Quotes about year
page 13

“When you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again.”

Philip Pullman book Northern Lights

Source: The Golden Compass

“I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.”

Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor

Pleasure, Books, School, Learning

“A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Source: The Return of the Native

Love

“Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it's fired by a guy who doesn't make that in a year at a guy who doesn't make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.”

Sebastian Junger (1962) American author, journalist and documentarian

Source: War

War, Guy, Idea

“It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Love, Dreams, Thinking, Waiting

“It was like something you have dreaded and feared and dodged for years until it seemed like all your life, then despite everything it happened to you and all it was was just pain, all it did was hurt and so it was all over, all finished, all right.”

William Faulkner book Intruder in the Dust

Source: Intruder in the Dust

Life, Pain, Fear, Hurt

“To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Source: Nature and Selected Essays

Beauty

“Because Anno Domini, in the Year of Our Lord, is fine for Christians, but Thor gets a little upset. He still holds a grudge that Jesus never showed up for that duel he challenged him to.” “Say what now?”

Rick Riordan book The Sword of Summer

Source: The Sword of Summer

“Yeah, she was hot, all right, but I think she had the hots for you - kept saying how she saw you over at the Waterhouse last year and you were all, like, wow, amazing. It was like a menage a trois, only you weren't there, thank God.”

Rachel Caine book Glass Houses

Source: Glass Houses

God, Thinking

“You're better than seven years of food. You're better than windows. You're even better than the sky.”

Shannon Hale book Book of a Thousand Days

Source: Book of a Thousand Days

Food

“But in high school the business of irrevocable choices began. Doors slipped shut with a faint locking click that was only heared clearly in the dreams of later years.”

Stephen King book Cujo

Source: Cujo

School, Dreams, Business

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”

Laurence Binyon book For the Fallen

"For the Fallen" (1914), fourth verse
'Condemn' is sometimes quoted as 'Contemn'. Both make sense in the context, but it was 'condemn' which was included in the first printing of the poem on page 9 of The Times of 21 September 1914. Binyon did not change it to 'contemn' when shown the proof of a later printing.

Age, Sun

“You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”

Cormac McCarthy (1933) American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter II
Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Context: A man’ s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.

God, Evil

“Beckon The Sea,
I'll Come To The….
Shed Seven Tears,
Perchance Seven Years….”

Terri Farley (1950) American writer

Source: Seven Tears Into the Sea

Tear, Sea

“I am twenty years old. To a world-wise adult, I am little more than a child. To any child, however, I am old enough to be distrusted, to be excluded forever from the magical community of the short and beardless.”

Dean Koontz Odd Thomas

Source: Odd Thomas

World, Communication

“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.
An all plans, safeguards, policies and coercion are fruitless.
We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Personality

“Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.”

Thomas Wolfe book Look Homeward, Angel

Source: Look Homeward, Angel

Death, Home, Time

“You've lived in America for twenty years. Eat badly, damn it.”

Jennifer Crusie (1949) American writer

Source: Faking It

“Student: Dr. Einstein, Aren't these the same questions as last year's [physics] final exam?

Dr. Einstein: Yes; But this year the answers are different.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Question

“It can take years to mold a dream. It takes only a fraction of a second for it to be shattered.”

Mary E. Pearson book The Kiss of Deception

Source: The Kiss of Deception

Dreams

“Range after range of mountains.
Year after year after year.
I am still in love.”

Gary Snyder (1930) American poet

Love, Mountain

“And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

People, Way, Memory

“It was really true, there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn't even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall.”

Elena Ferrante book The Days of Abandonment

Source: The Days of Abandonment

Past

“It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Love, Problem, Happiness

“Five years from now, you’re the same person except for the people you’ve met and the books you’ve read.”

John Wooden (1910–2010) American basketball coach

People, Books, Reading, Personality

“She told me once that the year she went to England she painted her buttons yellow so she would remember what the sun felt like.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Source: Story People: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas

Sun, Painting

“She genuinely likes people. All people, not just a select few she's spent years making up her mind about.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

People

“Advice,” chuckled Doña Vorchenza. “The years play a sort of alchemical trick, transmuting one’s mutterings to a state of respectability. Give advice at forty and you’re a nag. Give it at seventy and you’re a sage.”

Scott Lynch The Lies of Locke Lamora

Source: The Lies of Locke Lamora (2006), Chapter 9 “A Curious Tale for Countess Amberglass” section 1 (p. 433)

“Look at Matsumoto. You need at least 10 years of sleep to catch up with her." "Shut up! Rangiku's a freak of nature!”

Tite Kubo (1977) Japanese manga artist

Source: Bleach, Volume 24

Nature, Sleep

“but fact is, it’s been years since I even really liked
someone. So how likely is it I’ll meet someone I love, much less someone I love enough to marry? I’m tired of not knowing who I’ll be with, or if I’ll be
with anyone.”

Gillian Flynn book Gone Girl

Source: Gone Girl

Love

“I understood what he was doing, that he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd and tedious duty of graduating from college and now he was emancipated from that world of abstraction, false security, parents, and material excess.”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

World, Parent, Falseness

“When I was born I was so surprised I didn't talk for a year and a half.”

Irène Némirovsky (1903–1942) French novelist who died at the age of 39 in Auschwitz

“People can do great things. However, there are some things they just CAN'T do. I, for instance, have not been able to transform myself into a Popsicle, despite years of effort.”

Brandon Sanderson Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians

Source: Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians

People, Effort

“Once again, life had a lesson to teach me: It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Variant: It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy.
Source: Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), Chapter 19: Hamburgers,Skyline and Deadline
Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Context: Once again, life had a lesson to teach me: It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy. Sure, I'd gotten tired of this tiny space, but I'd had a good home here. In the time it takes to swill two cans of beer, all had had sublimed like morning mist. My job, my whiskey, my peace and quiet, my solitude, my Sormerset Maugham, and John Ford collections-all of it trashed and worthless.

Life

“I'm about to commence four years of obeying the cause of a bruiser on a horse. I refuse to put down what might be the last book I see for months.”

Tamora Pierce (1954) American writer of fantasy novels for children

Books, Horse

“In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year loafing aim- lessly. You don’t get anywhere by not ‘wasting’ time – something, unfortunately, which the parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget.”

Carlo Rovelli book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Incipit
Seven Brief Lectures on Physics (2014)
Source: Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Youth, Parent, Time, Forgetting

“The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Love

“we had such tremendous fun
and much agony together
for some years”

Charles Bukowski book The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Source: The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“I blame my mother for my poor sex life. All she told me was 'the man goes on top and the woman underneath.' For three years my husband and I slept in bunk beds.”

Joan Rivers (1933–2014) American comedian, actress, and television host

Life, Sex

“And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life.”

Richard Yates book The Easter Parade

Source: The Easter Parade

Life

“It took me seventeen years to get three thousand hits in baseball. It took one afternoon on the golf course.”

Hank Aaron (1934) Retired American baseball player

Source: In response to Jack Nicklaus' query, "What kind of golfer are you?"; as quoted in "Aaron Has Career in Day" by the Associated Press, in The Atlanta Constitution (February 23, 1971)

Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Hank Aaron / Quotes

“You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

Source: I Am No One You Know: Stories

Thinking

“Look. In all the years I've known him, there's always been exactly one place Simon wanted to be, and he's always fought like hell to make sure he got there and stayed there."
"Where's that?”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

"Wherever you were."
Luke and Clary, pg. 210-211
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)

Hell

“If you were coming in the fall,
I'd brush the summer by,
With half a smile and half a spurn,
As housewives do a fly.

If I could see you in a year,
I'd wind the months in balls,
And put them each in separate drawers,
Until their time befalls.”

Emily Dickinson book The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Source: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Smile, Time, Summer, Flying

“Sometimes life is very mean: a person can spend days, weeks, months and years without feeling new. Then, when a door opens - a positive avalanche pours in. One moment, you have nothing, the next, you have more than you can cope with.”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Source: Eleven Minutes

Life, Feeling, Personality

“No matter what you do this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Source: Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Dead

“Hours and days and months and years go by; the past returns no more, and what is to be we cannot know; but whatever the time gives us in which we live, we should therefore be content.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Time, Past

“I have lived one step away from losing my mind for years. I am quick and accurate in spotting unstable streaks in others.”

Charlaine Harris book Shakespeare's Landlord

Source: Shakespeare's Landlord

“I shook so that it was some time before I realized that he was shaking too, and for the same reason. I don't know how long we sat there on the dusty floor, crying in each others arms with the longing of twenty years spilling down our faces.”

Diana Gabaldon book Voyager

Source: Voyager

Time, Cry

“It's easier to fake it. When you fake it for sixteen years, it becomes part of you, something you don't think about.”

Alex Flinn (1966) American children's writer

Source: Breathing Underwater

Thinking, Parting

“It was funny that you know someone for years but still discover something you never noticed before.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Guardian

Source: The Guardian

“Listen, street punk. You're a guy, and you're a couple inches taller, and maybe forty pounds heavier, and ooh, you're in a gang. But I've survived ten years of Catholic school, and I will cut you off at your knees without a blink. Do you understand?”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Angel

School, Guy, Understanding

“What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?”

Erich Segal book Love Story

Source: Love Story

Girl

“in all the years we spend together, I never once regretted the fact that I had chosen her and that she had chosen me as well.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Wedding

Source: The Wedding

“100 years ago, buying something you could make was considered wasteful; now making something you could buy is considered wasteful. I am not convinced this is a step in the right direction.”

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (1968) Canadian writer

Source: All Wound Up: The Yarn Harlot Writes for a Spin

“You can live a lifetime in two years.”

Richelle Mead book Spirit Bound

Source: Spirit Bound

“There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.”

Ian McEwan Saturday

Source: Saturday

Life, Hunger, Happiness

“Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into
are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing
for long years.
And for this reason, some old things are lovely
warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Love, Life, Men

“It is difficult for people of advanced years to start remembering they must die. It is best to form the habit while young.”

Muriel Spark book Memento Mori

Source: Memento Mori

People

“I’ve suffered betrayal with all five senses. For over a year.”

Gillian Flynn book Gone Girl

Source: Gone Girl

Sense, Suffering, Betrayal

“It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.”

Robert Silverberg Dying Inside

Source: Dying Inside

World, Color, Time

“It's true. I…… I wanted to be born in the year of the cat……!”

Natsuki Takaya (1973) Manga artist

Source: Fruits Basket, Vol. 1

Cats

“In the dark and the shadows where secrets lived, that was where Julian survived. It was how he had managed for years.”

Cassandra Clare book Lady Midnight

Source: Lady Midnight

Secret

“She supposed that all those years of loving a person who was dishonest had taught her a few things.”

Jhumpa Lahiri book Unaccustomed Earth

Source: Unaccustomed Earth

Love, Personality

“Whether or not you find your own way, you're bound to find some way. If you happen to find my way, please return it, as it was lost years ago. I imagine by now it's quite rusty.”

Norton Juster book The Phantom Tollbooth

Source: The Phantom Tollbooth

Way, Imagination

“Four hundred years of losing out on the girl of my dreams isn't sitting very well with me these days.”

Alyson Nöel book Dark Flame

Source: Dark Flame

Dreams, Girl

“My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

People, Heart

“The older Nico got, the more juvenile Percy seemed to him, though Percy was three years older. Nico found his sense of humour equal parts endearing and annoying. He decided to concentrate on the annoying.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Sense, Parting

“Sometimes fear made you angry. Perhaps after years anger cooled, like a sword taken from a forge. Perhaps in the end you were left with something very cold and very sharp.”

Frances Hardinge book Fly by Night

Source: Fly by Night

Fear, Anger

“Let us love nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write threescore: this is the second of our reign.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

The Anniversary, last stanza
Source: The Complete English Poems

Love

“All I do know, for certain, after 53 years in this business, is that writers who sincerely think that their language can represent reality ought to be plumbers.”

Gilbert Sorrentino (1929–2006) American writer

Business, Thinking, Reality, Sincerity

“Hatori: "SHIGURE… I WILL TELL EVERYONE IN THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT YOU, STARTING FROM WHEN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS OLD…"

Shigure: "Sorry, Tohru-kun. My lips are sealed!”

Natsuki Takaya (1973) Manga artist

Source: Fruits Basket, Vol. 2

“Some national parks have long waiting lists for camping reservations. When you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Sleep, Tree, Waiting

“I remember a friend many years ago who had taped a sign to his refrigerator: There's a dream dreaming us. If you try to think about what that means it makes your mind silly, but that silliness is good.”

Natalie Goldberg (1948) American writer

Source: Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

Dreams, Thinking

“The misery of keeping a dog is his dying so soon. But, to be sure, if he lived for fifty years and then died, what would become of me?”

Walter Scott (1771–1832) Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet

Dogs

“You can see where it was, years ago. Like an old woman who was once beautiful, but time has taken her beauty away.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

Beauty, Time

“Hey girl," he said, wiggling his eyebrows. "You must be the riptide, 'cause you sweep me off my feet."
He'd be practicing that pickup line for years. He was glad he finally got yo use it.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

Source: Percy Jackson's Greek Gods

Girl

“Anthony grinned at her, knowing that would probably infuriate her all the more. "My eyes have been a-wandering, as you put it, for the last nineteen years. Give them a rest, Roslynn. They settled on you and don't want to move on.”

Johanna Lindsey (1952–2019) American writer

Source: Tender Rebel

“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

Source: The Odyssey

Way, Singing

“I would die for you. You know that. I would die without you. If it were not for you, I would be dead a hundred times over these past five years.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Time, Past, Dead

“Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

New Year, Chance

“So Aphrodite married Hephaestus and the celebrity ship Aphrophaestus completely dominated Olympian tabloid news for like a thousand years. Did they live happily ever after? HAHAHAHAHA. No.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

Source: Percy Jackson's Greek Gods

“There are grand rewards for those who pick the high hard roads, but those rewards are hidden by years.”

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

Source: One

“If we take care of the moments, the years will take care of themselves.”

Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) Irish writer

Motivational, Success, Inspirational, Life

“If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and adore.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Nature

Source: 1830s, Nature http://www.emersoncentral.com/nature.htm (1836), Ch. 1, Nature <br class="br">Context: If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! <br class="br">Context: If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

Star, Appearance, Night