Once And Future King Quotes

The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop, although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea. ~ T.H. White

Now ordinary people are born forwards in Time, if you understand what I mean, and nearly everything in the world goes forward too. This makes it quite easy for the ordinary people to live, just as it would be easy to join those five dots into a W if you were allowed to look at them forwards, instead of backwards and inside out. But I unfortunately was born at the wrong end of Time, and I have to live backwards from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forwards from behind. Some people call it having second sight.
~Merlin ~ T.H. White

The Once and Future King. By T. H. White, ~ Helen Macdonald

A great ruler, a great court, a great kingdom, these texts suggest never exist unto themselves, as stable, fully actualized entities, and, therefore, are never experienced in their plenitude in the present. Instead, they are always remembered as something that occured in the past or anticipated as something will reoccur in the future. Insofar as they are experienced in the current time, it is only for a brief and evanescent moment, overshadowed by the knowledge that it will soon vanish.
For a realist, the fact that the excellence of a person, a place, or a time is not appreciated in its own time proves that it was never actually as excellent as it seemed.
For a Romantic, however, there exist a people, places, and times whose excellence can only be appreciated Arthur always has to be - to quote the Alliterative Morte Arthure (ca.1400) - "the once and future king ~ Karen Sullivan

Physicists often quote from T. H. White's epic novel The Once and Future King , where a society of ants declares, 'Everything not forbidden is compulsory.' In other words, if there isn't a basic principle of physics forbidding time travel, then time travel is necessarily a physical possibility. (The reason for this is the uncertainty principle. Unless something is forbidden, quantum effects and fluctuations will eventually make it possible if we wait long enough. Thus, unless there is a law forbidding it, it will eventually occur.) ~ Michio Kaku

Unfortunately we have tried to establish Right by Might, and you just can't do that ~ T.H. White

They had a year of joy, twelve months of the strange heaven which the salmon know on beds of river shingle, under the gin-clear water. For twenty-four years they were guilty, but this first year was the only one which seemed like happiness. Looking back on it, when they were old, they did not remember that in this year it had ever rained or frozen. The four seasons were coloured like the edge of a rose petal for them. ~ T.H. White

There are no boundaries among the geese. How can you have boundaries if you fly? ~ T.H. White

Was it the wicked leaders who led innocent populations to slaughter, or was it wicked populations who chose leaders after their own hears? On the face of it, it seemed unlikely that one Leader could force a million Englishmen against their will. If, for instance, Mordred had been anxious to make the English wear petticoats, or stand on their heads, they would surely not have joined his party -- however clever or persuasive or deceitful or even terrible his inducements? A leader was surely forced to offer something which appealed to those he led? He might give the impetus to the falling building, but surely it had to be toppling on its own account before it fell? If this were true, then wars were not calamities into which amiable innocents were led by evil men.They were national movements, deeper, more subtle in origin. And, indeed, it did not feel to him as if he or Mordred had led their country to its misery. If it was so easy to lead one's country in various directions, as if she was a pig on a string, why had he failed to lead her into chivalry, into justice, and into peace? He had been trying.
Then again -- this was the second circle -- it was like the Inferno -- if neither he nor Mordred had really set the misery in motion, who had been the cause? How did the fact of war begin in general? For any one war seemed so rooted in its antecedents. Mordred went back to Morgause, Morgause to Uther Pendragon, Uther to his ancestors. It seemed as if Cain had slain Abel, seizin ~ T.H. White

Because this story struck me as extraordinary, and it still does. Once upon a time there was a man in a spacesuit in a secret reconnaissance plane reading The Once and Future King, that great historical epic, that comic, tragic, romantic retelling of the Arthurian legend that tussles with questions of war and aggression, and might, and right, and the matter of what a nation is or might be. ~ Helen Macdonald

Merlin Speaks:
Ô mighty trees of Avalon
release sap and seeds
into hearts and minds

So Arthur's dream
can reveal echoes
of futures past

So Camelot's glory
is forever ingrained
in the rich forests
and mountains' mysterious valleys
where a once and future King
lowered his sword
and lay in the arms
of his sweet Lady of Forests and Lakes ~ Ramon Ravenswood

Quentin Sollys: the Once and Future King of Spiders. ~ Seanan McGuire

It was Christmas night, the eve of the Boxing Day Meet. You must remember that this was in the old Merry England of Gramarye, when the rosy barons ate with their fingers, and had peacocks served before them with all their tail feathers streaming, or boars' heads with the tusks stuck in again - when there was no unemployment because there were too few people to be unemployed - when the forests rang with knights walloping each other on the helm, and the unicorns in the wintry moonlight stamped with their silver feet and snorted their noble breaths of blue upon the frozen air. Such marvels were great and comfortable ones. But in the Old England there was a greater marvel still. The weather behaved itself. ~ T.H. White

I am a child of the everlasting King.
I am forgiven.
I am a warrior.
I am cloaked in righteous armor.
I was made for adventure.
I was built for battle.
I am part of a larger story.
My true and lasting affirmation comes only from my King.
I am unique above all creation--planned and perfect in design.
I have been created for a glorious destiny.
All my ways are established by you, my King, and I walk in them.
My life and actions are real, authentic, and without compromise.
I am quickened and made alive through the power of your Spirit.
My whole life is before me.
I am a shining gift from God to this lost world.
I know my name, I understand my calling, and I am worthy to walk in it.
I am strong, brave, and courageous in the face of my enemies.
Whatever is good, whatever is pure, whatever is true, dwell on these things.
My sins are scattered as far as the east is from the west.
I am a good husband to my wife.
I am a good father to my daughters.
The past is over, and the future glimmers with radiant light.
I will look to the new day, the dawning of hope.
I will step forward with the truth before me and will no longer look on the day that is gone.
The past is over; the future has begun. ~ James L. Rubart

I was born to be a warrior, and I was born to be with her. Tell me how to reconcile the two, because I cannot!"
Magnus made no answer. He was looking at Edmund and remembering when he had drunkenly thought of the Shadowhunter as a lovely ship, that might sail straight out to sea or wreck itself upon the rocks. He could see the rocks now, dark and jagged on the horizon. He saw Edmund's future without Shadowhunting, how he would yearn for the danger and the risk. How he would find it at the gaming tables. How fragile he would always be once his sense of purpose was gone.
And then there was Linette, who had fallen in love with a golden Shadowhunter, an avenging angel. What would she think of him when he was just another Welsh farmer, all his glory stripped away?
Yet love was not something to be thrown aside lightly. It came so rarely, only a few times in a mortal life. Sometimes it came but once. Magnus could not say Edmund Herondale was wrong to seize love when he had found it.
He could think Nephilim Law was wrong for making him choose. ~ Cassandra Clare

The comfort and nostalgia of the past you once knew does not exist anymore, but in the subjective experiences of your memory. You can not go back; you can not live there anymore, for you are here.
You are now.
If you linger in the past, you find you are really nowhere at all. A ghost trapped between two worlds. A shadow of your True self.
And who knows the future, except God, the great 'I Am'?
So, why not create fond memories today? ~ Mac MacKenzie

We know no fear. It was cut from our souls at birth. We can feel it only as an absence, as an empty shadow cast by the light of annihilation. In the face of a future of atrocity I stand mute, numb to the only feeling that would make me human. But I remember what fear was: its cold pulse in my veins; its echo in my ears. I remember fear, and remember that I was once human. I look towards what must come to pass and I wish that I could meet it as my ancestors did, with fear. The future deserves that, it deserves fear. ~ John French

Between one heartbeat and the next, a man can dream his entire life; tomorrow will open up in front of him and yesterday will retreat into time's abyss. There is no better place for personal memories than obscurity. Once lived, the past has very little value. And yet we carry its lifeless body into all future moments, allowing it to crush us with its weight, to identify us, and to speak for us. Even the most capable adults seem reluctant to make a decision without first consulting the past - the corpse - and listening to its endless rebukes. A wise man will ignore such counsel and observe the world from an infinite perspective. ~ Miguel Ruiz

Why is it that we are so busy with the future? It is not our province; and is there not a criminal interference with Him to whom it belongs, in our feverish, anxious attempts to dispose of it, and in filling it up with shadows of good and evil shaped by our own wild imaginations? To do God's will as fast as it is made known to us, to inquire hourly
I had almost said each moment
what He requires of us, and to leave ourselves, our friends, and every interest at His control, with a cheerful trust that the path which He marks out leads to our perfection and to Himself,
this is at once our duty and happiness; and why will we not walk in the plain, simple way? ~ William Ellery Channing

Yes Siddhartha,' he said. 'Is this what you mean: that the river is in all places at once, at its source and where it flows into the sea, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the ocean, in the mountains, everywhere at once, so for the river there is only the present moment and not the shadow of the future?'
'It is,' Siddhartha said.'And once I learned this I considered my life, and it too was a river, and the boy Siddhartha was separated from the man Siddhartha and the graybeard Siddhartha only by shadows, not by real things ... Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has being and presence. ~ Hermann Hesse

It's not that I refuse to look at the world around me, but that I refuse to pretend it's anymore important than everything else, you know what I mean? The moments from the past or from the future, the unreal scenes from tales, dreams, the projects we push aside each day that exist in the doubt we stop having in order to live--they're all worlds as true as this one, and I neither abandon or degrade them. So, I suppose that if I live in so many spaces at once, being absent from this one from time to time should be excusable, don't you think? ~ Gustavo Faveron Patriau

Most people don't understand what a library does for me and I've tried to explain it to them. All I know is that I feel energized when I'm in one. My pulse quickens when I walk through the the stacks. I feel like an explorer surveying an uncharted shore. Lost worlds are here waiting to be discovered. Ancient worlds; once glorious, not crumbled. Future worlds; no more substantial than the numbers or ideas or words of those who dream them. Mythical worlds. Worlds of limitless dimensions.
Libraries are medieval forests masking opportunity and danger; every aisle is a path, every catalog reference a clue to the location of the Holy Grail. ~ Jack Cavanaugh

If our
contemporaries as a whole could see what it is that is guiding them
and where they are really going, the modern world would at once
cease to exist as such, for the 'rectification' that has often been
alluded to in the author's other works could not fail to come about
through that very circumstance; on the other hand, since this 'recti-
fication' presupposes arrival at the point at which the 'descent' is
completely accomplished, where 'the wheel stops turning' - at least
for the instant marking the passage from one cycle to another - it is
necessary to conclude that, until this point is actually attained, it is
impossible that these things should be understood by men in gen-
eral, but only by the small number of those who are destined to pre-
pare, in one way or in another, the germs of the future cycle. It is
scarcely necessary to say that everything that the author has set out
in this book and elsewhere is intended to be addressed exclusively to
these few, without any concern for the inevitable incomprehension
of the others; it is true that these others are, and still must be for a
certain time to come, an immense majority, but then it is precisely
in the 'reign of quantity', and only then, that the opinion of the
majority can claim to be taken into consideration at all. ~ Rene Guenon

Nora remembered drawing in the sand of her future with a stick. What she couldn't recall was when the sand had become cement, the who-I-want-to-be turned for once and for all into who-I-am. ~ Anna Quindlen

For, I think, when I woke up today, with a dream of yesterday still in my eyes,I felt tired in life. And thinking of the little blond girl of Mays & Junes long gone by,I felt strange looking on a field of wheat, and I thought, in a moment I was God and so was she, and this field was us too. So long gone, she goes. But I am still her, whether she comes and goes like all of life, or she stays awhile.
Once, a man of physics told me, matter cannot be created or destroyed. And on
another occasion he said everything came from one point, in the beginning.
So we are all flowers and rivers and trees. That was all of us together. Every one of the past, present, and future. ~ Derek Keck

Once this bubble of self-deception is burst and the mask that shielded her and others from what she wished to ignore is lifted, it is difficult for the woman to return to her life as it was. It has been said that "the discovery of a deceiving principle, a lying activity within us, can furnish an absolutely new view of all conscious life." This reawakened awareness changes the upscale abused woman's life forever. Suddenly, new choices stand before her. This can be a frightening and sad phase in therapy, a moment when the woman is grappling with a kaleidoscope of loss and potential future gain. Some women experience this period as the dark night of the soul. It can be sickening to face the truths one has chosen to ignore in hopes of maintaining the status quo. Even if the woman wishes to stay married, she will never perceive her life in the same way again. ~ Susan Weitzman

Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past. It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn't want us to imagine. By observing the accidental chain of events that led us here, we realise how our very thoughts and dreams took shape – and we can begin to think and dream differently. Studying history will not tell us what to choose, but at least it gives us more options.
Movements seeking to change the world often begin by rewriting history, thereby enabling people to reimagine the future. Whether you want workers to go on a general strike, women to take possession of their bodies, or oppressed minorities to demand political rights – the first step is to retell their history. The new history will explain that 'our present situation is neither natural nor eternal. Things were different once. Only a string of chance events created the unjust world we know today. If we act wisely, we can change that world, and create a much better one.' This is why Marxists recount the history of capitalism; why feminists study the formation of patriarchal societies; and why African Americans commemorate the horrors of the slave trade. They aim not to perpetuate the past, but rather to be liberated from it. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

The process of reading a book takes a while to get used to (in this future society). It's so slow and laborious. But once you get into it, once you forget the way you're reading and concentrate on what you're reading, it becomes a really unique experience. You have to work to draw meaning from it rather than having a meaning given to you. It doesn't tell you how to think. ~ Mike A. Lancaster

It is only once we stop taking everything for granted and fully open our hearts to the beauty that surrounds us that we will understand the importance of joining our hands in the construction of a better world for the people of generations to come. ~ Francisco Battiti

Imagine going through years of your life with the gut feeling that none of it really matters yet, that it will start at some point in the future, and that the present doesn't really count. Does this feeling seem familiar? Have you ever told yourself that everything will ultimately fall into place once you [fill in the blank]? Who wouldn't wind up numbed to real hope and possibility after exerting so much energy for stuff that really doesn't matter? ~ Ian Kerner

Right now people are interested in genetic engineering to help the human race. That's a noble cause, and that's where we should be heading. But once we get past that - once we understand what genetic diseases we can deal with - when we start thinking about the future, there's an opportunity to create some new life-forms. ~ Jack Horner

To be ridiculously sweeping: baby boomers and their offspring have shifted emphasis from the communal to the individual, from the future to the present, from virtue to personal satisfaction. Increasingly secular, we pledge allegiance to lowercase gods of our private devising. We are concerned with leading less a good life than the good life. In contrast to our predecessors, we seldom ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose; we are more likely to ask ourselves if we are happy. We shun self-sacrifice and duty as the soft spots of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and we're not especially bothered by what happens once we're dead. As we age - oh, so reluctantly! - we are apt to look back on our pasts and question not did I serve family, God and country, but did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat? We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but with whether they were interesting and fun.

If that package sounds like one big moral step backward, the Be Here Now mentality that has converted from sixties catchphrase to entrenched gestalt has its upsides. There has to be some value in living for today, since at any given time today is all you've got. We justly cherish characters c ~ Lionel Shriver

Don't look too far in the future, don't worry about how you're going to have enough time or enough money or enough smarts; the "how?" is up to God. Just put your whole focus on this moment, doing this baby step at this moment; and then once you finish that one, God and the angels will give you the next assignment and so on and so forth. ~ Doreen Virtue

I fought in many guises, Many names, but always me. And I see not in my blindness What the objects were I wrought, But as God rules o'er our bickerings It was through His will I fought. So forever in the future, Shall I battle as of yore, Dying to be born a ... fighter, But to die again, once more. ~ George S. Patton Jr.

The future's come and gone; it's a thing of the past. That once impossibly exotic expression 'the year 2000,' for so long evocative of silver suits and robots in pinnies, now feels antiquated. ~ Peter Baynham

Be warned, reader. Once seen, something cannot be unseen and once read, something cannot be unread. What lies ahead can be the future of spirit but the future of spirit can also be what lies inside your head. ~ S.A. Tawks

Looking at a situation like the Israel-Palestine conflict, Americans are likely to react with puzzlement when they see ever more violent and provocative acts that target innocent civilians. We are tempted to ask: do the terrorists not realize that they will enrage the Israelis, and drive them to new acts of repression? The answer of course is that they know this very well, and this is exactly what they want. From our normal point of view, this seems incomprehensible. If we are doing something wrong, we do not want to invite the police to come in and try and stop us, especially if repression will result in the deaths or imprisonment of many of our followers. In a terrorist war, however, repression is often valuable because it escalates the growing war, and forces people to choose between the government and the terrorists. The terror/repression cycle makes it virtually impossible for anyone to remain a moderate. By increasing polarization within a society, terrorism makes the continuation of the existing order impossible.
Once again, let us take the suicide bombing example. After each new incident, Israeli authorities tightened restrictions on Palestinian communities, arrested new suspects, and undertook retaliatory strikes. As the crisis escalated, they occupied or reoccupied Palestinian cities, destroying Palestinian infrastructure. The result, naturally, was massive Palestinian hostility and anger, which made further attacks more likely in the future. The violence mad ~ Philip Jenkins

And you approve of your future sister-in-law?" Cade asked.

"Sure. Isabelle seems great." Her sister, on the other hand . . .

Huxley studied him as he slid on his boxer briefs. "What's the 'but'?"

"No 'but,'" Vaughn said. "I like Simon's fiancée." And, fortunately for him, she inherited all the good-natured genes in the family.

Cade furrowed his brow. "There it is again - that look. Like you want to say more."

Vaughn scoffed at that as he pulled on his clothes. "There's no look."

Cade pointed. "Huxley just put on his underwear. Not once, in the two years that you two have been partners, have you ever missed an opportunity to smirk at the fact that the man irons his boxer briefs."

"Hey. They fold neater that way. It saves space in the drawer," Huxley said.

Cade gave Vaughn a look. I rest my case. "So? What gives?"

Vaughn took in the tenacious expression on his friend's face and knew that any further denials would only bring on more questions. He sighed. "Fine." He thought about where to begin. "Isabelle has a sister."

Huxley rolled his eyes. "Here we go."

"No, no. Not here we go. She and I are not going anywhere," Vaughn said emphatically. "The woman's a . . ." He paused, trying to think of the right word. He caught sight of another agent, Sam Wilkins, passing by their row of lockers. The man was a walking dictionary. "Hey, Wilkins - what's that word you used ~ Julie James

All his plans were suddenly overthrown, and the existence, so elaborately pictured, was no more than a dream which would never be realized. He was free once more. Free! He need give up none of his projects, and life still was in his hands for him to do what he liked with. He felt no exhiliration, but only dismay. His heart sank. The future stretched out before him in desolate emptiness. It was as though he had sailed for many years over a great waste of waters, with peril and privation, and at last had come upon a fair haven, but as he was about to enter, some contrary wind had arisen and drove him out again into the open sea; and because he had let his mind dwell on these meads and pleasant woods of the land, the vast deserts of the ocean filled him with anguish. He could not confront again the loneliness and the tempest. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Why do those men hate us? They hate us because they need us, they fear us, they understand how much control it takes to keep us in line, to keep us good girls with our hymens intact until it's time for them to fuck us into mothers who raise future generations of misogynists to forever fuel their patriarchy. They hate us because we are at once their temptation and their salvation from that patriarchy, which they must sooner or later realize hurts them, too. They hate us because they know that once we rid ourselves of the alliance of State and Street that works in tandem to control us, we
will demand a reckoning. ~ Mona Eltahawy

To the second end, we hold that minimum wage commissions should be established in the Nation and in each State to inquire into wages paid in various industries and to determine the standard which the public ought to sanction as a minimum; and we believe that, as a present installment of what we hope for in the future, there should be at once established in the Nation and its several States minimum standards for the wages of women, taking the present Massachusetts law as a basis from which to start and on which to improve. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Before the war Sofya Levinton had once said to Yevgenia Nikolaevna Shaposhnikova, 'If one man is fated to be killed by another, it would be interesting to trace the gradual convergence of their paths. At the start they might be miles away from one another – I might be in Pamir picking alpine roses and clicking my camera, while this other man, my death, might be eight thousand miles away, fishing for ruff in a little stream after school. I might be getting ready to go to a concert and he might be at the railway station buying a ticket to go and visit his mother-in-law – and yet eventually we are bound to meet, we can't avoid it... ~ Vasily Grossman

Perhaps one day in the far-off future, when I'm about eighty-nine, I might look back and say, "When I was a young-ish woman I fell in love with an intense charismatic man. He was way out of my league and when it ended it nearly killed me, but every woman should experience that sort of love once in their lives. Only once, mind, you mightn't survive a second bout. A bit like dengue fever, that way." I ~ Marian Keyes

So go ahead, break stuff. Break yourself on the once-hard edges of yourself. And recycle the debris into the foundation of your future. ~ Mark Twight

The ruinous deeds of the ravaging foe

(Beowulf)

The best-known long text in Old English is the epic poem Beowulf. Beowulf himself is a classic hero, who comes from afar. He has defeated the mortal enemy of the area - the monster Grendel - and has thus made the territory safe for its people. The people and the setting are both Germanic. The poem recalls a shared heroic past, somewhere in the general consciousness of the audience who would hear it.
It starts with a mention of 'olden days', looking back, as many stories do, to an indefinite past ('once upon a time'), in which fact blends with fiction to make the tale. But the hero is a mortal man, and images of foreboding and doom prepare the way for a tragic outcome. He will be betrayed, and civil war will follow. Contrasts between splendour and destruction, success and failure, honour and betrayal, emerge in a story which contains a great many of the elements of future literature. Power, and the battles to achieve and hold on to power, are a main theme of literature in every culture - as is the theme of transience and mortality.
................
Beowulf can be read in many ways: as myth; as territorial history of the Baltic kingdoms in which it is set; as forward-looking reassurance. Questions of history, time and humanity are at the heart of it: it moves between past, present, and hope for the future, and shows its origins in oral tradition. It is full of human speech and sonorous images, ~ Ronald Carter

If there is any political moral to be found in this world," Stencil once wrote in his journal, "it is that we carry on the business of this century with an intolerable double vision. Right and Left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouses of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets by manipulated mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future.
"What of the real present, the men-of-no-politics, the once-respectable Golden Mean? Obsolete; in any case, lost sight of. In a West of such extremes we can expect, at the very least, a highly 'alienated' populace within not many more years. ~ Thomas Pynchon

...I believe that nothing that once was can be completely undone. Even if destroyed in the material world and forgotten by men, it remains and will remain alive in the memory of an infinite being for which the past as well as the future is always present, and that is thus the greatest, the only true historian, and the keeper of the eternal tradition of which even our best human traditions ...are but shadows and images. ~ Paul Oskar Kristeller

I want to sit around a Gypsy campfire, eating freshly caught rabbit in the company of bare knuckle fighters, and listen to stories about their fights. I want to sit with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table after they've defeated the barbarians in battle. I want to be there when Arthur pulls Excalibur from the stone, and I want to be surrounded by dragons, wizards and sorcerers. I want to meet the Muslim leader, Saladin, who occupied Jerusalem in 1187, and despite the fact that a number of holy Muslim places had been violated by Christians, preferred to take Jerusalem without bloodshed. He prohibited acts of vengeance, and his army was so disciplined that there were no deaths or violence after the city surrendered. I want to sit around the desert campfire with him.
I want to drink with Caribbean buccaneers of the 17th century and listen to their tales of preying on shipping and Spanish settlements. I want to witness Celtic Berserkers fighting in ritual warfare in a trance-like fury. I want to spend time working on a scrap cruise, the very last cruise before the ship's due to be scrapped, so there's no future in it, and it attracts all the mad faces of the Merchant Navy. Faces that are known in that industry, who couldn't survive outside 'the life' and who for the most part are quite dangerous and mad themselves. I'd rather have one friend who'll fight like hell over ten who'll do nothing but talk shit. And I want to ride with highwaymen on ribbons of moonlight ~ Karl Wiggins

Things will fall apart," she continued, "and you will get some bad letters in Scrabble and, hey, maybe your doctor will even put up the wrong chart before your surgery and kill you. But this is why you must start living today. People often fear the future until they realize the future is now, and that they are living in it. Time will come – that's what it does. You can push against it, run from it, fight it like you fight the snooze button on a groggy morning, but still, it will run at you like it stole something. It's how we react that counts. ~ Seth King

Once upon a time, he might've chased her and tumbled her in the sheets with the promise of more in the future. ~ Katherine McIntyre

We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible. ~ George Santayana

Acting is a lot of waiting to be picked, and I like to do a lot of things at once. I think I will have to find things that are totally mine. I have so much comfort that school and my academic life are totally mine. I hope that there's not a lot of idleness in my future. ~ Sarah Steele

The future was glorious once. It was filled with sleek silver spaceships, lunar colonies, and galactic empires. The horizon seemed within reach; we could almost grasp the stars if we would but try. ~ Kevin J. Anderson