"Past tense" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... don briew there is no one; with a pronoun it is contracted, e.g. u'm wan, he does not come. It follows the sign of the future, e.g. phi'n y'm man, you will not come. Shym and pat are neptive particles, and are used with negative verbs in the past tense, e.g. u'm shymla man, ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... one that briefly and energetically conveyed his meaning to those whom he was addressing. 'Oh, foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?' That is, literally, who has fascinated your senses by the evil eye? For the Greek is, tis umas ebaskanen? Now the word ebaskanen is a past tense of the verb baskaino, which was the technical term for the action of the evil eye. Without having written a treatise on the Æolic digamma, probably the reader is aware that F is V, and that, in many languages, B and V are interchangeable letters through thousands of words, as the Italian tavola, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... Some of them point to their own date, some I have dated, and some are undated. Whenever it could answer my purpose to transplant them from the natural or chronological order I have not scrupled to do so. Sometimes I speak in the present, sometimes in the past tense. Few of the notes, perhaps, were written exactly at the period of time to which they relate; but this can little affect their accuracy, as the impressions were such that they can never fade from my mind. Much ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... d' or ge do in situations in which do alters the sense from what was intended, or is totally inadmissible. Ge do ghluais mi, Deut. xxix. 19, is given as the translation of though I walk, i.e. though I shall walk, but in reality it signifies though I did walk, for do ghluais is past tense. It ought to be ged ghluais mi. So also ge do ghleidh thu mi, Judg. xiii. 16, though you detain me, ought rather to be ged ghleidh thu mi. Ge do ghlaodhas iad rium, Jer. xi. 11, though they cry to me, is not agreeable to the Gaelic idiom. It ought rather ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... of him in the past tense. I was seized and obsessed by the fear that I should never see him again, and at the same moment I realized sharply that this was the one thing I wanted—to see him. I pushed through the people, gained the street, and fairly ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... conforms to the traditional idea of Indian scenery, nor when once Bengal is left behind is there any of that luxuriant vegetation which one instinctively associates with hot countries. In bars in the United States, any one wishing for whisky and water was (I advisedly use the past tense) accustomed to drain a small tumbler of neat whisky, and then to swallow a glass of water. In India everything is arranged on this principle; the whisky and the water are kept quite separate. The dead-flat expanse of the Northern plains is unbroken by ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... in ver. 14 is especially opposed to such a view. "And thou (shalt) not (do) so, Jehovah thy God gave thee." J. D. Michaelis says: "What He gave to the Israelites is specified in vers. 15 and 18." The past tense suggests the idea of a gift which had already taken its beginning in the present.—The promise stands in a different connection in ver. 18. Moses had already given it in his own name in ver. 15. In ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... returned to it as to a hiding-place where, lost in the crowd, I might waste my days unnoticed until such time as I could summon up sufficient resolution to put an end to my dead life. I had been ambitious—dwelling again amid the bitterness of the months that followed my return, I write in the past tense. I had been eager to make a name, a position for myself. But were I to claim no higher aim, I should be doing injustice to my blood—to the great-souled gentleman whose whole life had been an ode to honour, to her of simple faith who had known no other prayer to teach me than the childish ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... I want to know—(2) if you find the present tense of my Prose Narrative discordant with the past tense of the text. I adopted it partly by way of further discriminating the two: but I may have misjudged: Tell me: as well as any other points that strike you. You can tell me if you will—and I wish you would—whether I had better keep the little Opus to ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... represent distinct stages in the sobering process which man's primitive intoxication with sense-happiness is sure to undergo. In the one the hot blood has grown cool, in the other it has become quite cold; and although I have spoken of them in the past tense, as if they were merely historic, yet Stoicism and Epicureanism will probably be to all time typical attitudes, marking a certain definite stage accomplished in the evolution of the world-sick soul.[75] They mark the conclusion of what we call the ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... response. "If you fancy Will would cry baby at death, you knew him far from as well as I did. How strange it is to think of his being in the past tense, poor fellow. It was clever of him to leave me his Diaz; I ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... 2. wont. The past tense of the A.-S. verb wunian, to persist, to continue, to be accustomed. Now used only in connection with some form of ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... brusquerie, but in passages which the Maestro has marked "con passione" nothing can exceed the elegance of his attitudes, and the pleasing dignity of his gestures. After, par exemple, the recitativi, what a pretty empressement he gave (alas! that we must now speak in the past tense!) to the tonic or key-note, by locking his arms in each other over his poitrine—by that after expansion of them—that clever alto movement of the toes—that apparent embracing of the fumes ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 28, 1841 • Various
... Barker and of the red cab-driver, in the past tense. Alas! Mr. Barker has again become an absentee; and the class of men to which they both belonged is fast disappearing. Improvement has peered beneath the aprons of our cabs, and penetrated to the very innermost recesses of our omnibuses. Dirt and ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... is in those words, thou hast been! when the sense of them becomes absolutely clear to us. One feels one's self sinking gradually into one's grave, and the past tense sounds the knell of our illusions as to ourselves. What is past is past: gray hairs will never become black curls again; the forces, the gifts, the attractions of youth, have vanished with our ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... trade. That he is not a business man—and a successful one—my position here at the present time is a sufficient proof," she said triumphantly. "And I must also protest," she added, with a faint sigh, "against Mr. Brimmer being spoken of in the past tense by anybody. It ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... interest of my brother R. C., and we decided, just to satisfy curiosity, to go out and catch some bonefish. The complacent, smug conceit of fishermen! I can see now how funny ours was. Fortunately it is now past tense. If I am ever conceited again I hope no one will ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... succeeds to revolution. All that I say in this paper is in a paulo-past tense. The Monterey of last year[2] exists no longer. A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by the railway. Three sets of diners sit down successively to table. Invaluable toilettes figure along the beach and between ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Atticae, vi. 17,) Ammianus Marcellinua, (xxii. 16,) and Orosius, (l. vi. c. 15.) They all speak in the past tense, and the words of Ammianus are remarkably strong: fuerunt Bibliothecae innumerabiles; et loquitum ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... begs for news of his son Guido, thus proving that, while these unfortunates know both past and future, the present remains a mystery to them. Too amazed at first to speak, Dante mentions Guido in the past tense, whereupon the unhappy father, rashly inferring his son is dead, plunges back into his sepulchre with a desperate cry. Not being able to correct his involuntary mistake and thus comfort this sufferer, Dante ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... experiences lead to retrospective judgments, using the past tense, what these judgments utter WAS true, even tho no past thinker had been led there. We live forwards, a Danish thinker has said, but we understand backwards. The present sheds a backward light on the world's previous processes. ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... the astounding words: 'Arrived at Grand Canyon. Ran the canyon and was drowned.' Carpenter left a wife and child in Toronto, for whom, evidently, he had written the message. But if he was of sound mind, desiring to live, and so certain of death that he was able to write his own fate in the past tense, why did he attempt the rapids? His friends had no explanation of the ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... the ablative absolute of Latin, and the genitive absolute of Greek, is common to all the Celtic languages. It is translated into English by a sentence introduced by when, while, whilst, or though, with a verb generally in the continuous form of the present or past tense, or by a participle. In the Celtic languages the absolute clause ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... it was by his moral qualities that my friend ever impressed himself most distinctly on all who met him. Alas! that I should be speaking of him in the past tense! He was a man, ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... always been a possible past tense in poetry, and living poets continue its use. There is an ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... authoritative Greek Gospel of St Matthew at that time, if his account be correct. So far his meaning is clear. But it is equally clear that the time which he is here contemplating is not the time when he writes his book, but some earlier epoch. He says not 'interprets,' but 'interpreted.' This past tense 'interpreted,' be it observed, is not the tense of Eusebius reporting Papias, but of Papias himself. Everything depends on this distinction; yet our author deliberately ignores it. He does indeed state the grammatical argument ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... know them to be sincere, Zara? I spoke in the past tense, and only of what might have been were the disparity of our years less, and if the environment by which we are respectively surrounded ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... to him you will be surer of making yourself understood if you do the same. Probably, too, with the exception of two or three sentences like "I am well. I love you," you will notice that all his statements are written in the past tense, and that will be a guide to you to confine your own remarks to the past, for the most part, till you notice that he has begun to use the future and the present himself. Watch his letters carefully and adapt your ...
— What the Mother of a Deaf Child Ought to Know • John Dutton Wright
... conception of that extent; or of the weight of the objection which is implied in the second. With respect to a vast number of our most common verbs, he himself never knew, nor does the greatest grammarian now living know, in what way he ought to form the simple past tense in the second person singular, otherwise than by the mere uninflected preterit with the pronoun thou. Is thou sleepedst or thou sleptest, thou leavedst or thou leftest, thou feeledst or thou feltest, thou dealedst or thou dealtest, thou tossedst or thou tostest, thou losedst or ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... wouldn't want that over again. [Then changing the subject abruptly.] But why have you been putting all our life into the past tense? It seems to me the most interesting part is ...
— The First Man • Eugene O'Neill
... Christian society should have been built upon a dead man's grave? It would have gone to pieces, as all similar associations would have gone. What had happened after that moment of depression which scattered them every man to his own, and led some of them to say, with pathetic use of the past tense to describe their vanished expectations, 'We trusted that it had been He which should have redeemed Israel'? What was the force that instead of driving them asunder drew them together? What was the power that, instead of quenching ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... to get that established, for the record," another of the trustees put in. "Doctor Chalmers, is it true that you spoke, in the past tense, about the death of Khalid ib'n Hussein in one of your classes on the ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... of one syllable ending in y preceded by a consonant, change y into ies in the plural; and verbs ending in y, preceded by a consonant, change y into ies in the third person singular of the present tense, and into ied in the past tense and past participle, as, fly, flies; I apply, he applies; we reply, we replied, or have replied. If the y be preceded by a vowel, this rule is not applicable; as key, keys; I play, he ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... haa tin pol cuchi, "formerly, when the water will not entered to my head" i. e., before I was baptized. This complicated construction of the negative (ma), a future (ococ from ocol) and the sign of the past tense (cuchi), also occurs on an earlier page (98), where we have the sentence uacppel haab u binel ma [c]ococ u xocol oxlahun ahau cuchi, six years before the end of the 13th ahau. Ocol haa, syncopated to ocola, and even oca, was the ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various
... the past tense also are, I fear, the Christ-tide customs of Wales—the Mari Lhoyd, or Lwyd, answering to the Kentish Hodening, and the Pulgen, or the Crowning of the Cock, which was a simple religious ceremony. About three o'clock on Christmas morning the Welsh in ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... the idea of past tense, the ending "ed" is popularly employed, but when he may he drops the "e." While he will properly use the present tense of a verb he goes out of his way to add the "(e)d." So he says "know-d," "see-d." But he is not always consistent. He prefers ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... young beginners may as well commence With quiet cruising o'er the ocean woman; While those who are not beginners should have sense Enough to make for port, ere time shall summon With his grey signal-flag; and the past tense, The dreary 'Fuimus' of all things human, Must be declined, while life's thin thread 's spun out Between the gaping heir ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... Hebrew has a perfect and imperfect, or past and future (for the grammars use all kinds of names), why on earth should people who have, on their showing, a past tense, use a clumsy contrivance of turning a future tense into a past, ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... have been thinking"—the tranter implied by this use of the past tense that he was hardly so discourteous as to be positively thinking it then—"is that the quire ought to be gie'd a little time, and not done away wi' till Christmas, as a fair thing between man and man. And, Mr. Mayble, I hope you'll ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... forgiven me," she said. "But, Mr. Linden, I only spoke of what I had seen. I had been unfortunate; and I am sure I needn't confine myself to the past tense! ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... centre of a rich and prosperous part of the country, surrounded by splendid land, it had an enormous trade in butter and all agricultural produce, and a large monthly pig and cattle fair was held there. It possessed (I use the past tense advisedly) a number of excellent shops, doing a splendid business, and to the eyes of those who could look back a few years it was making rapid progress in ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... words now about the place itself. Greshamsbury Park was a fine old English gentleman's seat—was and is; but we can assert it more easily in past tense, as we are speaking of it with reference to a past time. We have spoken of Greshamsbury Park; there was a park so called, but the mansion itself was generally known as Greshamsbury House, and did not stand in the park. We may perhaps ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... were taken down from the mouths of the people, and it is in this sense, belonging to the people, that the word popular is used in the title of this work. I have occasionally changed the present to the past tense, and slightly condensed by the omission of tiresome repetitions;[A] but otherwise my versions follow the original closely, too closely perhaps in the case of the Sicilian tales, which, when recited, are very dramatic, but seem disjointed ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... be civil to the young man, of course. There was no reason indeed that he should be otherwise than civil—only that lurking terror in his mind, that this was the man his wife had loved. Had loved? is there any past tense to that verb? ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... was one of the most dashing figures in the Gardens, and without apparent effort was daily drawing nearer the completion of his seventh year at a time when David seemed unable to get beyond half-past five. I have to speak of him in the past tense, for gone is Oliver from the Gardens (gone to Pilkington's) but he is still a name among us, and some lordly deeds are remembered of him, as that his father shaved twice a day. Oliver himself was all on ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... came to mean the sound which we reproduce by the three modern letters, s, a and w. In the end the original meaning of carpentering was lost entirely and the picture indicated the past tense ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... become a past tense. With thoughtful steps we pause amid her ruins, painfully locate the palace of her kings, the arenas of her pleasure, the abodes of her vice; on fallen column or broken tablet, we read the story of her past victories, ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... my lad, past tense. Now, I wish to be alone. I have some thinking to do which requires complete isolation. Go to bed and sleep, and do not worry about me. Come at seven; I shall be awake." The Chevalier stood and held forth his arms. ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... and she was such a beautiful girl and woman," said Sylvia. She already spoke of Abrahama in the past tense. "I wonder where ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... writing in the past tense, I might pause here to consider whether this emotion was a genuine one or a mere figment for literary effect. As I am writing in the present tense, such a pause would be inartistic, and shall not be made. I must seem not to be writing, but to be ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... even widows may have pedigrees, and be conjugated in the past tense," was the cool reply. She drew herself up ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... CAN SHE WEEPE, then did she weep. Can here is the Northern dialect form for the middle English gan, past tense of ginnen, to begin, which was ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... this as an instance of a curiously monotonous, individualised, and persistent nightmare, and hinted the extreme horror and anxiety with which his cousin, of whom he spoke in the past tense as 'poor Jemmie,' was at any time induced ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... way, the questions were all written in the past tense. What was the colour of Mother's eyes, and so on. Wendy, you ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... upon the implied tragedy of a life, so young, for which ambition was already in the past tense, as he added: ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... surrounded by books of all sorts. Every modern book worth reading is forwarded to him by its publisher. He is a very interesting man and a brilliant conversationalist. Perhaps I ought to put all this in the past tense, for now he scarcely ever speaks—he reads next to nothing—it is difficult to persuade him to eat—he will not leave the house—he used to have a rather ruddy complexion—he is now deadly pale and terribly emaciated. He sighs in the most heartrending manner, and seems to be ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... my parishioners," the minister was saying for the comforting of Rebecca Mary. Unconsciously he used the past tense, as one speaks of those close to death. It was well enough, for already big, gaunt, white Thomas Jefferson was ...
— Rebecca Mary • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... cheerfulness, when he had laid the paper back upon Penny's desk. "She makes half a column of this one item in what must be a meager Saturday bunch of 'Society Notes,' then writes it all over again, in the past tense, for an equally meager Monday ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... in the past tense, not because she is dead, but because times and circumstances have changed since the period when we both had to do with the Uninhabited House, and she has altered in consequence—one of the most original people who ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... begin by testifying that you yourself took no interest whatever in the introduction, and in the most proper spirit displayed a single-minded ambition to get back to play, and this I thought an excellent and admirable point in your character. You were also (I use the past tense, with a view to the time when you shall read, rather than to that when I am writing) a very pretty boy, and (to my European views) startlingly self-possessed. My time of observation was so limited that you must pardon me if I ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... trenches; but this is not the place in this book to write of trenches. We shall see trenches till we are weary of them later. We are going direct to Gerbeviller which was—emphasis on the past tense—a typical little Lorraine town of fifteen hundred inhabitants. Look where you would now, as we drove along the road, and you saw churches without steeples, houses with roofs standing on sections of ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... Name-form Past Tense Past Participle Transitive and Intransitive Verbs Active and Passive Voice Mode Forms of the Subjunctive Use of Indicative and Subjunctive Agreement of Verb with its Subject Rules Governing Agreement of the Verb Miscellaneous Cautions Use ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... backward, and the literary young gentleman, who is the hero of the engraving, may well be carrying about his MSS. inside his umbrella. Whatever may be the merits of the spring fashions for 1978, it would appear to have been universal (to speak of the future in the past tense), for both these young gallants are dressed precisely alike. Of the three remaining designs, that of 1984 appears to us to exhibit the contour of the lady's figure most generously, and to have certain ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... in the past tense," retorted Aunt Jamesina. "I've got them yet. There are three old widowers at home who have been casting sheep's eyes at me for some time. You children needn't think you own all ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... gay horses. Mr. Barradine was a horseman. That tremendous sound of the past tense answered the question that Mavis was ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... "No; we came with the assistance of the coffee-pot" (rein). The guesser is allowed to make three guesses aloud, but after that he must meditate on the word in silence or put questions to test his theories. If the word is a verb and a past tense or present tense has to be used in an answer, the player says "coffee-potted" ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... intransitive verbs with personal pronominal suffixes, e.g., sad- "to wait," sumid-ak "I wait"; kineg "silent," kuminek-ak "I am silent." In other verbs it indicates futurity, e.g., tengao- "to celebrate a holiday," tumengao-ak "I shall have a holiday." The past tense is frequently indicated by an infixed -in-; if there is already an infixed -um-, the two elements combine to -in-m-, e.g., kinminek-ak "I am silent." Obviously the infixing process has in this ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... past tense in referring to my old friend. I do this in the interests of strict, scientific accuracy, to satisfy those who would contend that, having utterly vanished from sight and sound of man, Harry ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... Sulla, the Praetor, asks the Fathers that 5000 soldiers should be given him. Now improve this: get rid at all costs of the having and being, which are not English, and change the asks into the past tense of narration. Thus:— ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... wast. We never use the singular of the present tense with you:—you art, you is; you walkest, you walks. Why, then, should any attempt be made to force a usage so unnatural and gratuitous as the connecting of the singular verb in the past tense with this pronoun? In every point of view, the construction, "When were you there?" "How far were you from the parties?" ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... Why speak in the past tense? I love her still. I shall always love that sweet companion of these many happy years. From the time I saw her in those poor London lodgings I loved her with all the strength of my manhood. But you know that, ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... is right—past tense," Tom said wryly. "It's no doubt buried again. But at least we have the ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... putting them all in the past tense, as if he had already solved them! But what was that law of magnetism he mentioned? Perhaps he would reveal his secrets to me in his ravings! I must mark every word he said; for it was clear I must solve the problem, ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... engaged his attention, and his unwearied exertions in their behalf ceased not till the close of a long and energetic life. In the following quotation, describing the American slave trade, although the past tense is employed by his biographer, yet if Louisiana be substituted for Georgia, the whole representation is true of the present time. That dreadful traffic has increased many fold since the date here alluded to, at which E. Tyson's career of ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... speak of him in the past tense, because we are now separated for ever; because he is henceforth as dead to me as if the grave had closed over him—I always considered my father to be the proudest man I ever knew; the proudest man I ever heard of. His was not that conventional pride, which the popular ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... represented by one of twelve vowel characters, and declined like nouns. When a nominative immediately follows the verb, the pronominal suffix is generally dropped, unless required by euphony. Thus, "a man strikes" is dak klaftas, but in the past tense, dakny klaftas, the verb without the suffix being unpronounceable. The past tense is formed by the insertion of n (avna: "I have been"), the future by m: avma. The imperative, avsa; which in the first person is used ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... spoken sincerely; and, further, we may take it for granted that he used the past tense, 'loved,' merely because Ophelia was dead, and not to imply that he had once loved her but ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... to show that rack "is merely the past tense, and therefore past participle, [reac] or [rec], of the Anglo-Saxon verb Recan, exhalare, to reek;" and although the advocates of its being a particular description of light cloud refer to him as an authority for their reading, he treats ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 73, March 22, 1851 • Various
... past tense, suggesting that an act is complete, has a present sense in Arabic and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... hope that some American poet will one day be able to write in the past tense similar verses of the barbarity ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... or unusual usage of language are as in the original text, for example, the author's use of annihilate in the past tense without ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... cities that are only now beginning to be self-conscious and seriously purposeful in doing more than the things conventionally and for the most part selfishly done by cities generally. In the conjugation of their busy, noisy life they do not often use the past tense, never the past-perfect, and they have had for the most part little concern as to the future, except the rise in real-estate values and the retaining of markets. When in Pittsburgh I asked a prominent man, of French ancestry, why the ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... already referring to the foolish Persian in the past tense; yet, in view of probable results, and in the stress of such violent circumstance, her anti-mortem sorrow ...
— A Night Out • Edward Peple
... past tense "loved" is probably intended, as the pretended pilgrim had not yet discovered ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... explication given by the Jews of this prophecy. I have made no important alterations of the common English translation; except, that in some passages, I have made it more conformable to the original by substituting a verb in the past tense, instead of leaving it in the future, as in the English version. Those translators have taken certain liberties in this respect to make this prophecy (and several others) more accordant to their own views, which are ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... think so now," returned the Doctor, with a grave and preoccupied air. "Whatever his faults, cowardice was not one of them. You see, I speak of him in the past tense. I told you your intended duel would not come off, and I was right. Denzil, I don't think you will ever see either Armand Gervase or the ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... begin by testifying that you yourself took no interest whatever in the introduction, and in the most proper spirit displayed a single-minded ambition to get back to play, and this I thought an excellent and admirable point in your character. You were also,—I use the past tense with a view to the time when you shall read rather than to that when I am writing,—a very pretty boy, and to my European views startlingly self-possessed. My time of observation was so limited that you must pardon me if I can say no more ... but you may perhaps like to know that the ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... power of the past tense is exemplified in 'if I could, I would,' which means, 'I can not'; whereas, 'if I can, I will,' means ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... him with an air carried from his supper hour, bland, dispensing. Well! Let us have it. "What did you wish to see me about?"—with a use of the past tense as connoting something of indirection and hence of delicacy—a nicety customary, yet unconscious. Bobby had arrived in his best clothes and with an air of such formality that Mr. Deacon had instinctively suspected ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... what had been would always stand as a repellent specter between them.... Yes, he had loved her—he knew that now more assuredly than ever; and he tried to place that love away from him by a play upon words in the past tense; but deep down in his heart he knew that he was merely trying to deceive himself. He loved her still; and the fact that he loved her but could not marry her added fuel to the flames ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... convey more than the general association of human experience in the periods of sickness and the close of life. If there was a closer association of these two characters in the later Georgian era, it is, at least, a satisfaction to be able to write of such things entirely in the past tense. At a time when even to maintain the decencies and comforts of domestic life was often a struggle with untoward surroundings, it may seem to show a desire to load the past times with more than their share of ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... another reason why we discourage the use of your books by our young people, and that is the profound effect of sadness, to a race accustomed to view all things in the morning glow of the future, of a literature written in the past tense and relating exclusively to things that ...
— The Blindman's World - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... expressing the action as assumed, is, as you have already learned, a participle; and, as the action is completed, we call it a past participle. Now notice that ed was added to crush, the verb in the present tense, to form the verb in the past tense, and to form the past participle. Most verbs form their past tense and their past participle by adding ed, and so we call ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... "presumption." If it will help their case they will do it yet; and if it will further help it, they will "presume" that all those butchers were his father. And the week after, they will say it. Why, it is just like being the past tense of the compound reflexive adverbial incandescent hypodermic irregular accusative Noun of Multitude; which is father to the expression which the grammarians call Verb. It is like a whole ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... Chrysophrasia. She enjoys it after her own fashion. It is a little disconnected. The relation between cause and effect is a little obscure. She is fragmentary. She is a series of unfinished sketches in various manners. She has her being in the past tense, and her future, if she could have it after her taste, would be the past made present. She has many aspirations, and few of them are realized, but all of them are sketched in faint hues upon the mist of her ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... confidence as to the future based upon the deliverance of the past. 'Hast,' a past tense. It is as good as done. The believing use of God's great past, and initial mercy, to make us sure of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... other women, just as other women." Her voice sounded like a moan. "I thought myself different, stronger—perhaps worse than other women. I was wrong. Oh, Bertie! cannot you see that she loves you as I loved you long ago—oh, so long ago? And someone has said that there is no past tense in love! No, no! she does not love you as I loved you—guiltily; no, her love is the love that purifies, that exalts. She loves you, and she waits for you to tell her that you love her. You love ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... Or the lids of those Tombs; square sarcophaguses, in that silent dim-burning Hall, each with its Soul in torment; the lids laid open there; they are to be shut at the Day of Judgement, through Eternity. And how Farinata rises; and how Cavalcante falls—at hearing of his Son, and the past tense 'fue!' The very movements in Dante have something brief; swift, decisive, almost military. It is of the inmost essence of his genius this sort of painting. The fiery, swift Italian nature of the man, so silent, passionate, with its quick abrupt movements, its silent 'pale ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... spark was to the tinder!—how loud that Angel would have had to play! For Ruth Thrale might easily have chanced to say:—"Yes, the same that my mother's was." And that past tense might have spoken ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... constitute an additional syllable, just as the stricture of the verse required it." Urry, whose edition of Chaucer was published, not long after his death, in 1721, knows for vocal the termination in ES, of genitive singular and of the plural—also the past tense and participle in ED, which, however, can hardly be thought much of, as it is a power over one mute E that we retain in use to this day. The final E, too, he marks for a syllable where he finds one wanted, but evidently without any grammatical ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... man would"—would is the past tense of will. The word will is one of the strongest in our language. A man's will is the imperial part of him. It is the autocrat upon the throne; the judge upon the bench of final appeal. Jesus is getting down to the root of matters here. He is appealing to the highest authority. No mere ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... learned the difference between the present and past tense of the verb. And here her simplicity rebukes the clumsy irregularities of our language. She learned jump, jumped—walk, walked, etc., until she had an idea of the mode of forming the imperfect tense of regular verbs; but when she came to the word ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... and elected judges and legislators. The extent to which this was done differed according as the railroads had large or small interests within the state. These statements can with approximate truth now be made in the past tense, as was not possible a few years ago. A better code of business morality has developed, and the railroad management's relationship of private trusteeship toward the shareholders and of public trusteeship toward the patrons of the road is ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... Mr. Strange's life. That life was, it appeared, held by this suffering gentleman on a precarious tenure. It was ebbing away fast with each passing hour. The servant already spoke of his master in the past tense, describing him to me as a young gentleman not more than five-and-thirty years of age, with a young face, as far as the features and build of it went, but with an expression which had nothing of youth about it. This was the great peculiarity of the man. At a distance he looked younger than he was ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... a man of social ease and wit. The last time I saw him, at the age of eighty-five, in his house in Andover, I thought, one need not say, "has been;" and to recall his brilliant talk that day gives me hesitation over the past tense of this reminiscence. On the whole, with the exception of Doctor Holmes, I think I should call Professor Park the best converser—at least among eminent ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... fifteen to ten seventeen. We got the night long distance operator out of bed, and she confirmed it; Rivers took the call himself. He gets a lot of long distance calls in the evenings; she knew his voice." He corrected himself, shifting to the past tense and glancing, as he did, at the chalk outline on the floor, now scuffed by many feet, and the dried bloodstains. "You say this ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... she called Nancy "Anne." Her lifted eyebrows at Nancy's English, her shocked, patient, parrot-like, "Not 'seen him when he done it,' please. You saw him when he did it!—No, 'I come in the house' isn't correct. Try to remember that well-bred persons use the past tense of the verb; thus: 'I came into the house.'—What do I hear, Anne? You 'taken' it? No! You TOOK it!" And she would look at Nancy like a scandalized martyr, ready to die for the noble cause of English grammar! Rather than endure that look, rather than face those uplifted eyebrows, ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... speak to your own father, what give you your being," said Granger, in a puzzled, would-be indignant voice, for he could not understand Bet's speaking of all her trouble and rage in the past tense. "What's come to you, lass?" he continued. You was in a rage—ain't you in a rage still?—the beat's gone for aye and ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... The past tense in which illness had been mentioned, checking at the first moment any rush of panic in Lady Valleys, left her confused by the situation conjured up in Barbara's last words. Instead of feeding that part of man which loves a scandal, she was being fed, always ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy |
