Barbara Covett: When I was young I had such a vision of myself. I dreamed I'd be someone to be reckoned with, you know, in the world. But one learns one's scale. I've such a dread of ending my days alone. But recently, I've allowed myself to think th...
Millicent Weems: Caden Cotard is a man already dead, living in a half-world between stasis and antistasis. Time is concentrated and chronology confused for him. Up until recently he has strived valiantly to make sense of his situation, but now he has...
We hear the stories every day now: the father who puts on a suit every morning and leaves the house so his daughter doesn't know he lost his job, the recent college grad facing up to the painful reality that the only door that's open to her after fou...
HAL: I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.
If in previous decades large historic events drew people together and oriented them toward collective action, the recent double trend toward greater choice but less security leads the young to see their lives in more individual terms. Big events coll...
I feel like there's already a written narrative going on everywhere. All the different situations and realities you're in, like words floating by. It's something that I didn't start thinking about until recently, but you can hitch that ride, that nar...
The dogma of the impossibility of determining the atomic constitution of substances, which until recently was advocated with such fervor by the most able chemists, is beginning to be abandoned and forgotten; and one can predict that the day is not fa...
I read recently that 60% of all drugs on the black-market had been put there by the police. No sooner are drugs seized, it seems, than they are recycled onto the streets by the arresting officers! I know our Leader, Mrs Thatcher, is in favour of priv...
Knowledge extends in promontories and bays; or to put it vertically rather than horizontally, the strata from remote to recent never lie so unbroken that we cannot find some line of unconformity where the imagination must make a leap. There are so ma...
Fuck the past. This was the present.
The past is what you take with you.
The age of chivalry is past. Bores have succeeded to dragons.
But the past is long, and the future is short.
Only the past is real.
Your past is my Future.
They march into the future to the rhythm of the past.
Past tears are present strength.
What to do with the past? There was so much of it.
I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.
Don't ever put anything past kids. They will surprise you in the best ways.
The best way to predict the future is to study the past, or prognosticate.
