“Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.”
Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary
The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Source: Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969), CHAPTER 6, The crisis of Confederation, p. 119
“Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.”
Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary
The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Speech at Huddersfield Town Hall (15 October 1951), quoted in Winston Churchill, Stemming the Tide: Speeches 1951 and 1952 (London: Cassell & Co, 1953), p. 149
Post-war years (1945–1955)
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer
Letter to Élie Diodati (4 July 1637), as translated in The Private Life of Galileo : Compiled primarily from his correspondence and that of his eldest daughter, Sister Maria Celeste (1870) http://books.google.com/books?id=ixUCAAAAYAAJ by Mary Allan-Olney, p. 278 <br class="br">Other quotes
Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest
Lady Bracknell, Act III
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer
The Crosswicks Journal, The Irrational Season (1977)
Thomas Edison (1847–1931) American inventor and businessman
Diary entry, as quoted in Defending and Parenting Children Who Learn Differently : Lessons from Edison's Mother (2007) by Scott Teel, p. 12
Date unknown
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter
"O Russet Witch!"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
Context: The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing merry-go-round. True, they are a merry-go-round of ill-gaited and wind-broken horses, painted first in pastel colors, then in dull grays and browns, but perplexing and intolerably dizzy the thing is, as never were the merry-go-rounds of childhood or adolescence; as never, surely, were the certain-coursed, dynamic roller-coasters of youth. For most men and women these thirty years are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life, a retreat first from a front with many shelters, those myriad amusements and curiosities of youth, to a line with less, when we peel down our ambitions to one ambition, our recreations to one recreation, our friends to a few to whom we are anaesthetic; ending up at last in a solitary, desolate strong point that is not strong, where the shells now whistle abominably, now are but half-heard as, by turns frightened and tired, we sit waiting for death.