happened… If you have one, remember it now and begin clearly and sincerely stating it a few times. Be consistent, keeping the same one over time. [Pause] Sense what it would be like if it were already true. How would things be different? [Pause] Take a big breath in…and let it go.
Julie T. Lusk (Yoga Nidra for Complete Relaxation and Stress Relief)
A present is given and paid for in the simple Past tense.
Petra Hermans (Voor een betere wereld)
Besides this, the grammatical forms and constructions in Russian are very peculiar, and present a great many strange irregularities. As an illustration of this we may take the future tense. The Russian verb has commonly a simple and a frequentative future. The latter is always regularly formed by means of an auxiliary with the infinitive, as in English, but the former is constructed in a variety of ways, for which no rule can be given, so that the simple future of each individual verb must be learned by a pure effort of memory. In many verbs it is formed by prefixing a preposition, but it is impossible to determine by rule which preposition should be used. Thus idu (I go) becomes poidu; pishu (I write) becomes napishu; pyu (I drink) becomes vuipyu, and so on.
Donald Mackenzie Wallace (Russia)
– an orange is une orange, a lemon is un citron. Je voyage en France. Je préfère Robby. Odile est belle. Paris est magnifique. Basic sentences, simple pleasures, one word at a time, every sentence in the present tense, no sadness of the past, no worries about le futur. I loved le français, a bridge to la France,
Janet Skeslien Charles (The Paris Library)
findings suggested that the type of instruction students had experienced—isolated pattern practice drills—resulted in a developmental sequence that appeared to be different from that of learners in more natural learning environments. For a time after their instruction had focused on it, learners reliably produced a particular grammatical morpheme in its obligatory contexts. For example, after weeks of drilling on present progressive, students usually supplied both the auxiliary be and the -ing ending (for example, ‘He’s playing ball’). However, they also produced one or more of the morphemes in places where they did not belong (‘He’s want a cookie’). The same forms were produced with considerably less accuracy in obligatory contexts when they were no longer being practised in class and when the third person singular simple present -s was being drilled instead. At this point, many students appeared to revert to what looked like a developmentally earlier stage, using no tense marking at all (for example, ‘He play ball’). These findings provided evidence that an almost exclusive focus on accuracy and practice of particular grammatical forms does not mean that learners will be able to use the forms correctly outside the classroom drill setting, nor that they will continue to use them correctly once other forms are introduced. Not surprisingly, this instruction, that depended on repetition and drill of decontextualized sentences, did not seem to favour the development of comprehension, fluency, or communicative abilities either.
Patsy M. Lightbown (How Languages are Learned)
And I cannot imagine how frustrating such prejudicial suspicion must be. But you cannot make your situation any better by refusing to cooperate with the officer, no matter how unreasonable you may think the police officer is being, or by refusing to disclose two simple things: (1) your name, and (2) whether you have some lawful reason for your curious presence or conduct at that moment at some place where the officer already knows you are, because he or she is standing right there with you. Those are the only two things you should tell the police officer in that context, and they are both in the present tense. (You might as well cooperate with such a request, by the way, because the Fifth Amendment does not normally give you the right to refuse to tell the police your name anyway.2) That is it. But if the police officer tries to strike up a conversation with you about the past, and where you were thirty minutes earlier, and who you were with, and where you had dinner, and with whom—you will not answer those questions. You will not be rude, but you will always firmly decline, with all due respect, to answer those questions.3
James Duane (You Have the Right to Remain Innocent)
Nak stepped him through the Narashtovik alphabet, which was nearly identical to Mallish but lacking three letters, and the subtleties of its pronunciation, which unlike the Mallish stew was regular and orderly as the board of a game of cotters, and which Nak claimed was close enough to Gaskan to sound like no more than a regional accent. He made Dante write it out five times, then speak each letter five more. He drilled Dante on the verb conjugations of Narashtovik and its relation to modern Gaskan. He showed him the structure of its grammar in simple sentences, taught him a handful of words, the precise laws of how a verb cycled through the tenses of the present, the past, the future, the subjunctive. He bade Dante write out a dozen verbs through each of their forms and left on some monkish errand. Busywork, Dante thought, and far too much to take in at once. That Nak wanted him to learn through rote memorization struck him as an insult.
Edward W. Robertson (The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Trilogy)
Take a moment to recognize in which areas you are feeling your emotions in your body. If you are angry, maybe you feel tenseness in your fists. If you are nervous or anxious, maybe there is a pit in your stomach. Identify all the feelings that are present. The simple act of witnessing and inquiring will move you into a reflective state and out of a reactive state.
Thais Gibson (Attachment Theory: A Guide to Strengthening the Relationships in Your Life)
The simple past (or ‘past historic’) forms on the left locate an action entirely in the past, while the perfect tense forms on the right signal that a past action has present relevance. In spoken French, only the perfect tense is used, so j’ai fait now means both ‘I did’ and ‘I have done’, and the subtle distinction between the two, generally retained in English (see Spotlight above), has been lost from the tense system.
David Hornsby (Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself (Ty: Complete Courses Book 1))
Three crows, two zebras, one whale, a handful of ladybugs, one unicorn with metallic wings, three horses—one pink, one green, one realistically colored—two butterflies, three bears including the one we got free with a wiper blade change, a dolphin from the aquarium class trip we lied to go to, convincing my mother she signed the permission slip while she dozed on the recliner after my brother made us a simple meal. Finally, four parakeets arranged up front, who were the young Luna’s—my—favorites. Place the walrus next to the puppy. The raccoon comes after the bear. The hush of human voices on the other side of the curtain, amplified and immediate. I had prepared for cruelty but not for this tender thought: Tom has returned my animals to me. They will never be out of order again. The Man from the Coffee Shop enters and every conciliatory sentiment fades. Tom’s gotten it wrong again. When the man entered in real life, no one noticed. There is no memory in a play. A play is always present tense. I am newly injured in real time.
Marie-Helene Bertino (Parakeet)
simple mindful meditation technique for beginners is described below: Find a quiet and well-aerated room to practice your meditation in. Sit comfortably on a chair, or you can sit on the floor. Ensure that your posture is relaxed and that your shoulder and neck muscles are not tense. Your head, neck, and spine should be aligned but not tense or stiff. Bring your mind to the present by pulling all your focus to the here and now. Concentrate on your breathing, feel the breath enter your body as you inhale, and feel the air exit your body as you exhale. Take deep breaths all the time, focusing on the sensation of the rising and falling of your diaphragm. To make it easier to focus on your breathing, you can place one hand on your upper chest and the other above your navel. This will aid you in engaging your diaphragm when breathing in and out. Breath in slowly through your nose, as you inhale, the hand on your navel area should feel your stomach rise gradually as the air enters your body. On the exhale, let the breath out through your mouth with your lips slight pursued. As you exhale, the hand on the navel area should feel the stomach relax and fall back into the starting position. As thoughts pop up in your mind, do not quash or try to suppress them; simply turn your attention back to your breathing and focus on the inhale and exhale motions of rising and falling. Stay in this state for at least 10 minutes, always pulling your focus back to the present and away from thoughts and emotions by simply focusing on your breathing. At the end of the 10 minutes, rise slowly from your position, and allow your mind to become gradually aware of your surroundings.
Robert Dickens (Vagus Nerve Secrets: Find out the secrets benefits of vagus nerve stimulation through self help exercises against trauma, anxiety and depression for better ... (Dieting & Self-Help by Robert Dickens))
she was now proud of and pleased with, a truth she had not only come to terms with but welcomed openly, with every fiery molecule of her being. A truth that she scribbled hastily but firmly, pressing deep into the paper with the nib, in capital letters, in the first-person present tense. A truth that was the beginning and seed of everything possible. A former curse and a present blessing. Three simple words containing the power and potential of a multiverse. I AM ALIVE.
Matt Haig (The Midnight Library)