Quotes about year
page 17

“It is me. I am his madness. For years he's been looking for something to put his madness into. And he found me.”

Source: The Collector

“They say suicides and murderers go to Hell. If so, I will know my way around, because I've been there for the last eight years.”

Stephen King book Full Dark, No Stars

Source: Full Dark, No Stars

Way, Hell, Suicide

“They had met at a club fifteen years before, Etta and Magnus. He had convinced her to dance with him, and she said she had been in love by the end of the song. He told her he had been in love before the beginning.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: Saving Raphael Santiago

Love, Dance

“I was thirty-seven years old and still discovering who I was.”

Julia Child (1921–2004) American chef

“It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

Source: White Noise

Sadness, Silence, Time

“It wouldn't be New Year's without a resolution. I've resolved to take a moment every day for the rest of my life to appreciate what I have.”

Susan Beth Pfeffer book Life As We Knew It

Source: Life As We Knew It

Life

“Time is a funny thing. I was always puzzled with the way a single day could stretch itself out to the point of eternity in your mind, all while years melted down into the fraction of a second.”

Gloria Naylor book Mama Day

Source: Mama Day

Way, Time

“Oh, my dear! I’m afraid you’ve mistaken
me for someone else! My name is Rhea Silvia. I was the mother to Romulus and Remus, thousands of years ago. But you’re so kind to think I look as young as the 1950s.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

Thinking

“I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years”

James Baldwin book Just Above My Head

Source: Just Above My Head

People, Learning, Change

“Just because he has black fingernails doesn't mean he's a monster-that's how you've defended yourself for years.”

Ellen Schreiber (1967) American writer

Source: Dance with a Vampire

“The 1143-year-long war hand begun on false pretenses and only because the two races were unable to communicate.

Once they could talk, the first question was 'Why did you start this thing?' and the answer was 'Me?”

Joe Haldeman book The Forever War

Source: The Forever War

War, Communication, Question, Falseness

“They were inlove, but they hadn't been lovers; they were friends and yet also strangers for so many years”

Nicholas Sparks book The Best of Me

Source: The Best of Me

Lovers

“When something needs to be ironed I put it in the ironing basket. If a year goes by and the item is still in the basket I throw the item away. This is a good system since eventually I end up only with clothes that don’t need ironing.”

Janet Evanovich Three to Get Deadly

Source: Three to Get Deadly

Clothes

“The unfortunate thing about working for yourself is that you have the worst boss in the world. I work every day of the year except at Christmas, when I work a half day.”

David Eddings (1931–2009) American novelist

World, Christmas

“An Immense hatred keeps me alive… i would live for a thousand years if i were certain of seeing the whole world croak.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) French writer

World

“I heard you went to Ireland… I haven't seen it in many years. Is it still green then, and beautiful?

Wet as a bath sponge and mud to the knees but, aye, it was green enough.”

Diana Gabaldon book The Scottish Prisoner

Source: The Scottish Prisoner

Beauty

“I don’t want to be
one of those easily forgotten people, so important at the time, so special, so
influential, and so treasured, yet years later just a vague face and a distant
memory.”

Cecelia Ahern book Love, Rosie

Variant: I don’t want to be one of those easily forgotten people, so important at the time, so special, so influential, and so treasured, yet years later just a vague face and a distant memory. I want us to be best friends forever
Source: Love, Rosie

People, Distant, Memory, Time

“Last year I abstained
this year I devour

without guilt
which is also an art”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Source: You are Happy

Art

“I'd been painting rats for three years before someone said 'that's a clever anagram of art' and I had to pretend I'd known that all along.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

Source: Wall and Piece (2005)

Art, Painting

“I've looked at the world for quite a few years now and I've found that if I don't laugh, I'll probably end up crying."
- Prince Kheldar of Drasnia”

David Eddings (1931–2009) American novelist

Source: Demon Lord of Karanda

World, Cry

“I have to tell you it was the first time even after all these years of expecting my own death that i truly knew what it meant to die because with you gone there was nothing left for me to live for.”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Source: The Viscount Who Loved Me

Death, Time

“I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Source: Autobiographies

Freedom

“In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.”

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

Source: Nature and Selected Essays

Life, Youth

“In secret we met
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?
With silence and tears.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

When We Two Parted (1808), st. 4.

Secret, Tear, Silence, Heart

“Relax, having kids is years away. But can you imagine? Your brains, my charm, our collective good looks… then add in the usual physical abilities dhampirs get.

It's really not even fair to everyone else.”

Richelle Mead book The Fiery Heart

Source: The Fiery Heart

Imagination

“I tell you, there are more worlds, and more doors to them, than you will think of in many years!”

George MacDonald book Lilith

Source: Lilith

World, Thinking

“God will forgive me. It's his job." Heine said this on his deathbed (1856). Hilarious. He must have thought that up years before and counted the seconds to use it.”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic

God, Forgiveness

“At this time of year it's easy to forget the true meaning of Christianity - the lies, the corruption, the abuse.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

Time, Forgetting

“Can you giggle while racing for your life and protecting a six-year-old? I can.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Maximum Ride The Angel Experiment

Life

“For the last year his grandma had been slipping in and out of reality. One minute she was as clear as a bell and the next she was calling him Simon. Who was Simon? He had no idea.”

Suzanne Collins book Gregor the Overlander

Source: Gregor the Overlander

Idea, Reality, Grandma

“Why should I be afraid now? Strange men have come to kill me ever since I was twelve years old.”

Mario Puzo The Godfather

Source: The Godfather

Men

“I can't go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.”

Cory Doctorow Little Brother

Source: Little Brother

Life, Freedom, Waiting

“Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.”

Frank O'Hara book Meditations in an Emergency (book)

Source: Mayakovsky, st. 4, from Meditations in an Emergency (1957).

Beauty, Thinking, Laughter, Tree

“because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Nobel lecture (8 December 1982) http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_nobel.html Variant: races condemned to 100 years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth. Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude Context: The most prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune. On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man." I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possiblity. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.

Solitude

“In my years, I have seen that people must be their own gods and make their own good fortune. The bad will come or not come anyway.”

Octavia E. Butler Wild Seed

Source: Wild Seed

God, People

“An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; and American thinks a hundred years is a long time”

Diana Gabaldon book Drums of Autumn

Source: Drums of Autumn

Way, Thinking, Time

“New Year's Eve always terrifies me.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame

“These long years later it is worse
for I remember what it was
as well as what it might have been.”

Rod McKuen (1933–2015) American poet, songwriter, composer, and singer

Source: Listen to the Warm

“A nun I know once told me she kept begging God to take her character defects away from her. After years of this prayer, God finally got back to her: I'm not going to take anything away from you, you have to give it to Me.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

God

“We turn not older with years but newer every day.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Source: http://archive.emilydickinson.org/correspondence/norcross/l379.html Letter

Birthday, For Wife

“The other day I went to a tourist information booth and asked, 'Tell me about some of the people who were here last year.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

People

“They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

Age, Siblings

“The Operative tried to implement the Purusey breathing technique, which has been proven effective at fooling polygraphs. There is no conclusive evidence as to
whether it is effective at masking the internal lie detectors of fifteen-year-old boys.”

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

Lie, Fools, Boy

“Odd, isn’t it? You know when your birthday is, but not your death day, even though you pass the date year after year, never suspecting that some day…”

Mary Downing Hahn (1937) American children's writer

Source: The Ghost of Crutchfield Hall

Death, Birthday

“We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”

John Steinbeck book Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Source: Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

Home

“I’ve lived a long time,” Magnus said. “So many years, and no, it doesn’t feel like enough. I won’t lie and say it does. I want to live on—partly because of you, Alec. I have never wanted to live so much as I have these past few months, with you.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Lie, Feeling, Time, Past

“From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year… death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Source: The Quiet American

Life, Death, World, Childhood

“There are only three things that America will be remembered for 2000 years from now when they study this civilization: The Constitution, Jazz music, and Baseball. These are the 3 most beautiful things this culture's ever created.”

Gerald Early (1952) American poet

Beauty, Music, Study

“Youth calls to age across the tired years: 'What have you found,' he cries, 'what have you sought?" 'What have you found,' age answers through his tears, 'What have you sought.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

Source: The Poems of Dylan Thomas

Youth, Age, Tear

“We laughed about all the kids who believed in the Santa Clause myth and got nothing but a bunch of cheap plastic toys. 'Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten,' Dad said, ' you'll still have your stars.”

Jeannette Walls book The Glass Castle

Source: The Glass Castle

Star

“We spent all those years talking about stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all the ways we were different and it broke both of our hearts.”

Nick Hornby (1957) English novelist

Way, Heart

“Please stop putting quotes from Nietzsche at the end of your emails. Five years ago you were laughing your guts out over American Pie 2. What — suddenly you’ve magically turned into Noam Chomsky?”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

Source: JPod (2006)
Context: You know what? When you read a book, you’re totally lost in your own private world, and society says that’s a good and wonderful thing. But if you play a game by yourself, it’s this weird, fucked-up, socially damaging activity.
In my neighbourhood, all the teenage boys are dying because they’re driving their cars using videogame physics instead of real-world physics. They turn too quickly and change lanes too quickly. They don’t understand traction or centripetal force. And they’re dropping like flies.
Please stop putting quotes from Nietzsche at the end of your emails. Five years ago you were laughing your guts out over American Pie 2. What — suddenly you’ve magically turned into Noam Chomsky?
Don’t discuss Sony like it’s a great big benevolent cartoon character who lives next door to Astro Boy. Like any company, Sony is comprised of individuals who are fearful for their jobs on a daily basis, and who make lame decisions based pretty much on fear and conforming to social norms — but then, that’s every corporation on earth, so don’t single out one specific corporation as lovable and cute. They’re all evil and greedy. They’re all sort of in the moral middle ground, where good and bad cancel each other out, so there’s nothing really there — which, in it’s own way, far darker than any paranoid or patriarchal theory of Sony.
Here’s a much simpler example of geeks and neural processing malfunctions: Has anybody experienced a geek environment in which said geeks wear perfume or deodorant? Chances are no. While advanced microautistics are more commonly men than women, both share a marked dislike of scent.

Quotes

“He was waving. "Saukerl," she laughed, and as she held up her hand, she knew completely that he was simultaneously calling her a Saumensch. I think that's as close to love as eleven-year-olds can get.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Love, Thinking

“A genius. A criminal mastermind. A millionaire. And he is only twelve years old.”

Eoin Colfer Artemis Fowl

Source: Artemis Fowl

“…kissing George was a little like rolling in caramel after spending years surviving off rice sticks.”

Aimee Bender (1969) Novelist, short story writer

Source: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Kiss

“It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

World, Dreams, Decision, Water

““Fifty years,” I hackneyed, “is a long time.”
“Not when you’re looking back at them,” she said. “You wonder how they vanished so quickly.””

Isaac Asimov book I, Robot

“Introduction”, p. 8
Source: I, Robot (1950)

Time

“So, what do you think they'll do to him?" I ask.
Prim sounds about a thousand years old when she speaks.
"Whatever it takes to break you.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

Thinking

“I guess no one stays friends for more than thirty years without broken hearts along the way.”

Kristin Hannah (1960) American writer

Source: Firefly Lane

Way, Heart

“You are the best person I've met in years, and if I'd met you in a year's time, or maybe even a few months, I know we could be happy together, but I can't give you what you need.”

Jane Green (1968) British writer

Source: Mr. Maybe

Time, Personality, Happiness

“Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.”

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)

Friendship, For Friend, For Bestfriend

“Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"
"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

Relationship, Feeling, Time

“I don't know if you've ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for thousands of years. Or just not exist..”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Sleep

“The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

Pain, Age

“I had a chance at him now. Things were a bit more even. He knew my name, I knew his. He had six years' experience, I had five thousand and ten. That was the kind of odds that you could do something with.”

Jonathan Stroud book The Amulet of Samarkand

Source: The Amulet of Samarkand

Chance

“They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

People

“When he wins the bet, I tell Griggs that it will take me a lifetime to save up two trillion dollars and he tells me that he's only giving me seventy years.”

Melina Marchetta book On the Jellicoe Road

Source: On the Jellicoe Road

“Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians.”

Mohsin Hamid book The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Source: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

People

“There are more than two chances– many more. I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? (2011), p.38
Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Life, Chance, Forgetting

“It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy;—it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.”

Jane Austen book Sense and Sensibility

Source: Sense and Sensibility

Relationship, Romantic, People, Time

“It seems strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses, and apologized to no one.”

Alan Moore V for Vendetta

Source: V for Vendetta

Life

“It's not easy being so frightened of everything. And when I think of how much I've improved in the last year, I wonder when I'll ever get finished with making changes and be really grown up.”

Paula Danziger book There's a Bat in Bunk Five

Source: There's a Bat in Bunk Five

Thinking, Change

“However many years she lived, Mary always felt that 'she should never forget that first morning when her garden began to grow'.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett The Secret Garden

Source: The Secret Garden

Forgetting

“He played of love and loss and years of silence, words unsaid and vows unspoken, and all the spaces between his heart and theirs; and when he was done, and he'd set the violin back in its box, Will's eyes were closed, but Tessa's were full of tears.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Love, Tear, Silence, Loss

“I suppose that each of us may have a great moment in our life, a month, a week a year, when we are most fully what we are meant to be”

Sebastian Faulks (1953) British journalist and novelist

Life

“I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

Imagination

“Each of us must live off the fruit of his thoughts in the future, because what you think today and tomorrow, next month and next year, you will mold your life and determine your future. You are guided by your mind.”

Earl Nightingale (1921–1989) American motivational speaker

Life, Thinking, Future

“I fell into a deep sleep tucked in that little cocoon, a deeper sleep than I might of had in years.

Right up until someone kicked me and said "Gotcha!”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Angel

Sleep

“He smiles at me, and I am suddenly seventeen again - the year I realize that love doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable”

Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper

Source: My Sister's Keeper

Love, Smile

“Maybe that was how it was with all first loves. They own a little piece of your heart, always. Conrad at twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, even seventeen years old.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Love, Heart

“Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.”

Janet Frame (1924–2004) New Zealand author

Imagination

“Real, sane, mature love—the kind that pays the mortgage year after year and picks up the kids after school—is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Source: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Love, School

“She'd secretly had a crush on him since they were twelve years old. Last summer, she'd fallen for him hard.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

Summer

“you just took on five million years of evolution again”

Scott Westerfeld book Specials

Source: Specials

“At New Year's he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.”

Hilary Mantel book Wolf Hall

Source: Wolf Hall

People, Hope

“Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) American conservative author and commentator

Life

“In years to come, he would be a giver of bread, not a stealer - proof again of the contradictory human being. So much good, so much evil. Just add water.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Water, Evil

“There is no significant idea which cannot be explained to an intelligent twelve year old boy in fifteen minutes.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Intelligence, Boy, Idea

“She had wondered, when he’d looked into her eyes and said that he’d had to learn to make do without mirrors in the Wild Hunt, whose eyes he’d been looking into for all those years. Who’d been his mirror.
Now she knew.”

Cassandra Clare book Lady Midnight

Source: Lady Midnight

Learning

“You've managed-- in our short three years together-- to kill not only my god, but my father, my brother, and my fiance. That's kind of like a homicidal hat trick. It's a strange foundation for a relationship, wouldn't you say?”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Hero of Ages

God

“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”

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

"Self-Portrait" (1936), p. 5 http://books.google.com/books?id=Q1UxYzuI2oQC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA5#v=onepage&q&f=false 1950s, Out of My Later Years (1950) Variant: I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

Pain, Youth, Solitude

“I want to talk to you. I want to listen to you. I want to walk with you and, yes, I want you in my bed. That's what I want today. That's what I'll want in a hundred years. If you promise to be my wife forever, I will pledge myself to your happiness.”

Christina Dodd (1957) American writer

Source: Rules of Attraction

Happiness