Quotes about year
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“The apple… came before Adam and Eve in the story of creation. It had to have been there at least three years because that's how long it takes for a new tree to bear fruit.”

Jodi Picoult book Songs of the Humpback Whale

Source: Songs of the Humpback Whale

Tree

“There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.”

Will Durant (1885–1981) American historian, philosopher and writer

War, Past

“Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

People, Thinking, Time

“Scientists estimate the universe unfolded from its state of infinite destiny* - a moment commonly referred to as "the big bang" - approximately 1.3-2 x 10^10 years ago.

*Typo: "destiny" should read "density.”

Mark Z. Danielewski book House of Leaves

Source: House of Leaves

Universe, Reading

“He was handsome then if never before, bound for one of those immortal moments which come so radiantly that their remembered light is enough to see by for years.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

Light

“I don't feel stupid, just inadequate. After three years of studying the law, I'm very much aware of how little I know.”

John Grisham book The Rainmaker

Source: The Rainmaker

Stupidity, Law, Feeling, Study

“So the American government lied to the Native Americans for many, many years, and then President Clinton lied about a relationship, and everyone was surprised! A little naïve, I feel!”

Eddie Izzard (1962) British stand-up comedian, actor and writer

Feeling

“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist

World

“There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker

Life, Study

“I do plan on saying one or two things to him when we're allowed an hour for goodbyes. To let him know how essential he's been to me all these years. How better my life has been for knowing him.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Life

“One impossible day, of an impossible month, of an impossible year.”

Haruki Murakami book The Elephant Vanishes

Source: The Elephant Vanishes

“I didn't remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

Color, Memory, Past

“I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.”

Marguerite Duras book The Lover

Source: The Lover

Beauty, Thinking

“Trapped for days, years, centuries maybe. Dead, but not allowed to die. Alive, but as good as dead. So alone that anyone, anything no matter how loathsome would be welcome.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

Dead

“A reduction of meat consumption by only 10% would result in about 12 million more tons of grain for human consumption. This additional grain could feed all of the humans across the world who starve to death each year- about 60 million people!”

Marc Bekoff (1945) American biologist

Source: Animals Matter: A Biologist Explains Why We Should Treat Animals with Compassion and Respect

Death, People, World

“I have only known her for two years. But if you took every memory, every moment, if you stretched them end to end-they'd reach forever.”

Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper

Source: My Sister's Keeper

Memory

“Passing time isn't a steady thing. People try to measure it, but some days seem to have years packed into them, and others pass in the blink of an eye. Some days matter, and others don't.”

Blue Balliett book The Calder Game

Source: The Calder Game

People, Time

“As time goes by, as time goes by, the whip-crack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavour except the struggle to survive.”

Roberto Bolaño book By Night in Chile

Source: By Night in Chile

Time

“Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don’t take it off until you’re thirty-four.”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

Nora Ephron: I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman, Random House Incorporated, 2008
Source: I Feel Bad about My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

Reading

“The first ten million years were the worst," said Marvin, "and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”

Douglas Adams book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Source: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.”

Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist

Source: A Short Guide to a Happy Life

Forgetting

“A year ago,' I said, 'you wouldn’t have asked this of me.'
'A year ago,' he answered, 'you wouldn’t have hesitated to drink.'
I crossed to the desk and tossed it down.”

Charlaine Harris Dead in the Family

Source: Dead in the Family

Drink

“Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Game

Source: Ender's Game

Children, People, Age

“Don't do this to us." He warned, his voice hoarse with angry desperation as he realize he was losing her. "You're letting eleven years of mistrust color everything you've discovered I've done".”

Judith McNaught (1944) American writer

Source: Paradise

Color

“As a ten-year-old boy, the Thief of Eddis could stop a grown man in his tracks with a single look. Where had that look gone?”

Megan Whalen Turner The King of Attolia

Source: The King of Attolia

Boy

“Autumn that year painted the countryside in vivid shades of scarlet, saffron and russet, and the days were clear and crisp under harvest skies.”

Sharon Kay Penman book Time and Chance

Source: Time and Chance

Beauty, Autumn, Painting

“A year. We'd known each other only a year, but we'd lived a lifetime in it.”

Richelle Mead book Spirit Bound

Source: Spirit Bound

“It's been many years since I had such an exemplary vegetable.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.”

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

Works and Days
1870s, Society and Solitude (1870)

Courageous, Positive, Good Morning, New Year

“It knew that the earth goddess intended on razing all human civilization, and this city, which had stood ffor thousands of years, was saying back to her: You wanna dissolve this city, Dirt Face? Give it a shot.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

“Sometime years before, I had dragged an old bean bag chair to that place. I watched Zach sink onto it, and then he pulled me down to lean against him. I felt his arms go around me, holding me tight.
I was safe.
I was warm.
I was home.”

Ally Carter (1974) American writer

Source: United We Spy

Home

“Love is a moment of stillness that sometimes a word can shatter to pieces. Or love can be a thing that endures, a rich, deep current flowing unending through the years.”

Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer

Love

“For years we have been taught not to like things. Finally somebody said it was OK to like things. This was a great relief. It was getting hard to go around not liking everything.”

David Byrne (1952) Scottish alternative rock musician and promoter of world music

“If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?”

Ford Madox Ford book The Good Soldier

Part One, Ch. I (p. 7)
Source: The Good Soldier (1915)
Context: No, by God, it is false! It wasn't a minuet that we stepped; it was a prison — a prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down so that they might not outsound the rolling of our carriage wheels as we went along the shaded avenues of the Taunus Wald.
And yet I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true. It was true sunshine; the true music; the true splash of the fountains from the mouth of stone dolphins. For, if for me we were four people with the same tastes, with the same desires, acting — or, no, not acting — sitting here and there unanimously, isn't that the truth? If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?

“Your thoughts and beliefs of the past have created this moment, and all the moments up to this moment. What you are now choosing to believe and think and say will create the next moment and the next day and the next month and the next year.”

Louise L. Hay (1926–2017) American writer

Thinking, Past

“If my mom told one more story about how cute I looked in the bathtub when I was three years old I was going to burrow into the snow and freeze myself to death.”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Source: The Titan's Curse

Death, Moms

“Years ago, before this estate was generously and unwillingly turned over to the crown, the lord here was a genuine dimwit. He had a minister stashed behind his throne to whisper clever things to say.”

Shannon Hale The Goose Girl

Source: The Goose Girl

“One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your hear that every day is the best day of the year.”

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

Life, Decision

“Our lives can't be measured by our final years, of this I am sure.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Source: The Notebook

“You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these last twenty years at least.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“As he fell toward the highway, a horrible scenario flashed through his mind: his body smashing against an SUV's windshield, some annoyed commuter trying to push him off with the wipers. "Stupid 16-year-old kid falling from the sky! I'm late!”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Stupidity

“Here's to another year and let's hope it's above ground.”

Carol Shields The Stone Diaries

Source: The Stone Diaries

Hope

“Beckendorf, whose legs were now working fine (nothing like being chased by a huge monster to get your body back in order) shook his head and gasped for breath. “You shouldn’t have turned it on! It’s unstable! After a few years, automatons go wild!”

Rick Riordan book The Demigod Files

Source: The Demigod Files

“The seat received him in a loose and distant kind of way, like an aunt who disapproves of the last fifteen years of your life and will therefore furnish you with a basic sherry, but refuses to catch your eye.”

Douglas Adams book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Source: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987)

Life, Way, Distant

“I hate it when people let me down, when things are temporary. I think that's why I want to be an architect."
"To build something permanent," I said. "A monument to last a thousand years.”

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Source: The Last Olympian

Hate, People, Thinking

“Miles and years become suddenly invisible when you find yourself back where you started from, as if you've learned nothing and you are once again the person you once were.”

Karen White (1964) American writer

Source: The Memory of Water

Learning, Personality

“I was on HPD--Heathcliff Protection Duty--in Wuthering Heights for two years, and believe me, the ProCaths tried everything. I personally saved him from assassination eight times.”

Jasper Fforde book Lost in a Good Book

Source: Lost in a Good Book

Time, Personality

“Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.”

Mary Karr (1955) American writer

Source: Lit

Dead

“I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning book Sonnets from the Portuguese

Source: Sonnets from the Portuguese

Life, Sadness, Tear

“When anybody, no matter how old they are, loses a parent, I think it hurts the same as if you were only five years old, you know? I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.”

Sherman Alexie book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Thinking, Parent, Hurt

“Two years? That's entirely too long. If you want, we can take care of that. After two years it's pure therapy.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Burns

“We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Spring, Waiting, Summer

“It was the first time in years I didn’t wonder if my father was out there, looking at it too.”

Ally Carter Out of Sight, Out of Time

Source: Out of Sight, Out of Time

Time

“There was a time when I liked a good riot. Put on some heavy old street clothes that could stand a bit of sidewalk-scraping, infect myself with something good and contagious, then go out and stamp on some cops. It was great, being nine years old.”

Warren Ellis (1968) English comics and fiction writer

Time, Clothes

“This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.”

Jennifer Egan A Visit from the Goon Squad

Source: A Visit from the Goon Squad

Music, Business

“Well, yeah, but she, like, twenty-two. And shelike a four-year-old.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: The Faceless Ones

“I don’t know what I’m doing in the next five minutes and she has the next ten years figured out. I’ll worry about making it out of ninth grade alive. Then I’ll think about a career path.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Speak

Source: Speak

Thinking

“In short, over the last ten years the Negro decided to straighten his back up, realizing that a man cannot ride your back unless it is bent.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)

“I’m not an idiot! I’m just twelve. I’m a twelve-year-old girl and neither of those facts are my fault.”

Ally Carter book All Fall Down

Source: All Fall Down

Girl

“Your hand and your mouth agreed many years ago that, as far as chocolate is concerned, there is no need to involve your brain.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

“Your ideal possession candidate's a thirteen-year-old recently orphaned schizophrenic girl three days away from her period on her way to see the shrink with whom she's romantically besotted.”

Glen Duncan book I, Lucifer

Source: I, Lucifer

Way, Girl

“And I don’t want his body touching something I wear. He’ll contaminate it. (Sasha)
Oh, good grief, Sasha. Grow up. You’re four hundred years old and you’re acting like a whelp. It’s not like he has cooties or anything. (Astrid)
Yes he does! (Sasha)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon book Dance with the Devil

Source: Dance with the Devil

“You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.”

Hilary Mantel book An Experiment in Love

Source: An Experiment in Love

Time

“Were-Hunters are different from humans. (Ravyn)
You mean other than the fact that you live for several hundred years, can turn into animals, time travel, and wave your hand to make freaky stuff happen? (Susan)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Dark Side of the Moon

Travel, Time, Animals

“So many things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.”

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian

Pain, Housing

“I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Source: Moral Disorder and Other Stories

Learning

“In a thousand years time this day will have existed for a thousand years to the day. And the ignorance of the whole world about what they've said today will have a date too.”

Marguerite Duras book Blue Eyes, Black Hair

Source: Blue Eyes, Black Hair

World, Time

“It's interesting to see that people had so much clutter even thousands of years ago. The only way to get rid of it all was to bury it, and then some archaeologist went and dug it all up.”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

Source: An Idiot Abroad: The Travel Diaries of Karl Pilkington

People, Way

“That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.”

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) British writer

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Sadness, Beauty, Silence, Change

“She had been a teenager once, and she knew that, despite the apparent contradictions, a person's teenage years lasted well into their fifties.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Mortal Coil

Personality

“I just love dealing with people whose idea of sometimes is every thousand years,” I said.”

Laurell K. Hamilton A Kiss of Shadows

Source: A Kiss of Shadows

Love, People, Idea

“All these years I'd thought being a spy was challenging. Turns out, being a girl is the tricky part.”

Ally Carter I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Source: I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Girl, Parting

“I can see myself now, she said. And I can see what I want to be, ten years from now. But I don't understand how I'm going to get from here to there.”

Jodi Picoult book The Pact

Source: The Pact

Understanding

“All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me.
-Ying Ying”

Amy Tan The Joy Luck Club

Source: The Joy Luck Club

Nature

“Don't live the same year 75 times and call it a life.”

Robin S. Sharma (1965) Canadian self help writer

Life, Time

“I'm not going anywhere. I hope. It's been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost.
But I wouldn't have missed it for the world.”

Anthony Bourdain book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Source: Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

World, Hope

“It was a year for the ages, like 79, like 1346, to name just a few. Forget the scythe, Goddamn it, I needed a broom or a mop. And I needed a vacation.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Age, Forgetting

“Five years of destruction and mayhem, lives lost everywhere, shortages of food and fuel and clothing - and the insane mind behind it just urges us all on and on to more destruction. And we all keep playing.”

Elizabeth Wein book Rose Under Fire

Source: Rose Under Fire

Food, Clothes

“Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old…

- Wang Lung”

Pearl S. Buck book The Good Earth

Source: The Good Earth

Life

“For years now, I've wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Sleep, Parting

“The years go by, and I've told the story so many times that I'm not sure anymore whether I actually remember it or whether I just remember the words I tell it with.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Source: The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory

Time

“I like autumn. The drama of it; the golden lion roaring through the back door of the year, shaking its mane of leaves. A dangerous time; of violent rages and deceptive calm, of fireworks in the pockets and conkers in the fist.”

Joanne Harris (1964) British author

Source: Gentlemen and Players

Autumn, Rage, Time

“I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they're the things that matter.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin

Marriage, Kiss

“Years ago, I tried to top everybody, but I don't anymore. I realized it was killing conversation. When you're always trying for a topper you aren't really listening. It ruins communication.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

As quoted in What Color is Your Paradigm: Thinking for Shaping Life and Results (2003) by Howard Edson, p. 184
Source: The Essential Groucho: Writings by, for, and about Groucho Marx

Communication