"I mean, it was almost like he had preceded me and was waiting for it.
"I'd like to emulate the success of the people who have preceded me.
Others will follow me to those violent shores, just as, in the past, others have preceded me, from Mrs. Trollope to Geoffrey Gorer and Evelyn Waugh.
I bemoaned that the lesson plans of the many English teachers who had preceded me and worked with the same curriculum were unavailable to me.
Except I'd been expected, and a cleanup must have preceded me by, I'd guess, no more than two hours.
I inched my way along the slippery track, digging now my toes, then my heels, into the footsteps of the fools who had preceded me.
Just upon exiting (while complaining to the next girl in line about the stoner who must have preceded me), I heard it: the song lyric that can prick the ears of any American girl.
Those honourable ancestors who have preceded me in trading in fictitious futures have almost all had the melancholy Steppenwolf disposition, from Mary Shelley, through Edward Bulwer-Lytton, HG Wells, Aldous Huxley, and Olaf Stapledon to George Orwell.
But for myself, I will say that, from the day on which I mounted the throne, I have not ceased to consider by what means I may rival those who have preceded me in this post of honour, and increase the power of Persia as much as any of them.
My grandmother told me, when I asked about the Thanksgiving traditions that had preceded me, that when she and her twin sister were growing up in Brazil even the turkeys got drunk on the big day — a bottle of wine was poured down each gullet.
The allotment abuts a cemetery (we make compost before we become it), and sometimes, when my fork turns up a button or knot of rotting twine, I wonder about the people who have preceded me in nursing these few rods of earth.
