Tenses Quotes

“... endowing the imperfect and the preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity, all the melancholy which there is in love; guided the sentence that was drawing to an end towards that which was waiting to begin, now hastening, now slackening the pace of the syllables so as to bring them, despite their difference in quantity, into a uniform rhythm, and breathed into this quite ordinary prose a kind of life, continuous and full of feeling.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“There are tenses that define us now: past tense, back then; future tense, not yet. We live in the small window between them, the space we've only recently come to think as still, and really it's no smaller than anyone else's window.”
― Margaret Atwood "The Bad News" in Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“Lei doveva aver avuto una cotta per me, giusto un inizio di amore, ma era una cosa molto lontana, del passato. ... Il problema con il vero amare, erano i tempi.”
― Jean-Pierre Gibrat, Mattéo, première époque (1914-1915)