Quotes about year
page 16

“A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study.”

- Chinese proverb”

Alvin Toffler (1928–2016) American writer

“Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it may go on. The heart and flesh of an empty shell give birth to nothing more than the life of an empty shell.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Life, Birth, Heart

“Altogether, if I'd been looking at nothing but the media all these years, I would be a much more discouraged person-especially given the notion that only conflict is news, and that objectivity means being evenhandedly negative.”

Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist

Source: My Life on the Road

Personality

“What did a happy ending even mean in real life, anyway? In stories you simply said, 'They lived happily ever after,' and that was it. But in real life people had to keep on living, day after day, year after year.”

Scott Westerfeld book Afterworlds

Source: Afterworlds

Life, People, Happiness

“Almost-Sister, you picked a real catch.”
“It was I who caught her,” Adam said softly. “It took years.”

Patricia Briggs book Night Broken

Source: Night Broken

Sister

“She was reflecting back on a truth she had learned over the years: that people heard what they wanted to hear, saw what they wanted, believed what they wanted.”

Jeffery Deaver book The Bodies Left Behind

Source: The Bodies Left Behind

People, Truth, Learning

“You don’t draw, and I don’t breathe. Not so much like last year”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Drawing

“Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)

“You're the one who doesn't understand, I've been standing on the edge with you for years.”

Laurie Halse Anderson (1961) American children's writer

Source: The Impossible Knife of Memory

Understanding

“They're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now"
"But God doesn't change"
"Men do though”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World

Source: Brave New World

Men, God, Change

“And you, CONSTANT READER. Thank God you’re still there after all these years. If you’re having fun, I am, too.”

Stephen King book Finders Keepers

Source: Finders Keepers

God

“Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.”

Neal Stephenson book Cryptonomicon

Source: Cryptonomicon

Game, Time

“History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations”

Arthur Koestler book Darkness at Noon

Source: Darkness at Noon

History

“Throwing things horrified me. I suffered extreme, paralyzing anxiety when it came to anything remotely athletic. I wouldn't even run to catch the school bus because I knew I'd trip and then get teased for a year.”

Augusten Burroughs Possible Side Effects

Source: Possible Side Effects

School, Suffering

“I have a body of an eighteen year old. I keep it in the fridge.”

Spike Milligan (1918–2002) British-Irish comedian, writer, musician, poet, playwright, soldier and actor

“The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.”

Calvin Trillin (1935) American journalist

Mother's Day, For Mother, Family

“I thought about you all the time. I used to pray that you’d live to be a hundred years old. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that you were ashamed of me.”

Khaled Hosseini (1965) novelist

Time

“When ours are interrupted, his are not. His plans are proceeding exactly as scheduled, moving us always (including those minutes or hours or years which seem most useless or wasted or unendurable).”

Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary

Source: Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love Life Under Christ's Control

“But my lord, when we addressed this issue a few years ago, didn't you argue the other side?" He said, "That's true, but when I get more evidence I sometimes change my mind. What do you do?”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Change

“It wasn't my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it.”

Charles Bukowski book Pulp

Variant: It wasn’t my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it.
Source: Pulp

Life, God

“We were still at the age when girls are years older than guy, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to.”

Tana French book Faithful Place

Source: Faithful Place

Age, Guy, Girl

“A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and he'd still see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void…”

William Gibson book Neuromancer

Source: Neuromancer (1984)
Context: A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and he'd still see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void… The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.

Dreams, Hope, Sleep, Speed

“Perhaps he's in love with Agatha," she said.
"I hope not. I intend to marry Agatha myself. She may be a thousand years old, but she makes an incomparable jam tart. Beauty fades, but cooking is eternal.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

Love, Beauty, Hope, Cooking

“With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.”

Jared Diamond book Guns, Germs, and Steel

Source: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

People, History, Learning, Time

“It's too late. Seventeen-year-olds don't need fathers.
Oh god. I'm thirty-four years old and I need a father. I can't even begin to think what my daughter needs.”

Melina Marchetta book Looking for Alibrandi

Source: Looking for Alibrandi

God, Thinking, Daughters

“I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

Source: The Writing Life

People, Books, Imagination, Reading

“I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, there are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who's in charge?”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Question, History, Love

“In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Nostalgia, Memory

“Some Westerners […] have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

History, Problem

“You dare speak to me in such an insolent manner?'

'Stop talking like you’re two hundred years old. You’re sixteen, just like me.”

Michelle Rowen (1971) Canadian writer

Source: Reign Fall

“Oh, no, a leopard blew up and plastered itself all over everything, but hey, animal print was in this year.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Incubus Dreams

Source: Incubus Dreams

Animals

“In this state, dig it, you get twenty years for sale of dope to a minor. You only get five to ten for manslaughter. So like, the thing is, if you're selling to a kid and cops come, shoot the kid real quick!”

Abbie Hoffman (1936–1989) American political and social activist

"Chicago", on the spoken word album Wake Up America! (1970).

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to tail an eighty year-old woman Its hard. Really hard. Really… slow.

-Grabrielle”

Ally Carter (1974) American writer

Source: Uncommon Criminals

Idea

“I see no advantage in these new clocks. They run no faster than the ones made 100 years ago.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

“I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.”

Amy Tan (1952) American novelist

Pain, Way, Water

“A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

(Ch. 6) "Old Man"; p. 160
The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] (1939)

“I always knew there were vampires, dude,” he’d said. “Because, you know how there’s people you know who, like, always look the same, even when they’re, like, a hundred years old? Like David Bowie? That’s because they’re vampires.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Source: City of Fallen Angels

People

“Look," said Janet, irritated, "if the thing you liked best to do in the world was read, and somebody offered to pay you room and board and give you a liberal arts degree if you would just read for four years, wouldn't you do it?”

Pamela Dean Tam Lin

Source: Tam Lin

World, Art, Reading

“Well, normally I’m against big things. I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things. Too many things can go wrong when they get big.” — Pete Seeger (on how he felt about attending his big 90th birthday bash last year)”

Pete Seeger (1919–2014) American folk singer

World, Birthday, Thinking

“I am a hundred and forty six years old and this is not my first unwinnable war.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

War

“They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you're safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything.”

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) American novelist, short story writer, designer

Thinking

“The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Source: Memoria de mis putas tristes

Love, Night

“The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Life, Light, Universe

“She'd met Colin on a Monday.
She'd kissed him on a Friday.
Twelve years later.
She sighed. It seemed fairly pathetic.”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Source: Romancing Mister Bridgerton

Kiss

“I find now, swallowing one teaspoon
of pain, that it drops downward
to the past where it mixes
with last year’s cupful
and downward into a decade’s quart
and downward into a lifetime’s ocean.
I alternate treading water
and deadman’s float.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

Source: The Complete Poems

Pain, Water, Past

“She knew more about these situations than she realized, he thought. She'd spent years at Duncan's side. "When in doubt," he added, "be pompous.”

John Flanagan (1873–1938) Irish-American hammer thrower

Source: Erak's Ransom

“A year from now you may wish you had started today.”

Karen Lamb (1982) British tennis player

Deep, Inspirational, Motivational, Success

“We'll meet again. We'll meet when years have passed, and years make such a difference, don't they?”

Ayn Rand book We the Living

Source: We the Living

“Hmmm, I bet you’d be really cute with hornays. Not that you’re not cute right now, but you’re a bit young. You’re only what? Four in human years? Oh wait, that’s wrong, isn’t it? You ninety? (Simi)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Infinity

Waiting

“High school sucks. People who say those were the best years of your life—those people are liars… Who wants the best years of their life to be in high school? High school is something everybody should be ready to lose.”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

Source: Forever Princess

Life, People, School

“For five years it had been his absolute truth. Jem and Will. Will and Jem. Will Herondale lives, therefore Jem Carstairs lives also.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Truth

“My name is Katniss Everdeen. I am seventeen years old. My home is District 12. I was in the Hunger Games. I escaped. The Capitol hates me……..”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Katniss (pp. 8)
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay (2010)
Context: My Name is Katniss Everdeen. I am seventeen years old. My home is District 12. I was in The Hunger Games. I escaped. The Capitol hates me. Peeta was taken prisoner. He is thought to be dead. Most likely he is dead. It is probably best if he is dead...

Hunger, Hate, Home, Game

“What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“I'd had years of practise looking dumb when people threw out Greek names I didn't know. It's a skill of mine. Annabeth keeps telling me to read a book of Greek myths, but I don't see the need. It's easier just to have folks explain stuff.”

Rick Riordan book The Demigod Diaries

Variant: Cacus.” I’d had years of practice looking dumb when people threw out Greek names I didn’t know. It’s a skill of mine. Annabeth keeps telling me to read a book of Greek myths, but I don’t see the need. It’s easier just to have folks explain stuff.
Source: The Demigod Diaries

People, Books, Reading

“Having waited my entire life to get an award for something, anything… I now get awards all the time for being mentally ill. It’s better than being bad at being insane, right? How tragic would it be to be runner-up for Bipolar Woman of the Year?”

Carrie Fisher book Wishful Drinking

Source: Wishful Drinking

Life, Time, Waiting

“Time is an unkind teacher, delivering lessons that we learn far too late for them to be useful. Years after I could have benefited from them, the insights come to me.”

Robin Hobb book Fool's Assassin

Source: Fool's Assassin

Learning, Teachers, Time

“For the best part of 40 years she had genuinely believed that not doing things would somehow prevent regret, when, of course, the exact opposite was true.”

Nick Hornby book Juliet, Naked

Source: Juliet, Naked

Parting

“And I began to feel sorry for myself; for so many years, my drawer full of memories had held the same old stories.”

Paulo Coelho book By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Feeling, Memory

“When I turned two I was really anxious, because I'd doubled my age in a year.
I thought, if this keeps up, by the time I'm six I'll be ninety.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

Age, Time

“I'd rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.”

Jack London book The Turtles of Tasman

Source: The Turtles of Tasman

Singing, Heart

“She had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become.”

Marguerite Duras book The Ravishing of Lol Stein

Source: The Ravishing of Lol Stein

Waiting

“The little bit you and me might change the world," Malloy smiled, "it wouldnt show up until a hundred years after we were dead. We'd never see it."

"But it'd be there.”

James Jones book From Here to Eternity

Source: From Here to Eternity

World, Smile, Change, Dead

“It's taken me years of practice to learn how to act natural.”

Craig Clevenger The Contortionist's Handbook

Source: The Contortionist's Handbook

Nature, Learning

“This twenty-year-old boy was distinguished from childhood by strange qualities, a dreamer and an eccentric. A girl fell in love with him, and he went and sold her to a brothel…”

Mikhail Bulgakov book The Master and Margarita

Source: The Master and Margarita

Love, Girl, Boy, Childhood

“At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything.”

Nathanael West (1903–1940) American writer

Source: Miss Lonelyhearts and A Cool Million

Beauty, Literature, Personality

“Because it is senior year I have begun to see things as potential absences. The things I love will become the things I'll miss.”

David Levithan The Realm of Possibility

Source: The Realm of Possibility

Love

“She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Tear, Memory

“Let me get this straight. The future of our relationship hinged on advice from a fifteen-year-old girl, a probably untrue story from a one-eyed Chihuahua trainer, and me unromantically - yet skillfully - kissing you on top of silverware and china?”

Richelle Mead book The Indigo Spell

Variant: The future of our relationship hinged on advice from a fifteen-year old girl, a probably untrue story from a one-eyed Chihuahua trainer, and me unromantically – yet skillfully – kissing you on top of silverware and china?
Source: The Indigo Spell

Girl, Kiss, Future