“But why would it matter? We aren't ... or...uh...weren't ..." Which is it, Jess? "Aren't" or "weren't"? Present or past tense? Now or then? "We haven't been talking to each other." Past imperfect tense. How appropriate.”

“Everything is beautiful. We have all this beauty in the world and all we have to do is reach out and touch it, it is all there and all ours for the taking." -- Cecilia to Henry Chinaski, liberty taken changing past tense to present tense (173)”

“...I begin with songs. They provide a sort of skeleton grammar for me to flesh out. Songs of longing for future tense, songs of regret for past tense, and songs of love for present tense.”

“I ride the singular point of the present until the future is past tense.”

“They WERE walking alongside the road, they WERE hit by a car, and now they ARE dead. It doesn't work. Are is present tense. Dead is -- well, dead is past, isn't it? Present tense modifying past; being modifying non-being. Language, in this instance" -- and here Miriam makes a garbled noise in her throat-- "fails.”

“There’s a language, I think it’s called Mescalero, in which verbs don’t change tenses. There’s no future or past tense in that language. I was thinking… if we could learn that language, we could live longer…”