All Quotes By Tag: Present
“You have to decide if what you want now is worth more than what you want for the future.”
“Don’t let remorse for the past be the bane of your present.”
“There’s no present left. This is the problem for a novelist. [The problem] is the present is gone. We’re all living in the future constantly . . . Back in the day Leo Tolstoy — what a sweetheart of a count and of a writer — in the 1860’s he wanted to write about the Napoleonic Campaign, about 1812. If you write about 1812 in 1860, a horse is still a horse. A carriage is still a carriage. Obviously, there are been some technological advancements, et cetera, but you don’t have to worry about explaining the next killer [iPhone] app or the next Facebook because right now things are happening so quickly. (“Gary Shteyngart: Finding ‘Love’ In A Dismal Future”, NPR interview, August 2, 2010)”
-
“Those who notice the moment, stay in the moment. Those who stay in the moment notice the moment.”
-
“Clinging onto the past won’t make you move into your future fast.”
“Clinging onto your past won’t make you move into your future fast.”
“Wake up. If your eyes are sleeping then wipe them gently. You need to be awake for this. It is a matter of life and death. Wake up! If your mind is sleeping then shake it quickly. You need to be awake for this. It is a matter of life and death. Wake up, I said! If your heart is sleeping then beat your chest! You need to be awake for life! You need to be awake for love! It is a matter of living and being alive.”
-
“Some people masturbate to temporarily replace their partners when they are absent, whereas some people do that to temporarily live in the present.”
-
“Although they probably know that some children were used and some children are used as miners, most adults are ignorant of the chocolate industry’s use of minors.”
“. . . at this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It’s a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white, and looking at it, instead of saying “Oh that’s nice blossom” … last week looking at it through the window when I’m writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There’s no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance … not that I’m interested in reassuring people – bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.”
-
“If, years later, I do use the slit detector to observe which way the electron went, it will mean that many years earlier the electron must have passed through one slit or the other. But if I don’t use the “slit detector,” then the electron must have passed through both slits. This is, of course, extremely weird. My actions at the beginning of the twenty-first century can change what happened thousands of years ago when the electron began its journey. It seems that just as there are multiple futures, there are also multiple pasts, and my acts of observation in the present can decide what happened in the past. As much as it challenges any hope of ever really knowing the future, quantum physics asks whether I can ever really know the past. It seems that the past is also in a superposition of possibilities that crystallize only once they are observed.”
-
“If this turns to friendship, it only meansThat one of us will suffer.That when we meet after the worst of endings,There will only be this skein of words between us—Most of them for boredom, fewer for loneliness—Rising out of our mutual space of breath, leavingBehind a bluer sky each moment of departure.And one of us will cling on to its blue,Hung on partings like a muted cloud, whileThe other rides on a wing of word away from here.”
-
“To know the hope and the struggle and the stay still and the run away and the come here and the push back. And also what it is to say yes, to be present exactly where you are.”
-
“The present equipped us for the future.”
-
“To create a beginning is to fashion an ending. And to experience an ending is to create space for a beginning. And in this choreographed cycle I can always have confidence that any wall is a door waiting to happen.”
-