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1 " Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind. "
― John Green , The Fault in Our Stars
2 " Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron. It is too much grief at too slight a cause, pain that takes over from the other emotions and crowds them out. Such depression takes up bodily occupancy in the eyelids and in the muscles that keep the spine erect. It hurts your heart and lungs, making the contraction of involuntary muscles harder than it needs to be. Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come. The present tense of mild depression envisages no alleviation because it feels like knowledge. "
― Andrew Solomon
3 " the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the past, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched now runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it. "
― Anthony Marra , A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
4 " The way those old memories kept bubbling to the surface in the present tense was disturbing. It was as if the past had never died; as if on some level of time's great tower, everything was still happening. "
― Stephen King , Lisey's Story
5 " It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense. "
― David Benioff , City of Thieves
