Future Quotes

“The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.”
― Theodore Roethke, The Collected Poems

“A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

“You can tell the future?'
'More like the future mugs me from time to time.' Rachel said
'I speak prophecies. The oracle spirit kind of hijacks me once in a while, and speaks important stuff that doesn't make any sense to anybody. But yeah, the prophecies tell the future.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lost Hero

“Your beliefs affect your choices. Your choices shape your actions. Your actions determine your results. The future you create depends upon the choices you make and the actions you take today.”
― Roy T. Bennett

“To catch a wild animal, you have to use the right bait.
What happens to the bait? I haven't decided yet.”
― March Lions, The Last Sunset

“At this rate, we'll never get to the future.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“The future can ever promise but one thing and one thing only: surprises.”
― Steven Erikson

“It is not lies or a lack of loyalty that ends a relationship. It is the agonizing truth that one person feels in their heart on a daily basis. It is realizing that you are coping and not living. It is the false belief that there is a verse, quote, phrase or talk that will magically make you feel content, complete or not care. However, it doesn’t last longer than a few days, before your mind and heart goes back to what it wants. It is the moment you realize that you left without ever leaving. It is the moment you realize that fear, shame or guilt is the only thing standing in the way of the life God meant for you to live.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“You are never too old to set a new goal or to dream a new dream.”
― CS Lewis

“     ‘The onboard computer just wants to say a few words before we leave.’
     The speakers in the cabin crackled into life. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to welcome you on-board the presidential shuttle for tonight’s illicit flight, Alfa Bravo Charlie. I would just like to say it’s a pleasure to meet you all and thank you so much for coming here tonight to steal me. To be honest I don’t get out much these days so this is something of a special occasion.’
     ‘It will be for us too if we get caught,’ Semilla said sardonically.”
― A.R. Merrydew, Our Blue Orange

“Even if it were possible to cast my horoscope in this one life, and to make an accurate prediction about my future, it would not be possible to 'show' it to me because as soon as I saw it my future would change by definition. This is why Werner Heisenberg's adaptation of the Hays Office—the so-called principle of uncertainty whereby the act of measuring something has the effect of altering the measurement—is of such importance. In my case the difference is often made by publicity. For example, and to boast of one of my few virtues, I used to derive pleasure from giving my time to bright young people who showed promise as writers and who asked for my help. Then some profile of me quoted someone who disclosed that I liked to do this. Then it became something widely said of me, whereupon it became almost impossible for me to go on doing it, because I started to receive far more requests than I could respond to, let alone satisfy. Perception modifies reality: when I abandoned the smoking habit of more than three decades I was given a supposedly helpful pill called Wellbutrin. But as soon as I discovered that this was the brand name for an antidepressant, I tossed the bottle away. There may be successful methods for overcoming the blues but for me they cannot include a capsule that says: 'Fool yourself into happiness, while pretending not to do so.' I should actually want my mind to be strong enough to circumvent such a trick.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“This is your last chance, and I mean it. Now get me to my ship,’ he told the device. A moment later he vanished from the Grand Plaza, and the mayhem that still continued unabated.”
― A.R. Merrydew, Inara

“If you are deliberately trying to create a future that feels safe, you will willfully ignore the future that is likely.”
― Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

“When a soothing wind blows gently love through the thistledown of expectations, hope may inveigle the future for timeless care and tenderness to be anchored in a bay of good luck. ("Happiness blowing in the wind" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Time and space are incalculable, there measure is infinite. The formulas that explicate their workings, have all but been explained away. But there is one thing that remains, and always will.
‘The occurrence of events in the absence of any obvious intention or cause.’
Chance.”
― A.R. Merrydew, Inara

“Following his ordeal at the hands of the angry residents in Dusty Bottom Lane yesterday, he felt particularly disinclined to exhibit any form of enthusiasm whatsoever.”
― A.R. Merrydew, The Girl with the Porcelain Lips

“She kept her head high, even as her eyes stung, even as panic filled her vision with warnings and precautions.
It was not her fault he had liked her.
It was not her fault she was cyborg.
She would not apologize.”
― Marissa Meyer, Cinder

“The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.

It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“I'm 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles

“There are different ways to be confused about how someone's disappointed you. Some lie about the future because they wanted to forget the past. But some will lie about the past because they think it will give you both a future.”
― Laura Dave, The Divorce Party

“Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.

Lies 2: Time is a straight line.

Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not.

Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time.

Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves...)

Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon.

Lies 7: Reality is truth.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“I still wake with your name on my lips every morning.”
― Melina Marchetta, Froi of the Exiles

“Dinosaurs are extinct today because they lacked opposable thumbs and the brainpower to build a space program.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist

“Why don’t you focus on where you’re going and less on where you came from?”
― Amy Harmon, A Different Blue

“Dear me, one day I'll make you proud.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, You're Doing Just Fine

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever.”
― George Orwellll, 1984

“The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.”
― Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric