Back Through The Years Quotes & Sayings

Have only this consolation
that he was never a fiend or even truly a madman, but only an eager, studious, and curious boy whose love of mystery and of the past was his undoing. He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back through the years as no one ever should reach; and something came out of those years to engulf him. — H.P. Lovecraft

If you walk through a door with dead locks,bolts and chains don't betray or turn your back on that trust.The privilege of knowing all that goes on behind that door should be treated as an extraordinary gift.For many people will only ever see half of the real person they've known for years. — Anonymous

Scarlett's mind went back through the years to the still hot noon at Tara when grey smoke curled above a blue-clad body and Melanie stood at the top of the stairs with Charles' sabre in her hand. Scarlett remembered that she had thought at the time: 'How silly! Melly couldn't even heft that sword!' But now she knew that had the necessity arisen, Melanie would have charged down those stairs and killed the Yankee - or been killed herself. — Margaret Mitchell

I survived this torture which left me paralyzed for years. That's what that night was all about, mutilation, more than violence through sex. I really do feel as though I was psychologically mutilated that night and now I'm trying to put the pieces back together again. Through love, not hatred. And through my music. My strength has been to open again, to life, and my victory is the fact that, despite it all, I kept alive my vulnerability. — Tori Amos

An evolutionary perspective of our place in the history of the earth reminds us that Homo sapiens sapiens has occupied the planet for the tiniest fraction of that planet's four and a half thousand million years of existence. In many ways we are a biological accident, the product of countless propitious circumstances. As we peer back through the fossil record, through layer upon layer of long-extinct species, many of which thrived far longer than the human species is ever likely to do, we are reminded of our mortality as a species. There is no law that declares the human animal to be different, as seen in this broad biological perspective, from any other animal. There is no law that declares the human species to be immortal. — Richard E. Leakey

Still there were times, as Jill whirled through her final preparations, when Emily stood watching her, wondering where the years had gone, wishing them back. — Barbara Delinsky

Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, lemme tell you. Those are big years. Everybody always thinks of it as a time of adolescence - just getting through to the real part of your life - but it's more than that. Sometimes your whole life happens in those years, and the rest of your life it's just the same story playing out with different characters. I could die tomorrow and have lived the main ups and downs of life. Pain. Loss. Love. And what you all so fondly refer to as wisdom. Wanna know the difference between adult wisdom and young adult wisdom? You have the ability to look back at your past and interpret it. I have the ability to look at my present and live it with my whole body. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Squinting in the darkness Anya could just make out a strange curving symbol scratched into the bark. Baba Zosia scored a line through it, disfiguring the symbol. Anya felt something in the air change and give, like the forest had let out a breath it had been holding around them. Something like static pricked the back of her neck as Baba Zosia cut her finger and smeared blood on the tree. The strange symbol melted into the bark, healing the tree to appear like nothing had been carved on it to begin with. Lifting her hands towards the campsite Baba Zosia started to chant softly in the complicated language of the tribe. Magic thrummed through the air, making Anya's own flare and itch under her skin. She rubbed her arms to stop it. Around her a breeze picked up and the campground, with its tracks in the mud and stains from the fires all melted away until there was nothing but autumn leaf litter and debris in its place. It looked like it hadn't been disturbed for years. — Amy Kuivalainen

By burning through coal and oil deposits, humans are putting carbon back into the air that has been sequestered for tens - in most cases hundreds - of millions of years. In the process, we are running geologic history not only in reverse but at warp speed. — Elizabeth Kolbert

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

He ran his fingers over the moist ends of her hair and across her face. Her eyes were wet. Jesus Christ. How many nights had he heard Lily crying. As some parents sleep through fire, thunderstorms, and voices at the back door only to wake at a child's whisper, so Everett heard Lily crying at night. Her muffled sobs seemed to have broken his dreams for years. He had heard her even at Fort Lewis, even in Georgia, finally at Bliss. That was Lily crying in the wings whenever the priest came to tear up his mother's grave. Lily cried in the twilight field where he picked wild poppies with Martha; Lily's was the cry he heard those nights the kiln burned, the levee broke, the ranch went to nothing. — Joan Didion

He read the veinings of a leaf, the pattern on a mushroom cap, and divined mysteries, relations, futures, possibilities: the magic of symbols, the foreshadowing of numbers and writing, the reduction of infinitudes and multiplicities to simplicity, to system, to concept. For all these ways of comprehending the world through the mind no doubt lay within him, nameless, unnamed, but not inconceivable, not beyond the bounds of presentiment, still in the germ, but essential to his nature, part of him, growing organically within him. And if we were to go still further back beyond this Rainmaker and his time which to us seems so early and primitive, if we were to go several thousand years further back into the past, wherever we found man we would still find - this is our firm belief - the mind of man, that mind which has no beginning and always has contained everything that it later produces. — Hermann Hesse

For I have hedged me with a thorny hedge,
I live alone, I look to die alone:
Yet sometimes, when a wind sighs through the sedge,
Ghosts of my buried years, and friends come back,
My heart goes sighing after swallows flown
On sometime summer's unreturning track. — Christina Rossetti

I turn away and stare through the window at the field where the scotch broom creeps yellow as hell toward my doorstep. Six years and it has advanced from the hinterlands to the picket fence in the back yard. Six more years and it will have chewed this house to the foundation, braided my bones in its hair. — Laird Barron

That's because we were together for two years and she led me on a treacherous journey through bitchy, across frigid, and into the land of cheating psycho. I barely escaped with my life. It required a week of solid moping just so my balls could grow back. — S.E. Culpepper

In my art history degree course, we did a module on palimpsests - medieval sheets of parchment so costly that, once the text was no longer needed, the sheets were simply scraped clean and reused, leaving the old writing faintly visible through the new. Later, Renaissance artists used the word pentimenti, repentances, to describe mistakes or alterations that were covered with new paint, only to be revealed years or even centuries later as the paint thinned with time, leaving both the original and the revision on view.

Sometimes I have a sense that this house - our relationship in it, with it, with each other - is like a palimpsest or pentimento, that however much we try to overpaint Emma Matthews, she keeps tiptoeing back: a faint image, an enigmatic smile, stealing its way into the corner of the frame. — J.P. Delaney

Money is created through bank debt. When you go for a mortgage through a bank, they give you $100,000 to buy a house and basically send you out into the world to bring back $200,000 in the next twenty years. The first $100,000 is principal, and the second is interest. — Bernard Lietaer

He had also spent a day and a half without sleep trying to start an online petition to bring back the advert for Nationwide Building Society which said Dunroamin, twice, but half the through the second day of the campaign he had realised that it was an anachronism and the internet was about fourteen years away from mass consumption, so he stopped and went to sleep. — St John Morris

You remind me of a boy I used to know
Same Smile, same easy, laid-back style
And man, could he kiss
Blew my mind the very first time
His lips touched mine.
You remind me

You remind me of a boy I used to like.
Same eyes, strong arms, same open mind
And man, could he dance
Arms around me, lost in a trance
I'd hear his heart
You remind me

I'm scared of you
How did you find me?
Turn and walk away
'Cause you remind me

You remind me of a boy I used to love
Same laughter and tears, shared through the years
And man, how he felt

Made my bones more than melt
He touched my soul.
You remind me

I'm scared of you
How did you find me?
Turn and walk away
'Cause you remind me — Malorie Blackman

I've never been afraid of ghosts. I live with them daily, after all. When I look in a mirror, my mother's eyes look back at me; my mouth curls with the smile that lured my great-grandfather to the fate that was me. No, how should I fear the touch of those vanished hands, laid on me in love unknowing? How could I be afraid of those that molded my flesh, leaving their remnants to live long past the grave? ... All the time the ghosts flit past and through us, hiding in the future. We look in the mirror and see shades of other faces looking back through the years; we see the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway. By blood and by choice, we make our own ghosts; we haunt ourselves. — Diana Gabaldon

: Their acts violated our trust. : The secrecy told us we were alone. : The shame swirling through our experience convinced us we didn't deserve the best for ourselves. : Our circumstances twisted our beliefs about what to expect out of life. : Surviving our unpredictable, disempowering childhood left little opportunity to explore our talents or creativity. It's been said, living through childhood sexual abuse is like living in a war zone. Each of us survived by doing the best we could. Now we have the opportunity to celebrate the child we were and all we did to reach this place in life when healing is possible. Now we get to update our information. And this will bring encouraging, empowering, joy-filled changes into our lives. Each time you go back into a memory, you have the opportunity to 'see' what you learned in that moment of trauma. When I was six-years old, playing with my doll with abandon that blocked out all other noise, I found — Jeanne McElvaney

I fixed her a drink, then lowered myself on the spider's silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendia family. The scene where the prodigal Jose Arcadio hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, 'quartered her like a little bird' made my face hot. I bent down the page, whose small triangle marks the instant.
Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding my hand into the glove of my seventeen-year-old hand. Through magic, there are the Iowa fields slipping by ... And there is my mother, not yet born into the ziplock baggie of ash my sister sent me years ago with the frank message 'Mom 1/2', written in laundry pen, since no-one in our family ever stood on ceremony. — Mary Karr

A Book I Can Put Down

I'm halfway through
and I've gotten used
to the way it wants
to be read. This writer
wants to spoon it up,
wants to watch me
swallow it. This writer
makes a point of good
deeds, clean living,
god and country,
when what I want
is sin and shame,
the rusty metal edge
of cruelty, varieties
of pain, his mother
still crying years later,
just like mine. I want
a writer who's given up
on the moral of the story,
one who'll hand me
a knife and sit back
to see what I do with it.

(Published in Anderbo) — Antonia Clark

That dead feeling hits hard and permeates the first year. It comes back to test you often in the following years, but if you get through the first year, then you know about it. It will never have the power to defeat you again. — Natalie Goldberg

Hardly had they rested when the waves carried them out again, like a nightmare that repeats itself over and over through the night, and over and over again through the years. Back and forth they went and he feared that her strength could not hold. He had no confidence, not in himself, nor in her. He felt like a helpless child, and Diane seemed helpless too, their long struggle getting them nowhere, only repeating itself--contraction, release, contraction again. — William Kotzwinkle

Roebling rejoined the Army of the Potomac in February 1863 back at Fredericksburg, where he was quartered late one night in an old stone jail, from which he would emerge the following morning with a story that would be told in the family for years and years to come. The place had little or no light, it seems, and Roebling, all alone, groping his way about, discovered an old chest that aroused his curiosity. He lifted the lid and reaching inside, his hand touched a stone-cold face. The lid came back down with a bang. Deciding to investigate no further, he cleared a place on the floor, stretched out, and went to sleep. At daybreak he opened the chest to see what sort of corpse had been keeping him company through the night and found instead a stone statue of George Washington's mother that had been stored away for safekeeping. — David McCullough

What a mystery blood was
how did a tiny gesture, a tome of voice, endure through generations like the harder verities of flesh? He had seen it again and again, watching his nieces and nephews grow, and accepted without thought the ehoes of parent and grandparent that appeared for brief moments. the shadow of a face looking back through the years
that vanished again into the face that was now. — Diana Gabaldon

Many years later after the sell-outs, betrayals, and hatred which would tear us apart, when our brotherhood had been destroyed, I'd always look back and remember that night. That fucking wild night at the KeyClub, when the smoke stung my eyes but my world was full of nothing but blind hope. When life was not a mockery, but a very real fire which flamed through my veins like the most incredible drug... the night when Kelly-Lee Obann, drunk, high and barely 20 the time, looked out through his hair with a terrible nakedness and said to me;
"We're not gonna make it out of this alive. You know that, right? — H. Alazhar

I will show you the same amount of mercy given to your family. You turned your back on twenty-five years of marriage, destroyed the family unit, and put everyone through years of heartbreak and therapy. — Virginia Aird

That cactus went right through my eye. It left my eye flat. They took me to a doctor, and he said, 'We'll have to take the eye out.' ... I fought like a tiger. I said, 'No! Leave the eye alone. I am sure it will grow back.' The doctor said, 'You're too young to know.' ... But in a year's time that fluid came back, and that eye is just as good as the other one today. — Bernard Jensen

Jordan loomed over her and a flash of light blinded her momentarily. The knife. Shane felt her newfound courage faltering, felt herself falling back through the years, into the body of that little girl.
No.
She closed her eyes, pictured Matt's face, Gram's face, and felt her strength returning. She would not let Jordan terrify her again. She might fail tonight, she might die, but she would not be his whimpering victim.
Opening her eyes, she braved the flashing glare of the hunting knife he held above her face. She willed her body to lie still as she stared straight into his eyes. With a thrill of triumph, she saw the surprise in the gray eyes that stared back at her.
Neither of them spoke a word, but they both knew the final moves in the game were at hand, and that Shane had just altered the rules. She could see the dawn of awareness in his eyes: She was no longer a mere pawn to toy with as he pleased.
On the other hand, he still had the knife. — Jane Taylor Starwood

In the Muslim world according to bin Laden, the Ottomans hardly count. Islamic fundamentalists look back almost exclusively to the Arab caliphate, particularly its early years. Those who see history as bin Laden did are generally called Salafi Muslims. Those who want to act like bin Laden to change the system through violence are called Salafi jihadis. Al-Qaeda is a Salafi jihadi movement. Salafism is Islam as Allah recited it, and jihadi means "through war," so it is a militant movement seeking an "originalist" form of Islam and willing to use force to get there. Salafism is often associated with the Wahhabi movement, an equally austere branch of Sunni Islam that arose in the early part of the eighteenth century. Wahhabis dominate Saudi Arabia, the paymaster and invisible hand behind many political machinations in the Middle East. In — Richard Engel

Max was fascinated by the woman and more than a little curious about what she might be up to. Sarah Johnson had come from a two-parent, affluent home with a squeaky-clean past. She'd been the golden girl, high school cheerleader, valedictorian and had apparently glided through college without making a ripple, coming out with a bachelor of arts degree in literature. She'd married well, had six children and then one winter night, for some unknown reason, she'd driven her car into the Yellowstone River. Her body was never found. Because there were no skid marks on the highway, it had looked like a suicide. Foul play had never been suspected.
That was twenty-two years ago. Now she was back - with no memory of those years or why she'd apparently tried to take her own life.
Max wanted this story more than he wanted a hot cup of coffee this morning. — B. J. Daniels

Hiro's father, who was stationed in Japan for many years, was obsessed with cameras. He kept bringing them back from his stints in the Far East, encased in many protective layers, so that when he took them out to show Hiro, it was like watching an exquisite striptease as they emerged from all that black leather and nylon, zippers and straps. And once the lens was finally exposed, pure geometric equation made real, so powerful and vulnerable at once, Hiro could only think it was like nuzzling through skirts and lingerie and outer labia and inner labia ... It made him feel naked and weak and brave. — Neal Stephenson

A study of the history of wages back through the years indicates clearly that when the cost-of-living rises appreciably wages have shortly been adjusted upward also. — Charles E. Wilson

If you look at a group of people that had faith, it's got to be the Jews. They followed Moses through the desert for 40 years with no map. There had to be one guy in the back, like, 'I don't think he knows where he's going.' — Adam Ferrara

In my first leadership position, I mistakenly thought that being named the leader meant that I was the leader. Back then I defined leading as a noun - as the position I was appointed to - not a verb - as what I was doing. Though I had been hired as the senior pastor, I quickly discovered the real leader of the church was a down-to-earth farmer named Claude, who had been earning his leadership influence through many positive actions over many years. He later explained it to me, saying, "John, all the letters — John C. Maxwell

Laughing,I poked him for his embarrassingly accurate imitation of my southern accent.
He continued in my voice, "Then one day my boyfriend was being an ass and I challenged him to a comp.I had to do a front 1080 off a jump just to show him up,and the rest is history."
"I hope so."
"I know so." He kissed my cheek.
I reached back to run my fingers through his long hair. "Right now I want to lie low,have a normal life,and hang out with my boyfriend. I'll meet you in People in a few years."
He chuckled, making my insides sparkle with anticipation. "It's a date. — Jennifer Echols

Halfway through the meal, while we were all laughing and telling stories, I made the mistake of placing my hand on Kaidan's upper thigh without thinking.
He let out a groan loud enough to silence the room. I slipped my hand back into my own lap, and Kaidan cleared his throat.
"Wow," he said. "The corn pudding is fantastic."
I snorted, which started a round of snickers. Patti smiled at Kaidan like he was a precious boy.
"Isn't it good? Anna found the recipe a few years ago. She's a great cook."
"Mm-hm." Kaidan gave a tight-lipped smile. "That she is. — Wendy Higgins

It is a fact that if an impulse from one or the other sphere comes up and is not lived out, then it goes back down and tends to develop anti-human qualities. What should have been a human impulse becomes a tiger-like impulse.
For instance, a man has a feeling impulse to say something positive to someone and he blocks it off through some inhibition. He might then dream that he had a spontaneous feeling impulse on the level of a child and his conscious purpose had smashed it. The human is still there, but as a hurt child. Should he do that habitually for five years, he would no longer dream of a child who had been hurt but of a zoo full of raging wild animals in a cage.
An impulse which is driven back loads up with energy and becomes inhuman. This fact, according to Dr. Jung, demonstrates the independent existence of unconscious. — Marie-Louise Von Franz

She was grown up; she was twenty-nine! It was only recently that she'd been walking home from the hairdresser's, feeling gorgeous, and a gaggle of teenage girls walked by, and the sound of their strident giggles made her send a message back through time to her fourteen-year-old self: "Don't worry, it all works out. You get a personality, you get a job, you work out what to do with your hair, and you get a boy who thinks you're beautiful." She'd felt so together, as if all the teenage angst and the failed relationships before Nick had all been part of a perfectly acceptable plan that was leading to this moment, when she would be twenty-nine years old and everything would finally be just as it should be. — Liane Moriarty

I was very upset at how his skin was peeling off so badly anywhere, but nobody gave it a second thought. They told me it was 'normal'.
Of course this was far from normal. There was no way they could have known about EB (Epidermolysis Bullosa) back then considering the rarity of the disorder. The only way to diagnose EB it is through a skin biopsy, and they would need to suspect EB to send it to the correct lab. It would not be until Nicky was born 21 months later that every Doctor imaginable was all of a sudden extremely interested in seeing photos of Alex. "Oh yeah" the dermatologist that diagnosed Nicky and Doctor McGuire at Stanford said to me unequivocally, "Alex for sure had EB." How EB could have caused his demise though is still a mystery. Doctor Marinkovich at Stanford told me that many babies with EB are indeed stillborn, but could not tell me why. At this point however, in the delivery room, we were completely oblivious about EB and would remain so for nearly two years — Silvia Corradin

in Sante Fe time is not that shallow. There one can go deep into a continuity as the pueblos and the culture they represent take one back at least eight hundred years through a single Indian dance. For a European that continuity is life-giving. — May Sarton

There are times now, and my life has changed so completely, that I think back on the early years and I find myself thinking: It was not that bad. Perhaps it was not. But there are times, too - unexpected - when walking down a sunny sidewalk, or watching the top of a tree bend in the wind, or seeing a November sky close down over the East River, I am suddenly filled with the knowledge of darkness so deep that a sound might escape from my mouth, and I will step into the nearest clothing store and talk with a stranger about the shape of sweaters newly arrived. This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can't possibly be true. But when I see others walking with confidence down the sidewalk, as though they are free completely from terror, I realize I don't know how others are. So much of life seems speculation. — Elizabeth Strout

Tosh throws up her hands. 'Tell me what you want!'
What I want...
To smell the desert after rain? To awake each morning beneath a soft Cheyenne blanket, skin still heavy with his scent? To rip out the flawed cog inside of me that brought it all to a screeching halt, then wind back through the years and do everything all over again. Perhaps that is what I want. A different ending. — Allyson Stack

Thousand years ago, we all descended from Africans who left the continent. Those ancestors, we will never know their name. We can go back 200 or 300 years and actually populate your family tree with real people who had names and documents. They had customs, characteristics that, unbeknownst to you, you have inherited. Almost through osmosis it has been passed down to you. — Henry Louis Gates

Who are we really? Combinations of common chemicals that perform mechanical actions for a few years before crumbling back into the original components? Fresh new souls, drawn at random for some celestial cupboard where God keeps an unending supply?
Or the same soul, immortal and eternal, refurbished and reused through endless lives, by that thrifty Housekeeper? In Her wisdom and benevolence She wipes off the memory slates, as part of the cleaning process, because if we could remember all the things we have experienced in earlier lives, we might object to risking it again. — Barbara Michaels

The first time I met Crenshaw was about three years ago, right after first grade ended. It was early evening, and my family and I had parked at a rest stop off a highway. I was lying on the grass near a picnic table, gazing up at the stars blinking to life. I heard a noise, a wheels-on-gravel skateboard sound. I sat up on my elbows. Sure enough, a skater on a board was threading his way through the parking lot. I could see right away that he was an unusual guy. He was a black and white kitten. A big one, taller than me. His eyes were the sparkly color of morning grass. He was wearing a black and orange San Francisco Giants baseball cap. He hopped off his board and headed my way. He was standing on two legs just like a human. "Meow," he said. "Meow," I said back, because it seemed polite. — Katherine Applegate

Shouldn't someone give a pep talk," Minho asked, pulling Thomas's attention away from Alby.
"Go ahead," Newt replied.
Minho nodded and faced the crowd. "Be careful," he said dryly, "Don't die."
Thomas would have laughed if he could, but he was too scared for it to come out.
"Great. We're all bloody inspired," Newt answered then pointed over his shoulder toward the Maze, "You all know the plan. After two years of being treated like mice, tonight we're making a stand. Tonight we're taking the fight back to the Creators, no matter what we have to go through to get there. Tonight the Grievers better be scared. — James Dashner

An old girlfriend is a gun in your belly. It's no longer loaded, so when you see her, all you feel is the hollow mechanical click in your gut, and possibly the ghost of an echo, sense memory from when it used to carry live rounds. Occasionally, though, there's a bullet you missed, lying dormant in its overlooked chamber, and when that trigger gets pulled, the unexpected gunshot is deafening even as the forgotten bullet rips its way through the tissue and muscle of your midsection and out into the light of day. Seeing Carly is like that. Even though we haven't spoken in almost ten years, it's an explosion, and in that one instant every memory, every feeling, comes flooding back as fresh as if it were yesterday. — Jonathan Tropper

It's not just the physical aspect of boxing, it's the whole fighter mentality that has been ingrained in me through the years as a competitive athlete. One of the hardest things you'll ever do is to box - to get into the ring and to face off with somebody whose whole goal is to knock you out, to hurt you, and to be able to fight back. — Cara Castronuova

I was six years old, watching my pregnant mother wash the dishes. Cutlery clinked, filling the air with sparkling bursts of colour.
'Do it again!' I begged her, bouncing in my seat.
My mother glanced back at me. 'Do what?'
'Make the stars.'
'Stars?'
It never occurred to me that she couldn't' see what I was seeing. 'The gold ones', I said.
'I don't know what you're talking about.' she replied, and with a child's impatience, I hopped down from my stool to show her.
'Like this,' I said, taking two spoons and clanging them together. Each clink produced another starburst expanding luminous through the air between us.
'You mean,' said my mother slowly, 'the sound makes you think of the stars?'
'No, it makes the stars.. — R. J. Anderson

In all spheres of modern life the influence of Stalin reaches wide and deep. From his last simply written but vastly discerning and comprehensive document, back through the years, his contributions to the science of our world society remain invaluable. One reverently speaks of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin - the shapers of humanity's richest present and future. — Paul Robeson

I page through the book, my heart thumping in my chest as I'm brought back to him, to Mayson Holt, the boy who stole my heart, broke it and disappeared from my life five years ago. The man who I do not allow myself to think about. The man who still owns a very large piece of my soul. — Melissa Brown

Umm, why is it that we don't have any of this in a book? So we could study?" There was a hint of irritation in her voice. Silvia shook her head. "Dear girls, history isn't something you study. It's something you should just know." Marlee turned to me and whispered, "But clearly we don't." She smiled at her own joke, and then focused again on Silvia. I thought about that, how we all knew different things or had to guess at the truth. Why weren't we given history books? I remembered a few years ago when I went into Mom and Dad's room, since Mom said I could choose what I wanted to read for English. As I went through my options, I spotted a thick, ratty book in the back corner and pulled it out. It was a U.S. history book. Dad came in a few minutes later, saw what I was reading, and said it was okay, so long as I never told anyone about it. When — Kiera Cass

We were facing a great number of uncertainties and dangers. First, whether the Russians would treat us decently, us who had lived through the German occupation; whether the survivors from Transnistria would come back; how many had survived the retreat of the Germans; whether our friends and relatives in the Russian army and those who had fled voluntarily would come home; whether any of them had survived the almost three years of war; whether we'll have food to survive. The Russian military, in pursuit of the retreating Germans, were angry, aggressive and contemptuous of the local population. The ubiquitous question: Why did they kill all the other Jews and left you alive? That thought implied that the survivors were all collaborators of the Nazis, whether they were Jewish or not. — Pearl Fichman

I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
Penelope did this too.
And more than once: you can't keep weaving all day
And undoing it all through the night;
Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight;
And along towards morning, when you think it will never be light,
And your husband has been gone, and you don't know where, for years.
Suddenly you burst into tears;
There is simply nothing else to do.
And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique,
In the very best tradition, classic, Greek;
Ulysses did this too.
But only as a gesture, - a gesture which implied
To the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak.
He learned it from Penelope ...
Penelope, who really cried. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Most people, looking back at their childhood, see it as a misty country half-forgotten or only to be remembered through an evocative sound or scent, but some episodes of those short years remain clear and brightly coloured like a landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope. — D.E. Stevenson

I went back to the clanging city,
I went back where my old loves stayed,
But my heart was full of my new love's glory,
My eyes were laughing and unafraid.
I met one who had loved me madly
And told his love for all to hear
But we talked of a thousand things together,
The past was buried too deep to fear.
I met the other, whose love was given
With never a kiss and scarcely a word -
Oh, it was then the terror took me
Of words unuttered that breathed and stirred.
Oh, love that lives its life with laughter
Or love that lives its life with tears
Can die - but love that is never spoken
Goes like a ghost through the winding years ...
I went back to the clanging city,
I went back where my old loves stayed,
My heart was full of my new love's glory, -
But my eyes were suddenly afraid. — Sara Teasdale

Ten thousand!" I shouted at the walls, back in the room with the wooden shutters, now open, so that anyone could hear me, on the porch or probably across the compound. "That arrogant bastard landed ten thousand men at Tas-Elisa. In my port! Mine!" When I was a child and playmates snatched my toys out of my hands, I tended to smile weakly and give in. Years later I was acting the way I should have as a child. Probably not the most mature behavior for a king, but I was still cursing as I swung around to find a delegation of barons in the doorway behind me. My father, Baron Comeneus, and Baron Xorcheus among them.
They thought it was how a king behaved.
I ran my fingers through my hair and tried to pursue a more reasonable line of thought, but more reasonable thoughts made me angry again. — Megan Whalen Turner

If all stories are fiction, fiction can be true
not in detail or fact, but in some transformed version of feeling. If there is a memory of paradise, paradise can exist, in some other place or country dimensionally reminiscent of our own. The sad stories live there too, but in that country, we know what they mean and why they happened. We make our way back from them, finding the way through a bountiful wilderness we begin to understand. Years are nothing: Story conquers all distance. — Jayne Anne Phillips

Life is a collection of a million tiny little moments and choices, like a handful of luminous pearls. Strung together, lined up through the days and the years, they make a life. It takes so much time, and so much work, and those beads and moments are so small, and so much less fabulous and dramatic than the movies. The Heisman Trophy winner knows this. He knows that his big moment was not when they gave him the trophy. It was the thousand times he went to practice instead of going back to bed. It was the miles run on rainy days, the healthy meals when a burger sounded like heaven. That big moment represented and rested on a foundation of moments that had come before it. — Shauna Niequist

I had come to expect that Chinese friends would make financial decisions that I found uncomfortably risky: launching businesses with their savings, moving across the country without the assurance of a job. One explanation, which Weber and Hsee call "the cushion hypothesis," is that traditionally large Chinese family networks afford people confidence that they can turn to others for help if their risk-taking does not succeed. Another theory is more specific to the boom years. "The economic reforms undertaken by Deng Xiaoping were a gamble in themselves," Ricardo Siu, a business professor at the University of Macau, told me. "So people got the idea that taking a risk is not just okay; it has utility." For those who have come from poverty to the middle class, he added, "the thinking may be, If I lose half my money, well, I've lived through that. I won't be poor again. And in several years I can earn it back. But if I win? I'm a millionaire! — Evan Osnos

Then the nickel must have dropped when he realized I had pranked him as he groaned under his breath, "Bob!"
Doug's been trying to get back at me for years. But he can't, because I'm a lawyer. You don't get into and through law school like I did without gaining a few street smarts. — Bob Goff

I was born in St. Louis and lived in Pittsburgh for a bit, before my family moved to Nigeria, where they're from. We lived there for three or four years and came back to the States when I was about ten. I realised that I'd gone from place to place not fitting in. The thing that helped me fit in when moving around and not having a ton of friends was that I could make art. That was the through-line. — Babatunde Adebimpe

I love the fact that, one time, my face was on the back of a cereal box - probably 3-CPO's - and it was a mask where you cut out the eye holes and put a string through the side. It makes me feel like I'm 11 years old all over again. — Mark Hamill

I heard my old friend Clem's voice coming back to me through the dimness of thirty years: "I see you coming here trying to make sense where there is no sense. Try just living in it. Respond, alter, see what happens." I thought of the African way of perceiving life, as experience to be lived rather than as problem to be solved. — Audre Lorde

Down an alley a washing woman has set out laundry in pans near the rubble of an old high-rise. Another is washing her body, carefully scrubbing under her sarong, its fabric clinging to her skin. Children run naked through the dirt, jumping over bits of broken concrete that were laid down more than a hundred years ago in the old Expansion. Far down the street the levees rise, holding back the sea. — Paolo Bacigalupi

It was like an invisible fire that we could feel, that had been trying to pierce through our mutual darkness. It struck me that each of us is a darkness for the other. Three days or three years don't make a difference unless we can catch hold of a burning moment in the darkness, knowing full well that it won't last and after it is extinguished we will slide back into our own chilling solitude. — Nirmal Verma

A couple years ago I was going to back off and actually thought about retiring, but it keeps calling me back, and I'm going to keep going back as long as it calls me. I really think it has something to do with the good vibes that I feel I've spread through my performance and through the time that I've spent with fans. — Jason Newsted

So, my brother and I, over the last two years, went back through Scripture and pulled every (passage) we could in relation to parenting children, guarding their hearts, teaching them, loving them, being patient. And then we worked through 40 principles and wrote The Love Dare for Parents. — Alex Kendrick

When I'd lost him the first time, before Culloden, I'd remembered. Every moment of our last night together. Tiny things would come back to me through the years: the taste of salt on his temple and the curve of his skull as I cupped his head; the soft fine hair at the base of his neck, thick and damp in my fingers ... the sudden, magical well of his blood in dawning light when I'd cut his hand and marked him forever as my own. Those things had kept him by me. — Diana Gabaldon

Only later-looking back through the years-do we come to realise those ordinary choices are often the critical turning point in our destiny. — Judy Croome

(It's a weird thing, depression. Even now, writing this with a good distance of fourteen years from my lowest point, I haven't fully escaped. You get over it, but at the same time you never get over it. It comes back in flashes, when you are tired or anxious or have been eating the wrong stuff, and catches you off guard. I woke up with it a few days ago, in fact. I felt its dark wisps around my head, that ominous life-is-fear feeling. But then, after a morning with the best five- and six-year-olds in the world, it subsided. it is now an aside. Something to put brackets around. Life lesson: the way out is never through yourself.) — Matt Haig

But again that sense of peace descended, that spell of perfect happiness, and I was traveling back through the years to the little French church of my childhood as the hymns began. Through my tears I saw the shining altar. I saw the icon of the Virgin, a gleaming square of gold above the flowers; I heard the Aves whispered as if they were a charm. Under the arches of Notre Dame de Paris I heard the priests singing Salve Regina. — Anne Rice

After the last shovel of dirt was patted in place, I sat down and let my mind drift back through the years. I thought of the old K. C. Baking Powder can, and the first time I saw my pups in the box at the depot. I thought of the fifty dollars, the nickels and dimes, and the fishermen and blackberry patches.
I looked at his grave and, with tears in my eyes, I voiced these words: You were worth it, old friend, and a thousand times over. — Wilson Rawls

And I couldn't take my eyes off Pete. He ate dinner like he always did, in three or four huge, whoofing bites, before heading back out front to his cone of warmth, his coffee, his cigarettes, and ghostly tunes piping from his little transistor radio. And most important, to whatever thoughts drowned out the voices of his own family saying "hello" and "happy holidays."
I watched him because I couldn't believe that could be anyone's comfortable horizon. A tiny porch on a dark corner near a highway. We lucked out living on a planet made thrilling by billions of years of chance, catastrophe, miracles, and disaster, and he'd rejected it. You're offered the world every morning when you open your eyes. I was beginning to see Pete as a representative of all the people who shut that out, through cynicism, religion, fear, greed, or ritual. — Patton Oswalt

My enemies defeated, and yet the sorrow remained, keener, more true, more clean, for I had always owned it. It echoed back to the thorns, the tone of a bell resounding through the years. We're fashioned by our sorrows - not by joy - they are the undercurrent, the refrain. Joy is fleeting. — Mark Lawrence

Going through college a Red Sox fan and knowing the history behind everything that was going on back in the '80s and finally getting a chance to win a World Series for this great city and bringing it back after 86 years, it was truly special, and it's one of the highlights that I'll remember for a long time. — Tim Wakefield

I think the reason why I never wanted to do a retrospective is because I was scared to go back and look at all this stuff through the years. — Larry Clark

I am the celebrity spokesperson for Resolve, the national infertility association, and my three precious children were born through infertility procedures. I struggled for many years trying to have children. My beautiful son was born through in vitro fertilization. I had my beautiful twins via a surrogate. So I wanted to give back. — Cindy Margolis

God has not forgotten you. He will as readily order about the forces of the universe on your account as He did on Noah's. His plans for Noah were also plans for the whole world through Noah. So they are for you. He will use you for the good of the whole world if you will let Him. SELECTED We may forget; God does not! God's time is never wrong, Never too fast nor too slow; The planets move to its steady pace As the centuries come and go. Stars rise and set by that time, The punctual comets come back With never a second's variance, From the round of their viewless track. Men space their years by the sun, And reckon their months by the moon, Which never arrive too late And never depart too soon. Let us set our clocks by God's, And order our lives by His ways, And nothing can come and nothing can go Too soon or too late in our day. ANNIE JOHNSON FLINT "There are no dates in His fine leisure. — Lettie B. Cowman

We all have a " someone " who we carry in our hearts sometimes for an entire lifetime. That one that just doesn't fully remove itself from your journey, reminded at coffee shops through scent and character of a stranger, or a song that you once shared. Years can go by without a thought and then one day you are reminded and it all comes crashing back. The one that could have been, the one that you never knew exactly how to say goodbye to. The one you wish to meet first in another life. — Nikki Rowe

I was five years old, onstage singing 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' - a rock version - and I was always wanting to entertain. But the biggest thing for me is just country music has helped me get through the worst times of my life and the best times of my life. I want to give that back to people. — Jana Kramer

It's the age-old tale of complacency, Shea." The tall warrior sighed deeply and stretched as he rose. "We may be standing on the brink of the greatest war in a thousand years, but no one wants to accept the fact. Everyone gets in the same rut - let a few take care of the gates to the city while the rest forget and go back to their homes. It becomes a habit - depending on a few to protect the rest. And then one day ... the few are not enough, and the enemy is within the city - right through the open gates ... — Terry Brooks

As I look back on my fondness for the outdoors, and specifically the elements in nature that I find visually stimulating, I am surprised at how often the theme of dead trees arise. I guess it's that each one seems to have a story of its own, representing many years of living through everything that nature could throw at them. — Cory Trepanier

Once upon a raindrop, I landed on Depression. My umbrella broke and broke me with it's bones. It hurt but didn't, and it eased my rain. Curious a little afraid, I tried it once again. Bitter feeling, my starburst shrunk with fear. Sadness filled me up and now I'm here. Repeat, repeat, feeling numb and blue. Cutting became my flight from Depression to Okay and I pushed through. Though a bad solution, it became the one. It's lasted years, it's never done. Once upon a raindrop, I smile and blink a tear. Sometimes my plane flies me back to Depression and cutting then appears. I try and try to stop, but I always round the bend. I can stay on Okay for months, but then I reach an end. It's been a rough road, maybe it will end. It's been a rough road, I know cutting's not my friend. So my starburst searches for solutions, not sure which to choose. And once upon a raindrop, I might land in Happy's shoes. — Alysha Speer

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we'll look back at the first decade of the 21st century when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we'd crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once? — Thomas Friedman

Ah, Toulouse, you have travelled too much. You know the gods of a hundred lands, those of the trees and mountains, the sky and sea, the stars and planets, of demons and angels, and even the Master of the Cosmos. But I am speaking of God. There are others, I'm sure, but only one God who created even great Zeus and Rama. Yet travel is like philosophy: a few years of it will perk the eye to differences, which you shall be able to notice with ease. Yet living as I have, travelling to lonely lands and through a thousand metropolises and hidden woods, you rather see the similarities. All becomes one, and God too becomes one. Not the sum of all those gods here, but beyond them, a being few philosophers have truly grasped. He has always been one, but he is severed in our minds. So it is up to us to piece him back together. If our souls possess a clarity beyond what our mortal nature can bestow, we shall see him. — Mary-Jean Harris

Well, you know, it's been in the back of my mind. I just cannot get it out of it. I'm miserable chasing money. I'm 30 years old going through a mid-life crisis! I just couldn't shut (it) off. — Drew Waters

THE WHISTLER
All of a sudden she began to whistle. By all of a sudden
I mean that for more than thirty years she had not
whistled. It was thrilling. At first I wondered, who was
in the house, what stranger? I was upstairs reading, and
she was downstairs. As from the throat of a wild and
cheerful bird, not caught but visiting, the sounds war-
bled and slid and doubled back and larked and soared.
Finally I said, Is that you? Is that you whistling? Yes, she
said. I used to whistle, a long time ago. Now I see I can
still whistle. And cadence after cadence she strolled
through the house, whistling.
I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and an-
kle. Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too.
And the devotions. And for all that, do we even begin
to know each other? Who is this I've been living with
for thirty years?
This clear, dark, lovely whistler? — Mary Oliver

Honestly, you got to take care of the people that take care of you. I know that sounds like cliche, or borderline phony, but that's the case. The reason I've had the fans that I have is because I've been consistent over the years and kept coming back and doing the same runs. I'm never going to stop doing the cities I've gone through. I'm only going to add. — Gabriel Iglesias

We are in one galaxy called the Milky Way. When you look at the Milky Way's next-door neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy, your telescope is a time machine taking you back two and a half million years. There's a cluster of five galaxies called Stephan's Quintet, which we see through the Hubble telescope spectacularly colliding with each other. But we see them colliding 280 million years ago. If there are aliens in one of those colliding galaxies with a telescope powerful enough to see us, what they are seeing on Earth, at this very moment, here and now, is the early ancestors of the dinosaurs. Are — Richard Dawkins

My mom beat us until she started breaking clothes hangers. Wooden clothes hangers! Once we started laughing back at her, then your spankings were through. That's the way I was raised. So, I got to be about 13 years of age when finally she quit spanking on me. But I think that it was great way to be raised. — Doug Harvey

To be the first player to do it three consecutive years (fifty or more home runs), you go back through the thousands of power hitters who played this game and nobody has ever done it, and I can sit here and say I'm the first. I'm pretty proud of that. — Mark McGwire

Once more, he was immersing himself in books, reaching the end of long articles, even going back over paragraphs to make sure he'd grasped things. How much more satisfying it was than all that skimming, all that jumping around. At present, he was working his way, deliciously, through a book on Mendel, the father of genetics. A man who might not have spend seven years watching peas, if he'd had the internet. — Julie Highmore

He moved on down the alley, his feet walking forward and his brain swimming backward through a sea of time. It was a dark sea, much darker than the alley. The tide was slow and there were no waves, just tiny ripples that murmured very softly. Telling him about yesterday. Telling him that yesterday could never really be discarded, it was always a part of now. There was just no way to get rid of it. No way to push it aside or throw it into an ash can, or dig a hole and bury it. For all buried memories were nothing more than slow-motion boomerangs, taking their own sweet time to come back. This one had taken seven years. — David Goodis

As I look back over fifty years of ministry, I recall innumerable tests, trials and times of crushing pain. But through it all, the Lord has proven faithful, loving, and totally true to all his promises. — David Wilkerson

. . . what I told Malory happened next is that when he looked over at her then it was like he'd been waiting a hundred years to see her, and this crazy ass Ledfeather girl all the way from Standing Rock, she looked off after the elk and then back at Doby through her hair, like she'd maybe been waiting for him too, but was scared a little, wanted to be sure, so Doby opened his mouth and said her name across the backseat of Junior's cab, Claire, like a flower opening in his mouth, and she held her lips together and nodded thank you to him, yes, thank you, and then swallowed what was in her throat and just let the sides of their hands touch together again some like it didn't really matter.
But it did. — Stephen Graham Jones

Loser"
"Father directed choir. When it paused on a Sunday,
he liked to loiter out morning with the girls;
then back to our cottage, dinner cold on the table,
Mother locked in bed devouring tabloid.
You should see him, white fringe about his ears,
bald head more biased than a billiard ball
he never left a party. Mother left by herself
I threw myself from her car and broke my leg ...
Years later, he said, 'How jolly of you to have jumped.'
He forgot me, mother replaced his name, I miss him.
When I am unhappy, I try to squeeze the hour
an hour or half-hour smaller than it is;
orphaned, I wake at midnight and pray for day
the lovely ladies get me through the day — Robert Lowell