Quotes & Sayings About A One Year Old

I'm not even one year old," Jared said. "I can be a baby if I want. — John Scalzi

I'd always assumed Beth and I would be friends forever. But then in middle of the eighth grade, the Goldbergs went through the World's Nastiest Divorce.
Beth went a little nuts.
I don't blame her. When her dad got involved with this twenty-one year old dental hygienist, Beth got involved with the junk food aisle at the grocery store. She carried processed snack cakes the way toddlers carry teddy bears. She gained, like, twenty pounds, but I didn't think it was a big deal. I figured she'd get back to her usual weight once the shock wore off.
Unfortunately, I wasn't the only person who noticed.
May 14 was 'Fun and Fit Day at Surry Middle School, so the gym was full of booths set up by local health clubs and doctors and dentists and sports leagues, all trying to entice us to not end up as couch potatoes. That part was fine. What wasn't fine was when the whole school sat down to watch the eighth-grade cheerleaders' program on physical fitness. — Katie Alender

So I spoke to my old friend Bruce and told him I was feeling it, his loss of Clarence. We talked for quite a while, and there is no need to go into what two old friends had to say to each other at this point, except to say that two old friends spoke to each other about their music, their muses, their partners in crime, their proof, their friendship, their souls and their lives. Ben Keith was my Clarence Clemons. Clarence Clemons was Bruce's Ben Keith. When he died last year it touched me to the core. I don't want to ever think of any one else playing his parts or occupying his space. No one could. I can't do those songs again unless it's solo. So I told Bruce, "Waylon once looked at me and said, 'There's very few of us left.'" He liked that. I told him when he looked to his right I would be there. That's enough. I'm not talking about that anymore. — Neil Young

I used to sleep in the T-shirt I wore during the day and whatever ratty old gym shorts I could find on the floor. But one year for Christmas, someone gave me a very chic, comfortable pair of pajamas from Brooks Brothers, and I realized the error of my ways. — Derek Blasberg

It's very disheartening to encounter a fearful twenty-one year old. They haven't earned the right to be that afraid. It's not like we're living in war-torn Bosnia or something. — Fran Lebowitz

Pastors are starting to get wily. When people tell my friend, 'I'm not being fed,' he replies, 'I'm prefectly happy to spoon feed my one-year-old. But if I'm still spoon-feeding him when he's five, we've got a problem. Here's a fork. Feed yourself. — Jon Acuff

My mum loves cats so I took her to see the lion cubs which at about a year old are actually quite big. She wasn't scared at all and went straight over and kissed one on the mouth! She thought they were just like her pets at home. — Amanda Holden

She felt one thousand years old. She also felt like maybe she was a condescending brat. She wanted her bike. She wanted her friends, who were also one-thousand-year-old condescending brats. She wanted to live in a world where she was surrounded by one-thousand-year-old condescending brats. — Maggie Stiefvater

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
[Kung Fu Monkey
Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009] — John Rogers

Savitar, Savitar, Savitar. At least I won. Wasn't it you who had to cry to the counsel to come save your ass from an attack of a four-year-old? (Takeshi)
Four-year-old ... tarranine demon. Don't forget the most important part. Those bastards are hatched full grown and it wasn't just one. It was a swarm of them. (Savitar)
So you admit you had help? (Takeshi)
Oh, that's it, sensei. You're tasting sand. (Savitar) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

But the same receptivity to experience that can make life difficult for the highly sensitive also builds their consciences. Aron tells of one sensitive teen who persuaded his mother to feed a homeless person he'd met in the park, and of another eight-year-old who cried — Susan Cain

There was one knight," said Meera, "in the year of the false spring. The Knight of the Laughing Tree, they called him. He might have been a crannogman, that one." "Or not." Jojen's face was dappled with green shadows. "Prince Bran has heard that tale a hundred times, I'm sure." "No," said Bran. "I haven't. And if I have it doesn't matter. Sometimes Old Nan would tell the same story she'd told before, but we never minded, if it was a good story. Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to — George R R Martin

Yes, I was a twenty-nine year old woman who lived with her mother. One who didn't do drugs, party, or have sex. I read books, drank the occasional beer on a hot afternoon, and did the Times crossword puzzle on Sunday afternoons. I hadn't attended college, I wasn't particularly gorgeous, and I often forgot to shave my legs. On the upside, I could cook some mean dumplings and bring myself to orgasm within five minutes. Not at the same time, mind you. I wasn't that talented. — Alessandra Torre

In fact, they didn't even keep track of birth dates here. Instead, they used a traditional method of counting a person's age. Newborn babies were "one year old," and became one year older at the start of the new year. As for the reason it didn't start at zero... I was briefly afraid I'd discover they didn't yet have the concepts of zero or place-value notation. In fact, they had both. Newborn babies being "one" was just a holdover from previous times, before the numeral "zero" existed within their culture. Old — Kanata Yanagino

Did you see them? They're kids, Nathan. Children, who ended up being in the wrong place, at the wrong time." I blew out a frustrated breath, tracking one of the angry young teens in topic as he was dragged kicking and yelling from the room. "They won't even consider switching sides. Plumber has them so scared, all they can see if the numbers advantage he has over us."
"Numbers don't mean shit when you're fighters have the same level of skill as a two year old." He sniffed, shaking his head at the kid who was finally pulled from the room. "And that's insulting to two year olds. — Violet Cross

In China, women who are single past the age of twenty-seven are stigmatized as sheng nu, or "leftover women." They face severe pressure from their families to marry, stemming from the widespread belief that regardless of education and professional achievement, a woman is "absolutely nothing until she is married." One thirty-six-year-old economics professor was rejected by fifteen men because she had an advanced degree; her father then forbade her younger sister from going to graduate school. — Sheryl Sandberg

The film itself involves a New York City radio storyteller, Gabriel Noone, who strikes up a friendship with one of his fans, an abused 14-year-old teenager who is suffering from AIDS, who does not have much longer to live. — Armistead Maupin

You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better. — Andrew Solomon

And as Sumi flipped through more, she couldn't help smiling at the pictures of Hauk holding the human babies and children. They were so tiny in comparison to him. He looked awkward and scared in some, and in others - later ones - he was much more confident. One of the most adorable was a more recent image of him with a girl around a year old. She was dressed in a frilly tulle gown that filled Hauk's muscular arms with pink fluff. Laughing, the girl had her hands tangled in his braids while she laid her little head against his massive shoulder. Tears — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Young girls always know. They know older women look at them and see what they've left behind and can't get back. It's a truth everyone knows but no one acknowledges: There's nothing more powerful than an eighteen-year-old girl. — Sarah Addison Allen

Today humankind has broken the law of the jungle. There is at last real peace, and not just absence of war. For most polities, there is no plausible scenario leading to full-scale conflict within one year. What could lead to war between Germany and France next year? Or between China and Japan? Or between Brazil and Argentina? Some minor border clash might occur, but only a truly apocalyptic scenario could result in an old-fashioned full-scale war between Brazil and Argentina in 2014, with Argentinian armoured divisions sweeping to the gates of Rio, and Brazilian carpet-bombers pulverising the neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires. Such wars might still erupt between several pairs of states, e.g. between Israel and Syria, Ethiopia and Eritrea, or the USA and Iran, but these are only the exceptions that prove the rule. — Yuval Noah Harari

If an eighty-six-year-old woman has been clear-seeing from a young age, she will have gone through a lot of life developing a keen eye for snares and pitfalls, an ear for deceit, and a good nose for knavery. And by such an age, a smart woman with no illusions is one to whom courage comes far more readily than it does to those young people who don't yet know the world for what it is. — Dean Koontz

I was just a little three-year-old kid, and I loved Hulk Hogan. And when you're a three-year-old kid, you don't list off the reasons. I was just drawn to him. He was always my favorite, even in the video games and everything like that. He was the one that I always remembered and liked the most. — Ronda Rousey

I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments. — Julian Barnes

When you're a fifty-year-old woman, no one really bothers to look at you anymore, much less value your opinion. It's hard on the old ego. But damn, it does make it easy to get away with a lot. — Tess Gerritsen

I have a 6-year-old daughter, and we never look through magazines. But when we're on a plane, that's the one time we have screen-time and magazine-time sometimes. And I do not open a magazine with her without saying: 'Now remind me, are these real pictures?' — Alysia Reiner

Slowly, God is opening my eyes to needs all around me. In Scripture, God revisits this issue of caring for the poor- an echo that repeats itself from Genesis to Revelation. The Bible acknowledges that the poor will always be part of society, but God takes on their cause. The Mosaic law of the Old Testament is filled with regulations to prevent and eliminate poverty. The poor were given the right to glean- to take produce from the unharvested edges of the fields, a portion of the tithes, and a daily wage. The law prevented permanent slavery by releasing Jewish bondsmen and women on the sabbatical and Jubilee year and forbade charging interest on loans. In one of his most tender acts, God made sure that the poor- the aliens, widows, and orphans- were all invited to the feasts. — Margaret Feinberg

I couldn't believe it; my deepest darkest fantasy of a cute school girl slowly stripping in front of me was finally unbelievingly coming true! Furthermore, it wasn't just any school girl, but one from my school, that was the icing on the cake, or at least it should have been. Because, at the same time that my fantasy was becoming reality, I felt that I was being very badly cheated. Why couldn't it have been sixteen year old Heather Johnson or fifteen year old Pamela wade stripping before me, instead of the eight year old Ami Fujishiro? — Andrew James Pritchard

I observed an eighteen-year-old friend of one of our daughters talking to his mother on the telephone. As he hung up the phone in frustration he said, "She makes me so angry, she's always telling me what to think and where to go and how to do things." He was obviously upset and filled with anger. I told him he had one of two choices. He could either continue to practice being right, or practice being kind. If you insist on being right you will argue, get frustrated, angry, and your problem will persist with your mom, I explained. If you simply practice being kind, you can remind yourself that this is your mom, she's always been that way, she will very likely stay that way, but you are going to send her love instead of anger when she starts in with her routine. A simple statement of kindness such as, "That's a good point, Mom, I'll think about it," and you have a spiritual solution to your problem. — Wayne W. Dyer

One of the first times I ever performed in front of a big group of people was at my kindergarten graduation. I did, like, a Michael Jackson impersonation as, like, a five year old. I had the suit and blazer, the glove and the fedora, and I just performed a whole Michael Jackson song. I'm sure it was 'Smooth Criminal.' — Chance The Rapper

If one takes meaning into consideration, happiness might best be described as "a zest for life in all its complexity," as Sissela Bok writes in her book. To achieve it means to "attach our lives to something larger than ourselves." To be happy, one must do. It could be something as simple as teaching Sunday school or as grand as leading nonviolent protests. It could be as cerebral as seeking the cure for cancer or as physical as climbing mountains. It could be creating art. And it could be raising a child - my "best piece of poetrie," as Ben Jonson said in his elegy for his seven-year-old son. — Jennifer Senior

I don't have great thighs. I have very big breasts and a soft, fatty little tummy. And I've got back fat. People assume that I'm walking around in little spaghetti-strap dresses. It's insidious - Glam Jamie, the Perfect Jamie, the great figure, blah, blah, blah. And I don't want the unsuspecting 40-year-old women of the world to think that I've got it going on. It's such a fraud. And I'm the one perpetuating it. — Jamie Lee Curtis

When we sing, I am one of many, and the individual me evaporates. I am one of 23 university choir members. Not a professor. Not an American. Not a 46-year-old in the midst of twentysomethings. Not a woman trying to outpace the aspects of self she has yet to make oeace with. I am simply what we all are
another voice, a set of lungs, some vocal chords and someone who finds joy and comfort in singing. But when the music stops, so does the we. The union dissolves. The silence transforms first person plural into first person singular. — Laura Kelly

You must take a year off, one of these days, before you're old and tired and weighed down by responsibility. Go away somewhere, and read. Read all the important books. Educate yourself, then you'll see the world in a different way. — Helon Habila

In the darkest hour of winter, when the starlings had all flown away, Gretel Samuelson fell in love. It happened the way things are never supposed to happen in real life, like a sledgehammer, like a bolt from out of the blue. One minute she was a seventeen year-old senior in high school waiting for a Sicilian pizza to go; the next one she was someone whose whole world had exploded, leaving her adrift in the Milky Way, so far from earth she was walking on stars. — Alice Hoffman

More details coming out about Michael Jackson. It seems his 13-year-old accuser testified before a grand jury that Michael had seven locks on his bedroom door. See, what happened was whenever Michael would install one lock, the kid would grow an inch taller, and he'd have to put in another one, and then another one, and then another one. — Jay Leno

I want you back here now. I want you next to me now. I cannot believe that my family, your brother, all our friends, and an entire police force can't keep tabs on one twenty-six year old graphic designer who thinks he's fuckin' Batman.
Detective Sam Kage in A Matter Of Time (vol 2 or part 4) — Mary Calmes

Jerott?' said Lymond. 'What are you not saying?' His eyes, as the orderly cavalcade paced through the muddy streets, had not left that forceful aquiline face since they met. And Jerott, Philippa saw with disbelief, flushed. For a moment longer, the strict blue eyes studied him; and then Lymond laughed. 'She's an eighteen-year-old blonde of doubtful virginity? Or more frightful still, an eighteen-year-old blonde of unstained innocence? I shall control my impulses, Jerott, I promise you. I'm only going to throw her out if she looks like a troublemaker, or else so bloody helpless that we'll lose lives looking after her. Not everyone,' he said, in a wheeling turn which caught Philippa straining cravenly to hear, 'is one of Nature's Marco Polos like the Somerville offspring. — Dorothy Dunnett

I have learned that I will not change the world, Jesus will do that. I can however, change the world for one person. I can change the world for fourteen little girls and for four hundred schoolchildren and for a sick and dying grandmother and for a malnourished, neglected, abused five-year old. And if one persons sees the love of Christ in me, it is worth every minute. In fact, it is worth spending my life for. — Katie J. Davis

One day, Aaron Levie, the twenty-six-year-old CEO of Box, a well-funded new tech company, tells me it's really important to learn from what happened in the 1990s - which is why he has read a bunch of books about that era. — Dan Lyons

Ella is much younger. Maybe thirty. I don't know. And you certainly can't tell from the way she dresses. Middle of winter she finds a way to show her belly button. And she's got four hundred of these little elastic bands that can only pass for a skirt if you never move your legs. Top that with this unbelievable iridescent red hair and you've got one hot seventeen-year-old. At least that's what she thinks. — Francine Pascal

Daniel had one more question. He hated asking it, but her answer would be exceedingly important to him. The knot in his throat had returned, but he tried to speak around it. "Do you pity me, Story?" For the second time that night, she surprised him. "No. I pity the sixteen-year-old boy. Of course I do. How could I not?" Story rose from the windowsill and placed her hands on his chest. She waited until he met her eyes to continue. "But I don't pity the man. The man took a tragedy and used it to give himself purpose. The man is magnificent. — Tessa Bailey

Immortal strength - more a curse than a gift. I'd dented and folded every piece of silverware I'd touched for three days upon returning here, had tripped over my longer, faster legs so often that Alis had removed any irreplaceable valuables from my rooms (she'd been particularly grumpy about me knocking over a table with an eight-hundred-year-old vase), and had shattered not one, not two, but five glass doors merely by accidentally closing them too hard. Sighing — Sarah J. Maas

A boy in my house was strange enough. But a guy who was that comfortable in someone else's house, around a parent? A boy who knew how to chop vegetables? A boy who voluntarily helped with everything? Was he one of those adults masqerading as a teenager! Was he a narc or something? Maybe there was a big drug problem at my school and twenty-five-year-old Robbie had been sent in to fix it.
Except that he'd been around since kindergarten, so unless the cops planned way ahead, that was out of the question. — Kieran Scott

In 1976, I read a book by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss and knew immediately that I, too, could write a historical romance. It took me a year to complete the manuscript. I was a forty-year-old Scarborough housewife who knew no one in publishing. — Virginia Henley

The preoccupations of seventeen-year-old girls
their looks, their clothes, their social life
do not change very much from generation to generation. But in every generation there seem to be a few who make other choices. Amy was one of the few. — Elisabeth Elliot

She frowned, thinking of going down there and explaining herself all over again, reliving the horror of finding Mimi's body and trying not to think of how she'd looked when they'd dragged her up and out of the ravine. No sooner had she thought it than she heard Mimi's voice, chastising her over a year ago.

"You hide from life, Catherine. Even when you're in the middle of it, standing toe to toe with all the bad guys you bring in, you manage to keep an emotional distance. I understand why you do it, but ultimately, you're the one who will suffer. You're the one who's going to grow old alone."

Cat blinked back tears, remembering what she'd told her.

I won't be alone, Mimi. I'll always have you.

Obviously she had been wrong. — Sharon Sala

It's so ridiculous to see a golfer with a one foot putt and everybody is saying "Shhh" and not moving a muscle. Then we allow nineteen year-old kids to face a game-deciding free throw with seventeen thousand people yelling. — Al McGuire

If we're laying out a garden, planning one before the house, you know, and there you've a tree that's stood for centuries in the very spot ... Old and gnarled it may be, and yet you don't cut down the old fellow to make room for the flowerbeds, but lay out your beds so as to take advantage of the tree. You won't grow him again in a year ... — Leo Tolstoy

The thirteen-year-old boy's cheeks were flushed with the wine that his father, half as a joke, had forced upon him. He burrowed into the silken quilts and let his head fall back on the pillow, his breath warm and heavy. The tracery of blue veins under his close-cropped hair throbbed around his earlobes, and the skin was so extraordinarily transparent that one could almost see the fragile mechanism inside. Even in the half-light of the room, his lips were red. And the sounds of breathing that came from this boy, who looked as though he had never experienced anguish, seemed to be the mocking echo of a sad folksong. — Yukio Mishima

There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana. $7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven't even included the harm to young people. It's absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes. — Milton Friedman

I was always a big fan of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner's '2000-Year-Old Man' sketch. I think it's one of the biggest influences on the podcast, definitely. You'd never say Carl Reiner was the funniest dude on there, because he's just teeing it up, but he knows what questions to ask to lead to great improv. — Scott Aukerman

Each generation was a rehearsal of the one before, so that that family gradually formed the repetitive pattern of a Greek fret, interrupted only once in two centuries by a nine-year-old boy who had taken a look at his prospects, tied a string around his neck with a brick to the other end, and jumped from a footbridge into two feet of water. Courage aside, he had that family's tenacity of purpose, and drowned, a break in the pattern quickly obliterated by the calcimine of silence. — William Gaddis

She'd made the best decision of her life when she convinced the easy-going David that, yes, he really did want to take her on a date. One year later they were inseparable.
He would make a patient, persistent father. He clearly adored Eve, but he also refused to put up with any of her drama. They solved their problems in quiet, respectful voices. Even Eve's father had seemed convinced that Eve and David would be together until they were old and forgetful. — Debra Anastasia

Oh yes", said the old woman, "but I've heard these so-called stoves are by no means all they are supposed to be. I never saw a stove in my day, and yet never ailed a thing, at least as long as I could really be called alive, except for nettle rash one night when I was in my fifteenth year.. It was caused by some fresh fish that the boys used to catch in the lakes thereabouts."
The man did not answer for a while, but lay pondering the medical history of this incredible old creature who, without ever setting eyes on a stove, had suffered almost no ailments in the past sixty-five years. — Halldor Laxness

That I learned even as a three year-old that I see this world that is really a mess and I learned to say, this is not me. I am not the one that is messed up. It is out there. — Story Musgrave

Walter Mischel and his students exposed four-year-old children to a cruel dilemma. They were given a choice between a small reward (one Oreo), which they could have at any time, or a larger reward (two cookies) for which they had to wait 15 minutes under difficult conditions. — Daniel Kahneman

I was on a par with the Creator of the Universe there in the dark in the cocktail lounge. I shrunk the Universe to a ball exactly one light-year in diameter. I had it explode. I had it disperse itself again.
Ask me a question, any question. How old is the Universe? It is one half-second old, but that half-second has lasted one quintillion years so far. Who created it? Nobody created it. It has always been here. — Kurt Vonnegut

There were two books I remember changing my life as a introverted, bookish 14 year old. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand and The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. One was set in a fantastic world, populated by outlandish characters,tired prose, foul monsters, evil incarnate and a message about losing one's humanity. The other book was about hobbits. — Christopher Odell Homsley

IT (The country) IS HEADED TOWARD OVERSIMPLIFICATION. YOU WANT TO SEE A PRESIDENT OF THE FUTURE? TURN ON ANY TELEVISION ON ANY SUNDAY MORNING - FIND ONE OF THOSE HOLY ROLLERS: THAT'S HIM, THAT'S THE NEW MISTER PRESIDENT! AND DO YOU WANT TO SEE THE FUTURE OF ALL THOSE KIDS WHO ARE GOING TO FALL IN THE CRACKS OF THIS GREAT, BIG, SLOPPY SOCIETY OF OURS? I JUST MET HIM; HE'S A TALL, SKINNY, FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY NAMED "DICK." HE'S PRETTY SCARY. WHAT'S WRONG WITH HIM IS NOT UNLIKE WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE TV EVANGELIST - OUR FUTURE PRESIDENT. WHAT'S WRONG WITH BOTH OF THEM IS THAT THEY'RE SO SURE THEY'RE RIGHT! THAT'S PRETTY SCARY - THE FUTURE, I THINK, IS PRETTY SCARY. — John Irving

The concept of a troubled, lonely, middle-class, gay fifty-eight-year-old living alone in dusty squalor in a chocolate-box cottage in the heart of the Cotswolds was a hard one to grasp in the context of his sweaty, noisy, hectic, foreign, red-light existence. — Lisa Jewell

Yount, who was an 18-year-old shortstop when he met Uecker, and is one of Bob's closest friends, noticed immediately that the event was held in the afternoon with only a smattering of media members on hand. "God, this unbelievable," Yount said. "Fifty thousand empty seats. What a ceremony. — Bill Schroeder

I know I found his lips and let him caress me without realizing that I, too, was crying and didn't know why. That dawn, and all the ones that followed in the two weeks I spent with Julian, we made love to one another on the floor, never saying a word. Later, sitting in a cafe or strolling through the streets, I would look into his eyes and know, without any need to question him, that he still loved Penelope. I remember that during those days I learned to hate that seventeen-year-old girl (for Penelope was always seventeen to me) whom I had never met and who now haunted my dreams. I invented excuses for cabling Cabestany to prolong my stay. I no longer cared whether I lost my job or the grey existence I had left behind in Barcelona. I have often asked myself whether my life was so empty when I arrived in Paris that I fell into Julian's arms - like Irene Marceau's girls, who, despite themselves, craved for affection. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

It's been a harder book to write for personal reasons too. What gets me most are not the scary scientific studies about melting glaciers, the ones I used to avoid. It's the books I read to my two-year-old. Looking For a Moose is one of his favorites. It's about a bunch of kids that really, really, really want to see a moose. They search high and low - through a forest, a swamp, in brambly bushes and up a mountain, for "a long legged, bulgy nosed, branchy antlered moose." The joke is that there are moose hiding on each page. In the end, the animals all come out of hiding and the ecstatic kids proclaim: "We've never ever seen so many moose! — Naomi Klein

I guess I should explain. I'm not exactly your typical sixteen-year-old girl.
Oh, I seem normal enough, I guess. I don't do drugs, or drink, or smoke-well, okay, except for that one time Sleepy caught me. I don't have anything pierced, except my ears, and only once on each earlobe. I don't have any tattoos. I've never dyed my hair. Except for my boots and leather jacket, I don't wear an excessive amount of black. I don't even wear dark fingernail polish. All in all, I am a pretty normal, everyday, American teenage girl.
Except, of course, for the fact that I can talk to the dead. — Meg Cabot

Don't ever get old. With each year that passes, the old Viking idea of jumping off a cliff to one's death looks better and better. The only thing to hope for is that you get so senile that you think you're twenty years old again. That would be fun to relive. — Camilla Lackberg

I never read one hateful thing said about me by some 12 year old. So I got to live an actual life. And I've kept that mentality. Just because there's a hurricane going on around you doesn't mean you have to open the window and look at it. — Taylor Swift

Being gay and being a woman has one big thing in common, which is that we both become invisible after the age of 42. Who wants a gay 50-year-old? No one, let me tell you. — Rupert Everett

He [Alan Lomax] started right off trying to find people who could introduce folk songs to city people. He found a young actor named Burl Ives and said, "Burl, you know a lot of great country songs learned from your grandmother, don't you know people would love to hear them?" He put on radio programs. He persuaded CBS to dedicate "The School of the Air" for one year to American folk music. He'd get some old sailor to sing an old sea shanty with a cracked voice. Then he'd get me to sing it with my banjo. — Pete Seeger

I'll have you know I was wildly in love with Ford long before he was dangerous. No one truly loves like a fourteen-year-old girl. — Susan Mallery

From a memory deep inside her, so faint it only held sounds and slips of color, a tiny, three-year-old Azalea wailed, "Papa."
"Papa," said Azalea to the lifeless form of the King. The word was so forgein, it choked her throat. "Papa ... you can't leave us, Papa ... It would be very ... out of order-"
Bramble knelt opposite her, grasping the King's bandaged hand.
"She's-she's right, Papa," Bramble stuttered. "We have ... rules ... "
Clover fell to her knees and pressed her handkerchief to his chest. Blood soaked through.
"Papa," she whispered.
The girls knelt around the King, their skirts spead out like forlorn blossoms, swallowing , and whispering one word.
"Papa."
"Papa."
"Papa. — Heather Dixon

Now he laughs for real, cackling with the wicked innocence of the bright and easily bored. Staff Sergeant David Dime is a twenty-four-year-old college dropout from North Carolina who subscribes to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Maxim, Wired, Harper's, Fortune, and DicE Magazine, all of which he reads in addition to three or four books a week, mostly used textbooks on history and politics that his insanely hot sister sends from Chapel Hill. There are stories that he went to college on a golf scholarship, which he denies. That he was a star quarterback in high school, which he claims not to remember, though one day a football surfaced at FOB Viper, and Dime, caught up in the moment, perhaps, nostalgia triggering some long-dormant muscle memory, uncorked a sixty-yard spiral that sailed over Day's head into the base motor pool. — Ben Fountain

If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat. — Annie Dillard

When Debbie was fourteen, she felt "impressed by the Lord" to marry Ray Blackmore, the community leader. Debbie asked her father to share her divine impression with Prophet LeRoy Johnson, who would periodically travel to Bountiful from Short Creek to perform various religious duties. Because Debbie was lithe and beautiful, Uncle Roy approved of the match. A year later the prophet returned to Canada and married her to the ailing fifty-seven-year-old Blackmore. As his sixth wife, Debbie became a stepmother to Blackmore's thirty-one kids, most of whom were older than she was. And because he happened to be the father of Debbie's own stepmother, Mem, she unwittingly became a stepmother to her stepmother, and thus a step grandmother to herself. — Jon Krakauer

Nobody wants to hear that any aspect of my awesome life is bad. I get that. But there are days, maybe two or three times a year, when I get completely overwhelmed by my job and go to my office, lie on the floor, and cry for ten minutes. Then I think: Mindy, you have literally the best life in the world besides that hot lawyer who married George Clooney. This is what you dreamed about when you were a weird, determined little ten-year-old. There are more than a thousand people in one square mile of this studio who would kill to have this job. Get your ass up off the floor and go back into that writers' room, you weakling. Then I get up, pour myself a generous glass of whiskey and club soda, think about the sustained grit of my parents, and go back to work. — Mindy Kaling

Still, I wait. I wait with my heart aflutter. People pass in front of me, pass by in hordes. It isn't that one; it isn't that one. I hold my shopping bag, shivering as I wait intently. Please don't forget me. Don't laugh at a 20-year old girl who goes to a rendezvous at the station day after day and then returns home without success; please remember me and keep me in your heart. The name of the little station, I purposely won't tell you. Even without my telling it to you, you'll catch sight of me someday. — Osamu Dazai

Sole Alessandra Torre I've had a lot of firsts in the last three years. Today is a new one. First time throwing a three-year-old Birthday party, Hollywood Style. Too bad my sexier-than-sin husband is absolutely no help. And Cocky is in the pool. And Ben is having a panic attack. And Justin is feeding my child sugar at every opportunity. This is past the dirt, and more than just Hollywood. This is our life as Sole. — Alessandra Torre

Here in California, one candidate for governor is a 100-year-old woman. She's going door-to-door and asking one simple question - 'Do I live here?' — Craig Kilborn

And So This Is Christmas; And What Have We Done? Another Year Over; A New One Just Begun; And So Happy Christmas; I Hope You Have Fun; The Near And The Dear Ones; The Old And The Young. — John Lennon

I would sit up on top of the woodpile playing and singing at the top of my lungs. Sometimes I would take a tobacco stake and stick it in the cracks between the boards on the front porch. A tin can on top of the tobacco stake turned it into a microphone, and the porch became my stage. I used to perform for anybody or anything I could get to watch. The younger kids left in my care would become the unwilling audience for my latest show. A two-year-old's attention span is not very long. So there I would be in the middle of my act, thinking I was really something, and my audience would start crawling away. I was so desperate to perform that on more than one occasion I sang for the chickens and the pigs and ducks. They didn't applaud much, but with the aid of a little corn, they could be counted on to hang around for a while. — Dolly Parton

Have you ever heard a five-year-old recite the Pledge of Allegiance, Arthur? It's creepy as hell. Their enunciation is perfect, but they have no idea what kind of promise they're making, of what's being called for. No one tells you until later that breaking your words amounts to treason. No one tells you until later that you can't take it back. I was having my own treasonous thoughts as I drove. They were half formed, but went a little like this: asking something like that from a person ought not to be allowed. — Alyson Foster

My mom was sitting at the kitchen table. She'd set her coffee down, making a noise that made me look her way. I'd begun to notice her less and less often, like her colors were fading and blending in with walls. She was shrinking. Or maybe her sphere of influence in the family was shrinking. My dad glanced at her, too, and then wrote something on a napkin.
He slid it across the counter to me - Don't worry. Come home in one piece. Have fun and act like a sixteen-year-old for a change. — Laura Anderson Kurk

It is difficult not to believe that the next year will be better than the old one! And this illusion is not wrong. Future is always good, no matter what happens. It will always give us what we need and what we want in secret. It will always bless us with right gifts. Thus in a deeper sense our belief in the New Year cannot deceive us. — Kersti Bergroth

My parents grew that small business from one 18-year-old guarding a bingo to more than 125 employees in three states. And sure, there was help along the way. But my parents took the risk. They stood up. And you better believe they built it. — Susana Martinez

I did it because I stood a better chance of surviving with them than without them. Not because I have any personal affinity for either one. I think your brother-in-law is a dolt personally, and BT was just your husband's lackey. Without Mike directing him, he is as unsure of himself as an eighteen-year-old virgin with a hooker. Now Michael I miss, that was a man that could get out of a jam, smart enough to know what to do and dumb enough to do it himself. — Mark Tufo

FROM a six-year-old:
Told by a well-meaning friend, 'Alex, do you know what the one thing is that the more you give, the more you get back? It's love, Alex.'
To which Alex asked, 'What about pain? — Susan Hamilton

I hate my country. There are so many rich people who don't share their shit. They're like spoiled little ten-year-old bullies on the playground. They hog the monkey bars and the slide and the seesaw. And if you complain even a little bit, if you try to get just one spin on the merry-go-round, the bullies beat the shit out of you. — Sherman Alexie

On our flight back from Arizona where we adopted our daughter three years after our ungreen one-headed son a stewardess ... paused to to adore the little girl my wife was holding. The woman was very attractive and seemed happy and easy with herself - confident enough to say to my wife 'Well congratulations and my don't you look terrific too.' My wife said 'Well we've just adopted her.' And the stewardess said 'How wonderful Congratulations again I was adopted too.' Happily the enthusiastic remark was not lost on our three-year-old boy nor was it lost on him that in Pheonix we had stayed in a close to luxurious resort hotel. He didn't know or care about the dreary heavy rain that fell in Atlanta when he came into our lives - all he knew about adoption at this point really was that it involved a warm whirpool tub cornucopian buffet breakfasts and a fascinating differently private-partsed baby. — Daniel Menaker

He shakes his head with a slow smile. You'd better be right. If the phone rings, I'm unpluggining it, I swear to God-"
You'd do that to your five-year-old sister?" I gasp in mock outrage.
For one whole night alone? Jesus, Maya, I'd sell her to the gypsies! — Tabitha Suzuma

The red haired waitress arrived with their drinks, dancing about the table as she placed their orders in front of them. "Hiya, keeds. Peachy place, ain't it?" Before anyone could respond, she kicked her heels in the air and flitted off again.
Waldo lit up a cigarette and tasted his drink. "Listen, I don't think we ought to stay here very long...."
"No shit, Sherlock!" Brisbane chortled. "But first I want to have a little fun. I think I'm gonna talk to some of these guys."
The fredneck left the table and walked over to a group of five men, all of them clad in the old baseball uniforms that were apparently quite popular at The One Year Wonder And All-Around Oddity Bar. They were huddled together on one side of the bar, and Brisbane broke into their conversation with a burst of fredneck chutzpah. — Donald Jeffries

the company - that at the eleventh hour an old ship with a lower standard of speed had been put on in place of the vessel in which I had taken my passage. America was roasting, England might very well be stuffy, and a slow passage (which at that season of the year would probably also be a fine one) was a guarantee of ten or twelve days of fresh air. I strolled down — Henry James

They had a year of joy, twelve months of the strange heaven which the salmon know on beds of river shingle, under the gin-clear water. For twenty-four years they were guilty, but this first year was the only one which seemed like happiness. Looking back on it, when they were old, they did not remember that in this year it had ever rained or frozen. The four seasons were coloured like the edge of a rose petal for them. — T.H. White

At twenty-one, Mark had been long and leanly muscled, not a spare inch on him. Rainey's gaze ran down his thirty-four-year-old body and she had to admit he was even better now. In fact, the only way to improve on that body would be to dip it into chocolate. — Jill Shalvis

Little Bit.
The loathsome nickname proved just how hopeless her situation had been, how pathetic, but neither the name nor the glaring age difference had deterred her heart, because with one playful wink and one slow smile, young Arabella had been a goner.
Sadly, twenty-two-year-old Ella wasn't that much better. — Rachel Harris

In fact, once when I imprinted on a young lady's lips a chaste and fatherly kiss for about five minutes, I stopped and said, sorrowfully, "Wouldn't you rather be kissed by a twenty-one-year-old boy?"
She frowned and said, "Of course not. If you'd ever been kissed by a twenty-one-year-old boy you'd know better than to ask."
Remember that. In any direct competition, the old man is bound to win and the young man knows it. — Isaac Asimov

A 5'5", 182-pound, 43-year-old man wearing khaki shorts and a UCLA sweatshirt runs to Nicolas Cage in a manner he will spend the rest of the night describing to his slightly bored but equally boring date as "ambushing." No one else is on the street and Nicolas Cage is unable to avoid the man, who wants a picture with his "brand new Droid." As the man, who actually seems to be vibrating and hovering in an almost hummingbird-like way, adjusts his stance for the third attempt at a picture his crotch lightly brushes Nicolas Cage's upper thigh, causing his face to shift from "bemused resignation" to, strangely, "serene bliss," for what will become the man's inaugural Facebook profile picture. — Megan Boyle

I think I should learn to get along better with people," he explained to Miss Benson one day, when she came upon him in the corridor of the literature building and asked what he was doing wearing a fraternity pledge pin (wearing it on the chest of the new V-neck pullover in which his mother said he looked so collegiate). Miss Benson's response to his proposed scheme for self-improvement was at once so profound and so simply put that Zuckerman went around for days repeating the simple interrogative sentence to himself; like Of Times and the River, it verified something he had known in his bones all along, but in which he could not placed his faith until it had been articulated by someone of indisputable moral prestige and purity : "Why," Caroline Benson asked the seventeen-year-old boy, "should you want to learn a thing like that? — Philip Roth

Their world will eat at you," Mab said. "Strip you away bit by bit. Cut off from the Nevernever, you will not survive. Whether it takes one mortal year or a thousand, you will gradually fade away, until you simply cease to exist." Mab stepped closer, pointing at me with the scepter. "She will die, Ash. She is only human. She will grow old, wither and die, and her soul will flee to a place you cannot follow. And then, you will be left to wander the mortal world alone, until you yourself are only a memory.And after that-" the queen opened her empty fist "-nothing. Forever. — Julie Kagawa

Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store. — Charles Krauthammer

Admiral Dahlgren's twenty-one-year-old son, Ulric, had lost a leg at Gettysburg. When he appeared at a Washington party, he was surrounded by pretty girls. They stayed by his side all night, refusing to dance, in tribute to the handsome colonel who had been known as an expert waltzer. — Doris Kearns Goodwin