
“And again, as always, after so many years we were still in the same place we always were.”
Source: Memories of My Melancholy Whores
“And again, as always, after so many years we were still in the same place we always were.”
Source: Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Interview with the San Francisco Bay Guardian (2002-10-30)
"The Diamond As Big As The Ritz"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
“What they don't know is that I went over the edge years ago, and lived to tell the tale.”
Variant: I have been to the edge and lived to tell the tale..
Source: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
“You're buying years of work, toil in the sun; you're buying a sorrow that can't talk.”
Source: The Grapes of Wrath
Source: Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins
Speech on the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968)
Context: And let's dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.
Source: Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
“After all these years, I feel so free. Who knows where I might fly?”
Source: The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Quoted in Robert Benchley (1955) by Nathaniel Benchley, ch. 1
“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions”
Letter to the House Committee on Un-American Activities http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6454 (HUAC) of the US House of Representatives (19 May 1952)
Context: I am ready and willing to testify before the representatives of our Government as to my own opinions and my own actions, regardless of any risks or consequences to myself.
But I am advised by counsel that if I answer the committee’s questions about myself, I must also answer questions about other people and that if I refuse to do so, I can be cited for contempt. My counsel tells me that if I answer questions about myself, I will have waived my rights under the fifth amendment and could be forced legally to answer questions about others. This is very difficult for a layman to understand. But there is one principle that I do understand: I am not willing, now or in the future, to bring bad trouble to people who, in my past association with them, were completely innocent of any talk or any action that was disloyal or subversive. I do not like subversion or disloyalty in any form and if I had ever seen any I would have considered it my duty to have reported it to the proper authorities. But to hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.
50 Years of Boyd K. Packer and Church History http://www.lds.org/church/news/50-years-of-boyd-k-packer-and-church-history Boyd K. Packer, 50 Years Church History, 30 September 2011
“Old is always fifteen years from now.”
“The first time I saw him again, it was another year, at my college graduation. And I just knew.”
Source: We'll Always Have Summer
“This year I'm a star, but what will I be next year? A black hole?”
“A two-year old is kind of like having a blender, but you don't have a top for it.”
“I once lost five years listening to a Pink Floyd album.”
Source: Ghost Story
Variant: I hated high school. I don’t trust anybody who looks back on the years from 14 to 18 with any enjoyment. If you liked being a teenager, there’s something wrong with you.
“My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year.”
Source: A Wild Sheep Chase
Wilderness Letter http://wilderness.org/bios/former-council-members/wallace-stegner (1960)
Source: The Sound of Mountain Water
Source: How to Save a Life
“Better to live one year as a tiger, than a hundred as sheep.”
Madonna: 50 Years Of Wit And Wisdom, The Insider http://www.theinsider.com/news/1130430_Madonna_50_Years_Of_Wit_And_Wisdom,
Source: In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison
“Of all sound of all bells… most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year.”
Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You
Quoted in "Books: The Great Gadfly", Time magazine, 8 October 1965 (review of The Age of Voltaire by Will and Ariel Durant)
1960s, Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam (1967)
Context: A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be changed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
“Now think deeply.
What have you done with your life over the past year?
How do you feel inside?”
Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens: The Ultimate Teenage Success Guide