Future Quotes

The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.

~ William Gibson

I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.

~ Beryl Markham

Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There's magic in that. It's in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift. Your sister may be able to see the future, but you yourself can shape it, boy. Do not forget that... there are many kinds of magic, after all.

~ Erin Morgenstern

The past was always there, lived inside of you, and it helped to make you who you were. But it had to be placed in perspective. The past could not dominate the future.

~ Barbara Taylor Bradford

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.

~ Noam Chomsky

People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.

~ Nikola Tesla

It was amazing how you could get so far from where you'd planned, and yet find it was exactly were you needed to be.

~ Sarah Dessen

The future you have, tomorrow, won't be the same future you had, yesterday.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.

~ Philip K. Dick

And I realized that there's a big difference between deciding to leave and knowing where to go.

~ Robyn Schneider

I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else. I will never feel the pressure of peers or the burden of parental expectation. I can view everyone as pieces of a whole, and focus on the whole, not the pieces. I have learned to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present because that is where I am destined to live.

~ David Levithan

I don't fuck much with the past but I fuck plenty with the future.

~ Patti Smith

Forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, 'You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.' It's saying, 'You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.

~ Jodi Picoult

You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better.

~ Andrew Solomon

With each passing moment I'm becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating.

~ Haruki Murakami

It's possible to go on, no matter how impossible it seems.

~ Nicholas Sparks

The past was gone and the future had yet to unfold, and he knew he should focus his life on the present…yet his day-to-day existence suddenly struck him as endless and unbearable.

~ Nicholas Sparks

I can't deceive myself that out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.

~ Sylvia Plath

The future is just wasted on some people.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. We live poised on that second as it's hurtling forward—toward what?

~ Laini Taylor

It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.

~ H.g. Wells

The ultimate test of man's conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.

~ Gaylord Nelson

I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself.

~ Arthur C. Clarke

She sees things — things that might happen, things that are coming. But it’s very subjective. The future isn’t set in stone. Things change.

~ Stephenie Meyer

No reflection was to be allowed now, not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet, so deadly sad, that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank, something like then world when the deluge was gone by.

~ Charlotte Brontë

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 only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.

~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.

~ Doris Lessing

I still don't know what it really means to grow up. However, if I happen to meet you, one day in the future, by then, I want to become someone you can be proud to know.

~ Makoto Shinkai

At this rate, we'll never get to the future.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.

~ George Eliot

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

In racing, they say that your car goes where your eyes go. The driver who cannot tear his eyes away from the wall as he spins out of control will meet that wall; the driver who looks down the track as he feels his tires break free will regain control of his vehicle.

~ Garth Stein

People don't realize that the future is just now, but later.

~ Russell Brand

I still wake with your name on my lips every morning.

~ Melina Marchetta

And it's best if you know a good thing is going to happen, like an eclipse or getting a microscope for Christmas. And it's bad if you know a bad thing is going to happen, like having a filling or going to France. But I think it is worst if you don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing which is going to happen.

~ Mark Haddon

I just want to let you know that when I look into my future, I see nothing but you.” That’s what Chaz had whispered in my ear at some point during the wedding last night.Then he’d whispered. “And you’re not even wearing Spanx.

~ Meg Cabot

But the future must be met, however stern and iron it be.

~ Elizabeth Gaskell