Quotes about year
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“I feel as though I have lived many lives, experienced the heights and depths of each and like the waves of the ocean, never known rest. Throughout the years, I looked always for the unusual, for the wonderful, for the mysteries at the heart of life.”

Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003) German film director, photographer, actress and dancer

Life, Feeling, Heart

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Light, Future

“Asking an eight-year-old girl if something is a little over-the-top is like asking a Texan if there are too many jalapenos in the salsa. The answer is always no." -Liberty Jones”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Sugar Daddy

Girl

“Professor Henry Higgins: There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years!”

Alan Jay Lerner (1918–1986) lyricist and librettist from the United States

Source: My Fair Lady

“Do you love me?’ he asked instead. ‘Because if you don’t, I’d wait until you did. I’d wait weeks and months and years.”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: Quintana of Charyn

Love, Waiting

“But there's food if you know how to find it. My father knew and he taught me some before he was blown to bits in a mine explosion. There was nothing even to bury. I was eleven then. Five years later, I still wake up screaming for him to run.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Food

“The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.”

Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) British writer

Source: My Miscellanies

People, Time, Reading

“I was twenty then. What the hell, I used to say, take your time, Bandini. You got ten years to write a book, so take it easy, get out and learn about life, walk the streets. That’s your trouble: your ignorance of life.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust

Life, Books, Hell, Learning

“I will do those things which make me happy today and which I can also live with ten years from now.”

Greg Iles book The Quiet Game

Source: The Quiet Game

Happiness

“Because we don't have much time together, I will give you as much love in a year as I could give you in a lifetime.”

Amélie Nothomb Métaphysique des tubes

Source: Métaphysique des tubes

Love, Time

“Being young is an 18 year prison sentence for a crime your parents committed. But you do get time off for good behavior.”

Orson Scott Card book Empire

Source: Empire

Behavior, Parent, Time

“If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.”

Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

Source: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

People, Truth, Past

“That is what love is I thought. A possibility that becomes a choice. A choice you keep making over and over. Day after day. Year after year. Time after time.”

Cameron Dokey (1956) American writer

Variant: That is what love is. A possibility that becomes a choice. A choice you keep making, over and over. Day after day. Year after year. Time after time.
Source: Golden: A Retelling of Rapunzel

Love, Time

“You can't throw away years of your life because it makes a funny anecdote.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Life

“Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Decision, Change

“A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar. One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.”

Henry Adams book The Education of Henry Adams

Source: The Education of Henry Adams

Bird

“How do you politely explain to someone that you had believed for years he was a moron as well as a Fool?
Fitz in Assassin's Apprentice”

Robin Hobb book Assassin's Apprentice

Source: Assassin's Apprentice

Fools

“In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Personality

“I've discovered over the years that the simplest explanation is almost always the right one; and that hunger of one kind or another - desire, by another name - is the source of almost every sorrow.”

Claire Messud (1966) American writer

Source: The Woman Upstairs

Hunger

“Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.”

Erma Bombeck (1927–1996) When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent le…

Way, Business, Box

“These happy golden years are passing by, these happy golden years.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder book These Happy Golden Years

Source: These Happy Golden Years

Happiness

“I took a straight picture that made me look like a thirty-year-old Italian who'd kill anybody who said something against his mother.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“With his fantastic mane of multicoloured hair, Phury should have been in Hollywood's league with the ladies, but he'd stuck with his vow of celibacy. There was room for one and only one love in his life, and it had been slowly killing him for years.”

Jessica Bird book Dark Lover

Source: Dark Lover

Love, Life

“Her imagination painted Georgie twenty years later, sitting in leg irons before some Broken psychiatrist. "Well, you see, it all started with bubbles…”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: On the Edge

Imagination, Painting

“It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.”

Robert Anton Wilson book The Illuminati Papers

Source: The Illuminati Papers (1980), p. 111

Idea, Change

“Nemo enim est tam senex qui se annum non putet posse vivere.

(No one is so old as to think that he cannot live one more year.)”

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

Source: On Old Age, On Friendship & On Divination

Thinking

“Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”

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

The Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2009, "Hollywood's Favorite Cowboy" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574529703577274572.html by John Jurgensen  <br class="br">Variant: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing. <br class="br">Context: I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Life, Suicide

“But when they were done, I wondered if there would be a next time. I felt good. I wasn’t dead, yet something was dead. Perhaps I’d managed my peculiar objective of partial suicide. I was lighter, airier than I’d been in years.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

Suicide, Time, Dead

“When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long.”

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

Life, Books, Reading

“The shadow of years was not as big on his small body. He knew I was away. But when people left they always came back.”

Alice Sebold book The Lovely Bones

Source: The Lovely Bones

People

“In a city this size, every year, hundreds of husbands walk away. Kids leave home. Wives escape. People disappear.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Source: Haunted

People, Home

“He returns years later, has no demands.
He wants only one, most precious thing:
To see, purely and simply, without name,
Without expectations, fears, or hopes,
At the edge where there is no I or not-I.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

Fear, Hope

“But what could I do? Be stupid for a while? I wasn't sure I knew how, even after so many years of careful observation.”

Jeff Lindsay book Darkly Dreaming Dexter

Source: Darkly Dreaming Dexter

Stupidity

“Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Source: Eleven Minutes

Food, Suffering, Water, Loneliness

“Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Training

“I sounded like Horton the Elephant. "A person is a person no matter how small." What the hell was I doing standing in the middle of a cave, in the dark, surrounded by wererats, quoting Dr. Seuss, and trying to kill a one-thousand-year-old vampire?”

Laurell K. Hamilton (1963) Novelist

Quotes, Hell, Personality

“It's strange indeed how memories can lie dormant in a man's mind for so many years. Yet those memories can be awakened and brought forth fresh and new, just by something you've seen, or something you've heard, or the sight of an old familiar face.”

Wilson Rawls book Where the Red Fern Grows

Source: Where the Red Fern Grows

Lie, Memory

“I think you should be a child for as long as you can. I have been successful for 74 years being able to do that.”

Bob Newhart (1929) American stand-up comedian and actor

Thinking, Success

“In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness.”

Tennessee Williams Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Source: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Love, Hate

“She knew words no one had ever heard of, and she used words every day that had been mainly dead or sleeping for hundreds of years.”

Mark Helprin (1947) US author, journalist, commentator

Sleep, Dead

“As far as I’m concerned, high school sucked when I went, and probably sucks now. I tend to regard people who remember it as the best four years of their lives with caution and a degree of pity.”

Stephen King book Guns

Source: Guns

People, School

“The scar will remain, but it is better for a man to lose both arms than his soul; and these hard years, instead of being lost, may be made the most precious of your lives, if they teach you to rule yourselves.”

Louisa May Alcott book Jo's Boys

Source: Jo's Boys

Soul

“Look lak she been livin' through uh hundred years in January without one day of spring.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Spring

“They weren’t a centuries old hunter and a seventeen year old girl, sitting here at the edge of the world. They were just two people, Bonnie and Damon.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Dark Reunion

People, World, Girl

“I still forget, sometimes, that I am no longer 12 years old.”

Eugéne Ionesco (1909–1994) Romanian playwright

Forgetting

“In the United States, the last recorded clitoridectomy for curing masturbation was performed in 1948--on a five year old girl.”

Eve Ensler book The Vagina Monologues

Source: The Vagina Monologues

Girl

“I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Source: Babylon Revisited and Other Stories

“There is a legitimate argument over whether the death penalty effectively deters violent crime, although my personal observation is that not one of the criminals who have been executed over the years has ever killed again.”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

Source: Letters to a Young Conservative

Death, Penalty, Personality

“And right when your song ended I knew - just like your mother - I was a goner," Peeta says. "Then for the next eleven years, I tried to work up the nerve to talk to you.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

“Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Love, World, Way

“Last year when my grandma fell and broke her hip she couldn't paint her toenails anymore. So my grandpa started doing it for her, even after he fell and broke his hip, too. For me, that's love.”

David Ebershoff book The 19th Wife

Source: The 19th Wife

Love, Grandma, Painting

“Trapped for days, years, centuries maybe. Dead, but not allowed to die. Alive, but as good as dead.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Variant: Dead, but not allowed to die. Alive, but as good as dead.
Source: Mockingjay

Dead

“I tried to pick Nykyrian’s pocket last year. (Jana)
And you let him live? (Kiara)
I have an age requirement before I kill someone. (Nykyrian)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Born of the Night

Age

“I have peanut M&M's up there."
"Not my style"
"Raisinets."
"Feh."
"Sam Adams."
Thor narrowed his eyes. "Cold?"
"Downright icy."
Thor crossed his arms over his chest and told him self he was not pouting like a five-year-old. "I want Milk Duds.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Reborn

“Safety is a fence, and fences are for sheep. I would rather die at twenty-two, knowing the truth, then live in a cage of lies for a hundred years.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Shadowfever

Truth

“If a relationship is on-and-off within the first year, that’s an immediate sign you are wasting your time.”

Sherry Argov (1977) American writer

Source: Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl-A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship

Time

“But the adjectives change,” said Jimmy. “Nothing’s worse than last year’s adjectives.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

Change

“Well, well, my dear fellow, be it so. We have shared this same room for some years, and it would be amusing if we ended by sharing the same cell. (…)”

Arthur Conan Doyle book The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Source: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

“(opening lines) The terror, which would not end for another 28 years-if it ever did end-began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”

Stephen King book It

Source: It (1986)

“I wonder when you stopped telling me everything Yuki. In ten years, that`s the only thing that has ever changed.”

Matsuri Hino Japanese manga artist

Source: Vampire Knight, Vol. 2

Change

“But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.”

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Way

“You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It’s the playing that’s irresistible. Dicing from one year to the next with the things you love, what you risk reveals what you value.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

Source: The Passion

Love

“So maybe I'll spend some years in prison, but you'll have a big head start on me in hell!”

Chuck Palahniuk book Invisible Monsters

Source: Invisible Monsters

Hell

“Living is the challenge. Not dying. Dying is so easy. Sometimes it only takes ten seconds to die. But living? That can take you eighty years and you do something in that time.”

Melina Marchetta book Looking for Alibrandi

Source: Looking for Alibrandi

Time

“The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year's loaves of bread. One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference.”

Bruno Schulz book The Street of Crocodiles

Source: The Street of Crocodiles

Indifference

“It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

“I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don't get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Solitude, Sleep, Cry

“Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Anniversary, Truth, Thinking

“Boys are perhaps beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of eighteen months and ninety years.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

"The Darlings at the Top of the Stairs", Lanterns & Lances (1961); previously appeared in The Queen and in Harper's Magazine.
From Lanterns and Lances‎

Age, Boy, Understanding

“A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age - regardless of how they look on the outside - pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.”

Douglas Coupland The Gum Thief

Source: The Gum Thief

Age, Dreams, Past

“Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can using only their hands and feet make some of the worst movies in the history of the world.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

People, World, Art, History

“We are friends for life. When we’re together the years fall away. Isn’t that what matters? To have someone who can remember with you? To have someone who remembers how far you’ve come?”

Judy Blume (1938) American children's writer

Life

“He played of love and loss and years of silence, words unsaid and vows unspoken, and all the spaces between his heart and theirs…”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Love, Silence, Loss, Heart

“The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive.”

John Steinbeck book Once There Was a War

Source: Once There Was a War

People, World

“If this man had not twelve thousand a year, he would be a very stupid fellow.”

Jane Austen book Mansfield Park

Source: Mansfield Park

Stupidity

“All my years to this moment
All my roads to this wall.
All my words to this silence
All my pride to this fall.
-Songs of Sapphique”

Catherine Fisher book Incarceron

Source: Incarceron

Silence

“I can't think again. Not ever again. I don't know if you've ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Thinking, Sleep

“Down through the years, I turned to the Bible and found in it all that I needed”

Ruth Bell Graham (1920–2007) Congressional Gold Medal recipient

“Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.”

Beryl Markham book West with the Night

Source: West with the Night

Learning, Future

“Ah, now, don't cry over lost years and forgetfulness. The tales tell what they can. The rest is for us to learn..”

Shannon Hale The Goose Girl

Source: The Goose Girl

Learning, Cry, Forgetting

“The stone that was rolled before Christ's tomb might appropriately be called the philosopher's stone because its removal gave not only the pharisees but, now for 1800 years, the philosophers so much to think about.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Thinking, Christ

“and now, all these years later, it seem to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended”

Stephen King book Wizard and Glass

Source: Wizard and Glass

Heart

“There are so many people we could become, and we leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years?”

Dan Chaon (1964) American writer

Source: Among the Missing

People

“Being an author sucks, doesn't it? It's like telling a joke and nobody laughs for two years.”

Scott Westerfeld book Afterworlds

Source: Afterworlds

“And kissed her for a hundred and sixty-nine years.”

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog

Kiss

“For so many years, for so long, I have been so many things, so many different men. But here," he said, so softly I could barely hear him, "here in the dark, with you… I have no name.”

Diana Gabaldon book Voyager

Source: Voyager

Men

“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 book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

Time, Past, Future, Parting

“We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.”

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

Source: Essays Including Essays, First & Second Series, English Traits, Nature & Considerations by the Way

School, Memory

“But even a ninety-year-old blind priest would stop and stare at this woman. If he weren’t blind, that is. Dumb metaphor, I thought. I’ll have to work on that one. I have trouble with metaphors.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: Steelheart

“What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.”

Erich Segal (1937–2010) American writer

Variant: What can you say about a twenty-five year old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. The Beatles. And me.

Love, Beauty, Girl

“Don't worry, Otto. I'm an acquired taste. Most of my best friends had to know me for years before they could even stand my presence. I'm like mold, I usually grow on you very slowly. (Tabitha)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Variant: she said with a smile. "I'm an acquired taste. Most of my best friends had to
know me for years before they could even stand my presence. I'm like mold, I usually grow on you very
slowly.
Source: Seize the Night

“For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul, or hers.”

James Joyce book The Dead

Source: The Dead

Soul

“My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air.”

Derek Parfit book Reasons and Persons

Source: Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 281
Context: Is the truth depressing? Some may find it so. But I find it liberating, and consoling. When I believed that my existence was a further fact, I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.

Life, Change

“He was twenty. I remembered twenty. I'd known everything at twenty. It took me another year to realize I knew nothing. I was still hoping to learn something before I hit thirty, but I wasn't holding my breath.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Circus of the Damned

Source: Circus of the Damned

Hope, Learning

“The ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year – and to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Newspaper interview (1902), when asked what qualities a politician required, Halle, Kay, Irrepressible Churchill. Cleveland: World, 1966. cited in Churchill by Himself (2008), ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 489 ISBN 1586486381
Early career years (1898–1929)