Quotes & Sayings About After All These Years

She couldn't quite believe it, even after all these years. It was a phenomenon of stupendous and unjustifiably useless extravagance. Yet here it lay, soft and powdery, edibly pure. — Michel Faber

He silenced the thought, already itching to get inside her, his tongue, or his fingers, or his cock. After all these years of wanting, he would gladly accept whatever access to her body she gave him. He just wanted in. — Amber Belldene

The Americas were a great laboratory of evolutionary experimentation, a place where animals and plants unknown in Africa and Asia had evolved and thrived. But no longer. Within 2,000 years of the Sapiens' arrival, most of these unique species were gone. According to current estimates, within that short interval, North America lost thirty-four out of its forty-seven genera of large mammals. South America lost fifty out of sixty. The sabre-tooth cats, after flourishing for more than 30 million years, disappeared, and so did the giant ground sloths, the oversized lions, native American horses, native American camels, the giant rodents and the mammoths. Thousands of species of smaller mammals, reptiles, birds and even insects and parasites also became extinct (when the mammoths died out, all species of mammoth ticks followed them to oblivion). — Yuval Noah Harari

-I gave you your life.
-You gave me chains.
-I thought you would have learned by now after all these years; you cannot have one without the other. — Patrick Tatopoulos

All these souls, after they have passed away a thousand years, are summoned by the divine ones in great array, to the lethean river ... In this way they become forgetful of the former earthlife, and re-visit the vaulted realms of the world, willing to return again into living bodies. — Virgil

They stopped at one of these half-tank houses ... where they were greeted by a young girl, who herself seemed like no more than a child.
- We have come to enquire after Absalom ... Have you heard nothing from him?
Nothing, she said.
When will he return? he asked.
I do not know, she said.
Will he ever return? he asked, indifferently, carelessly.
I do not know she said. She said it tonelessly, hopelessly, as one who is used to waiting, to desertion. She said it as one who expects nothing from her seventy years upon the earth. No rebellion will come out of her, no demands, no fierceness. Nothing will come out of her at all save the children of men who will use her, leave her, forget her. — Alan Paton

And yet now, after all these years, I find that it doesn't matter whether I filmed it or not, because we lose our children not once but over and over again. That loss, I can feel it now, yesterday, tomorrow, every minute, and I promise you, I do. — Neil Gordon

As Sloan approached the door, Paul Lyons lifted his eyes to watch her leave. He found himself wondering why after all these years they couldn't manage to get along for a lousy twenty minutes. Perhaps it was the result of their inability to compromise - to give each other the benefit of the doubt. Or maybe they'd both simply lost the ability to trust another human being and believe anything good could come of this world. — Kaylin McFarren

He took a deep breath. "I'm a weak man, Navani. I really am. If I give myself a few feet of leeway, I burst through all of my prohibitions. The momentum of following the Codes these years after Gavilar's death is what keeps me strong. If I let a few cracks into that armor, I might return to the — Brandon Sanderson

And speaking of options ,these kids [the ones who attend elite universities] have all been told that theirs are limitless. Once you commit to something, though, that ceases to be true. A former student sent me an essay he wrote, a few years after college, called "The Paradox of Potential." Yale students, he said, are like stem cells. They can be anything in the world, so they try to delay for as long as possible the moment when they have to become just one thing in particular. Possibility, paradoxically, becomes limitation. — William Deresiewicz

As for what, exactly, was said about the future, all I can say is that, speaking as indirectly as we were, transferred between us was only a feeling, or a shift in feeling, something like the sense of solid ground underfoot after walking for days or even months on spongy bog, a shift that I would be hard pressed, both then and now, but especially now, all these years later, to put into words. — Nicole Krauss

Not long after the book came out I found myself being driven to a meeting
by a professor of electrical engineering in the graduate school I of MIT. He said that after reading the book he realized that his graduate students were using on him, and had used for the ten years and more he had been teaching there, all the evasive strategies I described in the book - mumble, guess-and-look, take a wild guess and see what happens, get the teacher to answer his own questions, etc.
But as I later realized, these are the games that all humans play when others
are sitting in judgment on them. — John Holt

The most famous of these is the Law of Jubilee: a law that stipulated that all debts would be automatically cancelled "in the Sabbath year" (that is, after seven years had passed), and that all who languished in bondage owing to such debts would be released. — David Graeber

It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must he laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement they can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn to take their places at the now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day. For them, the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a treadmill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces them after death. They lacked the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences. — Hunter S. Thompson

I forget myself sometimes, but then I look up, as I am looking up now, and I see in my mind's eye a sheild, strangely changed by a rich encrusting of jewel-like barnacles and cold-water coral, with an eight foot tooth sticking right out of the middle of it. I reach out and the edge of that tooth is still so bitingly sharp after all these years that just a gentle brush with the fingers might send a rain of blood down on these pages. And I bend my head, not too close, and I am sure I can hear, very faintly:
Once I set the sea alight
With a single fiery breath ...
Once I was so mighty that I thought
My name was Death ...
Sing out loud until you're eaten,
Song of melancholy blisss,
For the mighty and the middling
All shall come to THIS ...
The Supper is still singing. — Cressida Cowell

After two years' absence she finally returned to chilly Europe, a trifle weary, a trifle sad, disgusted by our banal entertainments, our shrunken landscapes, our impoverished lovemaking. Her soul had remained over there, among the gigantic, poisonous flowers. She missed the mystery of old temples and the ardor of a sky blazing with fever, sensuality and death. The better to relive all these magnificent, raging memories, she became a recluse, spending entire days lying about on tiger skins, playing with those pretty Nepalese knives 'which dissipate one's dreams'. — Octave Mirbeau

It's such a relief after all these years to learn that you recovered from your fright," he said in a low voice, giving my hand a squeeze, "and that you grew up so pretty!"
"Were you worried?" I asked, touched.
"Yes. What were you, eleven? Twelve? At that age we're all gawky, and the outcome is always in doubt. — Rachel Hartman

With every lecture, you're forced to look again at every choice you've made
over the lesson-by-lesson chain of your entire life. And after all these years, you see how little you have to work with, how limited your life and education have been. How scant was your courage and curiosity. Not to mention your expectations. — Chuck Palahniuk

How many more years will our educators continue to lecture us on the evils of whipping children until they bring home high grades? Year after year we listen to these fellows tell us that it is not the grade that counts but the development of the child's personality. After the lecture they go back to all the best schools and reject our children because they have C averages. — Russell Baker

After referees negated a line change that led to Tampa Bay"s winning goal in the Stanley Cup Playoffs: After all these years in the league, am I that stupid that I would put four forwards and one defenseman in a 3-3 tie, in the third period? I think everybody that knows me here knows I"m not that stupid. I might be halfway stupid, but not that stupid. — Pat Burns

We could endlessly reminisce, live in the past to an unhealthy degree, then politely kill each other some winter night before bedtime, stirring poison into our cups of whiskey-spiked chamomile tea, wearing party hats. Then, nervous about our double homicide, we could lie in bed together, holding hands again, frightened and waiting, still wondering, after all these years, if we even believed in our own souls. — Timothy Schaffert

She's thinking that what she's been doing all these years isn't what she wants to do anymore. Sometimes music flows to her and from her, but sometimes it doesn't. Lately that happens more and more, and she can't seem to find what she had and what made her special. But she can't tell her father because he'd be so disappointed in her, so disappointed to find out she's not extraordinary after all. — Leila Cobo

They had come all at once, scientists being pack animals. Their leader was a nice man named Carlos, who had started dating Cecil, the presenter of the local radio station, after a near-death experience a few years before involving a brutal attack from a tiny civilization living under lane 5 of the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex. It was an ordinary enough way to begin a relationship, as these things go. — Joseph Fink

Well, everyone and their grandmother knows she's still
banging Charles after all these years - "
"Like a screen in a tornado. Sure. — Marisha Pessl

The farmer after sacrificing pleasure, taste, freedom, thought, love, to his work, turns out often a bankrupt, like the merchant.This result might well seem astounding. All this drudgery, from cockcrowing to starlight, for all these years, to end in mortgages and the auctioneer's flag, and removing from bad to worse. It is time to have the thing looked into, and with a sifting criticism ascertained who is the fool. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I started doing commercials in 2008 right after we released Death Race, and the reason was that I spent two years prepping Death Race and building all these custom rigs to shoot cars in the most dynamic and exciting way. — Paul W. S. Anderson

* She said, why don't we both just sleep on it tonight
And I believe, in the morning you'll begin to see the light
And then she kissed me and I realized she probably was right
There must be fifty ways to leave your lover, fifty ways to leave your lover
Paul Simon, Still Crazy After All These Years (1975), 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover
First thing I remember when you came into my life
I said I wanna get that girl, no matter what I do
Well I guess I've been in love before and once or twice have been on the floor
But I've never loved no-one the way that I love you. — Paul Simon

Before we invented civilization our ancestors lived mainly in the open out under the sky. Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal entertainment we watched the stars. There were practical calendar reasons of course but there was more to it than that. Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away. — Carl Sagan

The leaky-replacement hypothesis - assuming for the moment that it's correct - provides the strongest possible evidence for the closeness of Neanderthals and modern humans. The two may or may not have fallen in love; still, they made love. Their hybrid children may or may not have been regarded as monsters; nevertheless someone - perhaps Neanderthals at first, perhaps humans - cared for them. Some of these hybrids survived to have kids of their own, who, in turn, had kids, and so on up to the present day. Even now, at least thirty thousand years after the fact, the signal is discernible: all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA. One — Elizabeth Kolbert

The pretty girls get all the good stuff. Oh, God. So not true. I unlearned this after years of coaching beautiful clients. Yes, these lovelies get preferential treatment in most life scenarios, but there's a catch: While everyone's looking at them, virtually no one sees them. — Martha Beck

I would just like to say that after all these years of heavy drinking, bright lights and late nights, I still don't need glasses. I drink right out of the bottle. — David Lee Roth

No matter what I attempt, even if it's the most simple of tasks, it always ends in failure. Unfortunately, I find that my life is one big regret after another. Yet, after all these years, I still don't know when to give up. Is it my fault to keep trying when the results are always the same? Is it impossible for me to make things right? Even if I'd try to give up, I don't think I could. It's not in my nature to sumbit in the face of disappointment. In the end, I guess I'm just a glutton for punishment. I really am an idiot ... — Katsura Hoshino

During World War II, a few years after Norma Jeane's time in an orphanage, thousands of children were evacuated from the air raids and poor rations of London during the Blitz, and placed with volunteer families or group homes in the English countryside or even in other countries. It was only postwar studies comparing these children to others left behind that opened the eyes of many experts to the damage caused by emotional neglect. In spite of living in bombed-out ruins and constant fear of attack, the children who had been left with their mothers and families tended to fare better than those who had been evacuated to physical safety. Emotional security, continuity, a sense of being loved unconditionally for oneself - all those turn out to be as important to a child's development as all but the most basic food and shelter. — Gloria Steinem

Eric, I'm going to pay you back for leaving me." She smoothed her dress. "You understand?" "Yes," he said, and walked into the kitchen. "I'll devote my life to it," Kathy said, from the bedroom. "Now I have a reason for living. It's wonderful to have a purpose at last; it's thrilling. After all these pointless ugly years with you. God, it's like being born all over again." "Lots of luck," he said. — Philip K. Dick

The husband, on his deathbed, called over his wife and said, "One month after I die, I want you to marry Larry." "Larry? But he is your enemy!" "Yes, I know that. I've suffered all these years, so let him suffer now. — Various

He still, all these years later, shines brighter to me than other people. Even after I got over him, I was never able to extinguish the fire completely, as if it's a pilot light that will remain small and controlled, but very much alive. — Taylor Jenkins Reid

You don't know what it's been like all these years, seeing things that are invisible to everybody else. I knew I wasn't crazy, I knew it, but the rest of the world thought I was, and after a while even I started to wonder, you know? — C.A. Gray

I have realized after all these years that a city that has a good quality of life attracts jobs. People don't want to invest in places if there is no quality of life. — Jaime Lerner

Goddamn you. How can you still make me feel this way after all these years? Damn you for leaving me! And damn you for coming back like this, just when I thought you were gone forever and I might finally be able to forget you. — Lara Adrian

If a little hill of happiness would satisfy Chris, good for him. But
after all these years of striving, hoping, dreaming, longing-I wanted a
mountain high! A hill wasn't enough. — V.C. Andrews

After the birth of printing books became widespread. Hence everyone throughout Europe devoted himself to the study of literature ... Every year, especially since 1563, the number of writings published in every field is greater than all those produced in the past thousand years. The Paracelsians have created medicine anew and the Copernicans have created astronomy anew. I really believe that at last the world is alive, indeed seething, and that the stimuli of these remarkable conjunctions did not act in vain. — Johannes Kepler

I know how your visit and my strange behaviour must have affected you," he wrote. " The sight of your face after all these years completely unnerved me. I could not think, I could not speak. It was as if all my dreams of freedom, the whole world of the living, were concentrated in the shiny little trinket that was dangling from your watch-chain. I couldn't take my eyes off it, I couldn't keep my hand from playing with it. It absorbed my whole being. And all the time I felt how nervous you were at my silence, and I couldn't utter a word. — Emma Goldman

When it's silent, your brain fills in the music," Decker told him. "After all these years, I think I've finally learned how to listen. — Faye Kellerman

God forgive her, but underneath the smiles and the good job and the great family, she was tired. Desperately tired. Tired to the point of breaking. In the last few years the exhaustion had grown, rising up like a specter to knock on her door. No one knew, she hadn't told even Kit, but in the past year she'd begun to question her entire existence. Why was she even here? What was life? Was she even necessary?
Maybe all women had these thoughts. Maybe all women felt tired. But the thoughts confused her. Good women weren't supposed to have doubts. Good women were supposed to be strong and selfless. Instead Meg felt needy and afraid. What if there was no reward for all the hard work? What if life was just one sacrifice after another? — Jane Porter

We have travelled this world to a bittersweet love song:
Take my hand and lets carry on ...
Do my eyes deceive me or do you grow more wonderful each day?
After all these years of love you're more fantastic today than the day we met.
And ... you were quite fantastic then ...
I Love you still — Michelle Geaney

My radar, after all these years of sanity, is still off when it comes to what people do or don't mean. — Emma Forrest

I like things to be orderly. For seven years I ate at Bob's Big Boy. I would go at 2:30, after the lunch rush. I ate a chocolate shake and four, five, six, seven cups of coffee-with lots of sugar. And there's lots of sugar in that chocolate shake. It's a thick shake. In a silver goblet. I would get a rush from all this sugar, and I would get so many ideas! I would write them on these napkins. It was like I had a desk with paper. All I had to do was remember to bring my pen, but a waitress would give me one if I remembered to return it at the end of my stay. I got a lot of ideas at Bob's. — David

And now here I am, suddenly, after all these years, home. I am not exactly the black sheep of my family, but it is not like I am grazing in pastels. Getting — George Hodgman

THINGS WOULD HAVE TURNED out better if she had lived. As it was, she died when I was a kid; and though everything that's happened to me since then is thoroughly my own fault, still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life. Her death the dividing mark: Before and After. And though it's a bleak thing to admit all these years later, still I've never met anyone who made me feel loved the way she did. Everything came alive in her company; she cast a charmed theatrical light about her so that to see anything through her eyes was to see it in brighter colors than ordinary — Donna Tartt

It was a matter of not seeing the woods for the trees. Glorious songs have been in Ireland forever, but a lot of these were so popular they were sung only by drunken men at weddings. They didn't have any regard for the song at all. So, I picked out 14 songs that I had grown up with, songs with great melodies. After 35 years as a songwriter, I appreciate the value of a good melody because I know how hard it is to write one. So I presented them in a new way, with piano, keyboards, strings, and a contemporary rhythm section. I just treated the melody with a bit of dignity and a bit of style. — Phil Coulter

And if anger and fear could persist - then also, of course, stronger emotions could as well, such as love. Was that what drew some people back to reincarnate within their own families? Was that what caused some children to remember their past connections? And if so, then perhaps this phenomenon, these children's memories he had studied so carefully, was not against the laws of nature, after all. Perhaps it was the foundational law of nature that they were proving, what he'd been documenting and analyzing for over thirty years without knowing it: the force of love. He shook his head. His brain was going soft, maybe. Or maybe not. He'd kept so many of these questions at bay all these years, and now they whirled around him, touching him with something like awe, on their way to someplace else. — Sharon Guskin

People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two loves, but this, too, was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. Before the world existed, before it was populated, and before there were wars and jobs and colleges and movies and clothes and opinions and foreign travel
before all of these things there had been only one person, Zora, and only one place: a tent in the living room made from chairs and bed-sheets. After a few years, Levi arrived; space was made for him; it was as if he had always been. Looking at them both now, Jerome found himself in their finger joints and neat conch ears, in their long legs and wild curls. He heard himself in their partial lisps caused by puffy tongues vibrating against slightly noticeable buckteeth. He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away. — Zadie Smith

I love to just stare at my wife; she is the most beautiful woman I have ever laid my eyes on. After all of these years, her smile still does something special to my heart. — Delano Johnson

No one understands me better and no one can make me laugh the way Bill does. Even after all these years, he is still the most interesting, energizing and fully alive person I have ever met. — Hillary Clinton

You cannot represent cool. You've got to be cool. You've got to be authentic. I think, after all these years, that is how I define cool. It is being authentic. That is powerful. — Henry Winkler

In all these years we've been together," he said, "I don't think I know an important part of you. You keep secrets inside you. You hide. It's as though I've never seen you naked, and I've had to imagine what you look like behind the drapes."

"I'm not consciously hiding anything." After Ruth said that, she wondered whether it was true. Then again, who revealed everything - the irritations, the fears? How tiresome that would be. What did he mean by secrets?

"I want us to be intimate. I want to know what you want. Not just with us, but from life. What makes you happiest? Are you doing what you want to do? — Amy Tan

Oh, I'm good. Seriously, after all these years, you'd think I would stop amazing myself. But here I am, still doing it. — James Dashner

Every now and then, I need a little spark of inspiration. It could be from reading (a novel, poetry, story, news article, a blog) or it could be attending an event (play, musical performance, poetry reading, writers conference). Something to wake up the drowsy Artist that lives within. For the past seven months, I have done all of these things and I noticed that my Artist has been up writing articles, a children's story, and most recently, working on new poems. After several years of hibernation, it is good to see my Artist so active. I must continue to give her a jolt to inspire her to do much more. — Sandra Proto

The townspeople thrived from these impermanent relationships, which were in their own way pure: the exchange of money for goods, a pleasant farewell, the assurance that neither party would see the other again. After all, what are most relationships in life but exactly this, though stretched flabbily over years and generations? — Hanya Yanagihara

Being nearly four years old, she was certainly a child: and children are human (if one allows the term "human" a wide sense): but she had not altogether ceased to be a baby: and babies are of course not human
they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes: the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates.
In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind.
It is true that they look human
but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys.
Subconsciously, too, every one recognizes they are animals
why else do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling the human, as they would at a praying mantis? If the baby was only a less-developed man, there would be nothing funny in it, surely. — Richard Hughes

I'm moving on. I should have made that clear when I made the announcement. I guess I wasn't clear. If people think you're leaving a show after all these years, you might be retiring. So I understand where they're coming from, but I should have impressed the fact that I hope I'm just moving on right now. — Regis Philbin

And in the flush of the first few days of joy I confidently tell myself (not expecting what I'll do in three weeks only) 'no more dissipation, it's time for me to quietly watch the world and even enjoy it, first in woods like these, then just calmly walk and talk among people of the world, no booze, no drugs, no binges, no bouts with beatniks and drunks and junkies and everybody, no more I ask myself the question O why is God torturing me, that's it, be a loner, travel, talk to waiters, walk around, no more self-imposed agony ... it's time to think and watch and keep concentrated on the fact that after all this whole surface of the world as we know it now will be covered with the silt of a billion years in time ... Yay, for this, more aloneness — Jack Kerouac

Oh God, Frankie, I breathe in rhythm with that man. You think that's not my flesh and blood after all these years? — Melina Marchetta

I still get the feeling I got when I started, that's why I'm still doing it after all these years, I still get that full adrenalin rush before I compete. — Mark Occhilupo

After all these years, I'm finally into soccer. The World Cup is on, and my band is an international group - they're all around me, cheering in the hotel bars. — Art Garfunkel

Yes, it was love at first sight. I feel that after all these years, I have finally found my soul mate. — Barbara Hershey

The first thing I did when I got inside was turn on the kitchen light. Then I moved to the table, putting my dad's iPod on the speaker dock, and a Bob Dylan song came on, the notes familiar. I went into the living room, hitting the switch there, then down the hallway to my room, where I did the same. It was amazing what a little noise and brightness could do to a house and a life, how much the smallest bit of each could change everything. After all these years of just passing through, I was beginning to finally feel at home. — Sarah Dessen

My first and foremost goal when I joined the Yankees was to win the world championship. Certainly, it's been a long road and very difficult journey. But I'm just happy that after all these years we were able to win and reach the goal that I had come here for. — Hideki Matsui

She had been ready to love this man from the moment she first saw him. In all these years, that had never changed. They'd hurt each other, let each other down, and yet, here they were after everything, together. She needed him now, needed him to remind her that she was live, that she wasn't alone, that she hadn't lost everything. — Kristin Hannah

When I thought you'd died - "
"Don't say it," she choked out. "You don't have to relive that."
"No," he said. "I do. 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. I don't know how my mother did it."
"She had her children," Kate said. "She couldn't leave you."
"I know," he whispered, "but the pain she must have endured ... "
"I think the human heart must be stronger than we could ever imagine."
Anthony stared at her for a long moment, his eyes locking with hers until he felt they must be one person. Then, with a shaking hand, he cupped the back of her head and leaned down to kiss her. His lips worshiped hers, offering her every ounce of love and devotion and reverence and prayer that he felt in his soul.
-Anthony & Kate — Julia Quinn

People break down after a couple of hours. All the defenses go down, and there's a kind of communication that if I spent 20 years in a living room with one of these people, I would never, never know as much about them as I do in that one day. — Lee Grant

She says to me, but were we ever intimate? How intimate were we really? Sure, there were the ordinary familiarity-type things - our bodies, our bodily discharges and stains and seepages, an encyclopedic knowledge of each other's family grudges, knowledge of each other's early school yard slights, our dietary peccadilloes, our tv remote control channel-changing styles. And yet ...
And yet?
And yet in the end did we ever really give each other completely to the other? Do either of us even know how to really share ourselves? Imagine the house is on fire and I reach to save one thing - what is it? Do you know? Imagine that I am drowning and I reach within myself to save that one memory which is me - what is it? Do you know? What things would either of us reach for? Neither of us know. After all these years we just wouldn't know. — Douglas Coupland

Tonight the song you always despised strides from the jukebox full-bodied and you hear the lyrics for the first time, understand the lyrics for the first time after all these years. This new you with an older soul. Now it's your favorite. All this time singing the wrong words. — Colson Whitehead

After a burglary of all her most valued and treasured possessions, Winston Churchill's aging mother wrote: "That burglar relieved me of an obsession. For years, I've had to take houses big enough to hold all these bibelots. I am almost grateful to him." — Anne Sebba

Every time I walk down one of those red carpets, you think I'd be used to it after all these years, but it's like it's happening for the first time. — Jeff Bridges

Small things such as this have saved me: how much I love my mother - even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours. You are not grieving your son's death because his death was ugly and unfair. You're grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death. — Cheryl Strayed

I can't afford to step away from acting, but the one thing I've learnt after all these years is that I don't fit in. It's very difficult to be at the mercy of other people's whims and visions. — Paddy Considine

I am often asked what keeps me going after all these years. I think it is the realization that there is no final struggle. Whether you win or lose, each struggle brings forth new contradictions, new and more challenging questions. As Alice Walker put it in one of my favorite poems: I must love the questions themselves as Rilke said like locked rooms full of treasures to which my blind and groping key does not yet fit.1 — Grace Lee Boggs

Today I introduced myself to my very own Heart,
In silent agony, after all these years it bled apart. — Ankita Singhal

Perhaps the most remarkable thing I found about the Bible was how flexible it is. Here we have a book written 3,000 years ago, with bizarre stories, peculiar laws, erratic deity, and yet we are able - through argument, selective reading, and desire - to find a powerful framework of laws and moral reasoning that have built a very successful society. So this Bible, for all its oddities and flaws, serves us beautifully after all these years. — David Plotz

And you, CONSTANT READER. Thank God you're still there after all these years. If you're having fun, I am, too. — Stephen King

And the purple parted before it, snapping back like skin after a slash, and what it let out wasn't blood but light: amazing orange light that filled her heart and mind with a terrible mixture of joy, terror, and sorrow. No wonder she had repressed this memory all these years. It was too much. Far too much. The light seemed to give the fading air of evening a silken texture, and the cry of a bird struck her ear like a pebble made of glass. A cap of breeze filled her nostrils with a hundred exotic perfumes: frangipani, bougainvillea, dusty roses, and oh dear God, night-blooming cereus ... And rising above one horizon came the orange mansion of the moon, bloated and burning cold, while the sun sank below the other, boiling in a crimson house of fire. She thought that mixture of furious light would kill her with its beauty. — Stephen King

After all these years, he couldn't believe he'd recognized her so instantly. He prayed that she wouldn't recognize him, but as her eyes widened, he knew she had.
"Marcos?" she breathed.
And his worst nightmare came true. His cover was blown. — Elizabeth Heiter

Dubai was so special to me, Javi. You're special to me."
"Being close to you like this after all these years ... The way you make me feel ... I want to get closer to you, and that scares me. — Pamela Clare

After all these years, the heaviest thing isn't the number on the scale but the weight of the shame I've carried all these years
too big, too big, too big. — Shauna Niequist

After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line. — Tom Stoppard

As a young man you don't notice at all that you were, after all, badly affected. For years afterwards, at least ten years, I kept getting these dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, along passages I could hardly get through. — Otto Dix

He kisses her, and she knows, somehow, that he is asking for help, for an end to the sadness they are causing one another. Asking because, after all these years together, it is the only thing that might save them. — Madeleine Thien

God is different to us now, after all these years in Africa. More spirit than ever before, and more internal. Most people think he has to look like something or someone- a roofleaf or Christ- but we don't. And not being tied to what God looks like, frees us. — Alice Walker

After all these years, I still get nervous in front of people. I can't help it. I just, you know, I want it to be a good show, and I want people to get their money's worth. — Robin Zander

How much courage does it take to fire up your tractor and plow under a crop you spent six or seven years growing? How much courage to go on and do that after you've spent all that time finding out how to prepare the soil and when to plant and how much to water and when to reap? How much to just say, I have to quit these peas. Peas are no good for me, I better try corn or beans. — Stephen King

After all these years, it's still amazing what Obama is allowed to get away with. He says low gas prices in 2009 were caused by a terrible economy, but then claims that the lower number of illegal aliens crossing the border is because of his border policies, not the same lousy economy. — Howie Carr

I think I've far exceeded what I ever thought I could possibly do. I'm almost shocked that I'm still around after all of these years ... and always grateful that I get another turn to do something. — Billy Crystal

I try to stay in shape, I work out in the gym, take my vitamins every day, and I guess maybe I have some good genes, but lately I've been feeling it. You know, after all these years it does catch up with you. But just for now. — Regis Philbin

It is ironic-rouse the limpest adjective-that a government as spontaneously tyrannous and callous as ours should, over the years, have come yo care so much about our health as it endlessly tests and retests commercial drugs available in other lands while arresting those who take "hard" drugs on the potential ground that they are bad for the user's health. One is touched by their concern- touched and dubious. After all, these same compassionate guardians of our well-being have sternly, year in and year out, refused to allow us to have what every other First World country simply takes for granted, a national health service. — Gore Vidal

But most important...what kind of father can look his own son in the eyes...even after all these years...and not even recognize him! — Dan Brown

After all these years, he stood humbled and she stood corrected. Tara's eyes were downcast as she looked at the distance between them. If he had taken a step towards her, she was sure she could take a million too. — Mita Jain

After my parents were dead, I found in a box and in two chests of drawers nothing but hundreds of bright red Alpine caps, I said, nothing but bright red Alpine stockings. Every one of them knitted by my mother. My parents could have gone into the High Alps with these bright red caps and bright red stockings for thousands of years. I burnt every one of those bright red caps and bright red stockings, I said. I put on one of my mother's hundreds of bright red Alpine caps and in this costume burnt all the others, laughing, laughing, continuously laughing, I said.
(Goethe Dies, p.65) — Thomas Bernhard

Even after all these years, finding a really first-rate story is still a thrill, one I want to share with others. — Gardner Dozois

After all these years, almost 30 years later, whenever I'm on the street, someone will call out, 'Who you gonna call?' — Ernie Hudson