Quotes & Sayings About Fifteen Years Old

Pedaling down Dune Drive on a red beach cruiser, Dani ahead of her and Vanessa behind her, is a transporting experience. The night is quiet; the air on her face is soft; her hair streams behind her; the stars above are as brilliant as stars in a children's book. They could be nine years old, or fifteen, or twenty-one; they've ridden bikes down Dune Drive at all of those ages and all of the ones in between. There must have been so much more to those summers, but what she remembers are the two weeks she spent in Avalon with Dani and Vanessa - two weeks that always went by too quickly, but that in memory stretch to fill an entire season. — Meg Donohue

I was an accomplished junior tennis player up to around fourteen years old. At fourteen or fifteen I made the decision to venture off to make my life 100% music. — Aaron Zigman

The axe is the healthiest implement that man ever handled, and is especially so for habitual writers and other sedentary workers, whose shoulders it throws back, expanding their chests, and opening their lungs. If every youth and man, from fifteen to fifty years old, could wield an axe two hours per day, dyspepsia would vanish from the earth, and rheumatism become decidedly scarce. I am a poor chopper, yet the axe is my doctor and delight. Its used gives the mind just enough occupation to prevents its falling into revery or absorbing trains of thought, while every muscle in the body receives sufficient, yet not exhausting, exercise. — Horace Greeley

And it's not like I've never jacked off. I'm fifteen years old. Of course I do it. Any guy who says he doesn't is lying. That would be like having the coolest video game ever and never playing it. No one's that stupid. — Michael Thomas Ford

I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony. — Gyorgy Ligeti

Tell me about the war," he pressed cautiously. She smiled again and began, "Well . . ." The sentence ended there. Her tongue moved but no words emerged. He wanted to say, Tell me because I'd like to tell my grandchildren one day. Tell me because it happened to you, and so I should know. Tell me because it will bring me closer to you, and I want to be close to you. But he was fifteen years old, and he didn't know how to express thoughts like these. He only knew that he wanted to know. He could tell that she would tell him anything but anything, only if he could stand it please don't make her talk about that. And though he grasped how important it was for him to know - even if everyone in the family had acquiesced not to trouble Grandmother about it - he couldn't bring himself to make her. So he said to her: "Forget about the war. Tell me about how you and Grandfather fell in love. — Boris Fishman

Old age is fifteen years older than I am. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

I'd always had an interest in guitar from about seven years old. But I first actually had lessons when I was about fifteen in Scotland, in Edinburgh. There was a folk club there and a girl called Jill Doyle taught me the guitar, who happened to be Davey Graham's sister. Davey Graham is one of my heroes and always has been. Fantastic guitar player. And he's had a strong influence on me all the way through. — Bert Jansch

You have to watch your step with women these days, Pops. She could be involved with Yakuza or something. Even some of the girls in my class
you should hear the stuff they talk about. Fifteen years old, and there's nothing they don't know. We're not in the age of Peace and Love anymore. — Ryu Murakami

We who have seen him now, light on his feet, smooth moving as a leopard, a young man with an old man's science, the most beautiful fighting machine I have ever seen, may live to see him fat, slow, old, and bald taking a beating from a younger man. But I would like to hazard a prediction that whoever beats Joe Louis in an honest fight in the next fifteen years will have to get up the floor to do it. — Ernest Hemingway,

There were children playing on the commons. He thought of them as children, though he remembered thinking of himself as an adult at that age. Fifteen, sixteen years old. — James S.A. Corey

I'm still trying to re-create a Ray Charles concert that I heard when I was fifteen years old, and all my nerve endings were fried and transformed, and electricity shot through me. — Boz Scaggs

It's been fifteen years, Imi. You don't know anything about the person I've become. How can you say we're anything to each other?"
I put my hand on his chest, ignoring the feel of his ribs beneath his skin. I pressed my palm over his heart. Thud. Thud. Thud.
"I know who you are in here. I trusted the eighteen-year-old boy who made sure I was fed. Who protected me. Who loved me. And I trust the man he became. Sure, people can change, but I see who you are. — A Meredith Walters

There is much that science doesn't understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light-years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are constantly stumbling on new surprises — Carl Sagan

by the 1790's an average American over fifteen years old drank just under six gallons of absolute alcohol each year. . . . The comparable modern average is less than 2.9 gallons per capita. We — Christopher Collier

When I was fifteen years old, the only distinction in music my friends and I made was [that] there's music made by people with short hair and music made by people with long hair. — Moby

Dialogue in the works of autobiography is quite naturally viewed with some suspicion. How on earth can the writer remember verbatim conversations that happened fifteen, twenty, fifty years ago? But 'Are you playing, Bob?' is one of only four sentences I have ever uttered to any Arsenal player (for the record the others are 'How's the leg, Bob?' to Bob Wilson, recovering from injury the following season; 'Can I have your autograph, please?' to Charlie George, Pat Rice, Alan Ball and Bertie Mee; and, well, 'How's the leg, Brian?' to Brian Marwood outside the Arsenal club shop when I was old enough to know better) and I can therefore vouch for its absolute authenticity. — Nick Hornby

I learned to fly planes at fifteen years old because one of my teachers thought I'd be a better pilot than rapper. — Killer Mike

Parents who read to their children weekly or daily when they were young raised children who scored twenty-five points higher on PISA by the time they were fifteen years old. That was almost a full year of learning. More affluent parents were more likely to read to their children almost everywhere, but even among families within the same socioeconomic group, parents who read to their children tended to raise kids who scored fourteen points higher on PISA. By contrast, parents who regularly played with alphabet toys with their young children saw no such benefit. — Amanda Ripley

The women glare at each other. Grin. You have friends when you're fifteen years old. Sometimes you get them back. — Fredrik Backman

Benjamin Fitzpatrick was admitted to the practice of law in Alabama in 1821. Within five years, having participated in some law suits regarding conflicting property claims among slaveholders, he had built up a clientele sufficiently broad to allow him to begin acquiring slaves. In 1826 Fitzpatrick purchased three slaves for a thousand dollars; in 1827 he bought a fifteen-year-old boy for four hundred dollars. The following year he spent over five hundred dollars on a seventeen-year-old girl and her six-month-old son, $975 on a sixteen-year-old girl along with a twelve-year-old mulatto and a nine-year-old boy. Later in 1828, he added a boy named Peter and a woman named Betsey — James Oakes

There's a joke people tell in the Soviet Union: Mitterrand, Bush and Gorbachev have a meeting with God. Mitterrand says, 'My country faces many difficult problems-- lagging exports, Muslim minorities, European unification. How long will it be before France's problems are solved?' God says, 'Fifteen years.' Mitterrand begins to cry. 'I'm an old man,' says Mitterrand. 'I'll be dead by then. I'll never see France's problems solved.' Then Bush says, 'My country faces many difficult problems-- recession, crime, racial prejudice. How long will it be before America's problems are solved?' God says, 'Ten years.' Bush begins to cry. 'I'm an old man,' says Bush. 'I'll be out of office by then. I won't get any credit for solving America's problems.' Then Gorbachev says, 'My country faces many, many difficult problems. How long will it be before the Soviet Union's problems are solved?' God begins to cry. — P. J. O'Rourke

So whenever I write, it feels like my age is reduced by half, or even fifteen, seventeen, perhaps thirty-five years. It feels like I am returned to the belly of my mother and therefore have no one to answer to. I forget, in turn, my ragged clothes and my tuberculosis and my setbacks and my old pairs of shoes. — Fiston Mwanza Mujila

He let out a breath. "How old are you?" he asked, fearful of the answer.

"Twenty-five." She gave him a wry smile. "And since you yelled it at Heather, I know you're 'forty fucking years old'."

He would have laughed, but he couldn't breathe. Jesus, he'd known she was young, but hearing her actual age..."That's fifteen years."

"I can do the math, but you know what else? I'm legal. I can drink. I have decent car insurance since I hit the quarter century mark, and I own this house." she paused. "Well the bank owns most of it, but I qualified for a loan and everything since I have decent credit." Her nose wrinkled. "I'm getting off subject. If the age difference truly bothers you, then I will see you at the shop to finish your tattoo. No hard feelings."

He growled softly. Well, something was hard, and it wasn't his feelings. — Carrie Ann Ryan

For thirty-five years now I've been compacting old paper and books, living as I do in a land that has known how to read and write for fifteen generations; living in a onetime kingdom where it was and still is a custom, an obsession, to compact thoughts and images patiently in the heads of the population, thereby bringing them ineffable joy and even greater woe; living among people who will lay down their lives for a bale of compacted thoughts. — Bohumil Hrabal

You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, 'It happened overnight.' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing. — Colson Whitehead

didn't realize I was crying until the tears hit my chin and plummeted to my shirt. Fire burned my nose. Five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven-twelve-thirteen-and-fourteen-year-old Vanessa all came back to me with the same feeling that had been so strong in those years: hurt. The Vanessa who was fifteen and older had felt a different emotion for so long: anger. Anger at my mom's selfishness. Anger at her for not being able to clean her act up until years after we'd been taken away from her. Anger for being let down for so long, time and time again. — Mariana Zapata

I was standing on the deck looking down at a gang of stevedores working on the dock thirty feet below. One of them recognized me, nudged his neighbor, and pointed. All at once the whole gang stopped working to yell, 'Booster! Booster Keaton!' They waved in wild excitement, and I waved back, marveling, because it was fifteen years of more since they could have seen my last M-G-M picture.
And if there is sweeter music this side of heaven I haven't heard it. Dr. Avedon said I could live to be a hundred years old. I intend to do it. For who would not wish to live a hundred years in a world where there are so many people who remember with gratitude and affection a little man with a frozen face who made them laugh a bit long years ago when they and I were both young? — Buster Keaton

When he was six, Victor had made a card for his father's birthday. On heavy drawing paper, he had written in big, multicolored letters: i love you dad. Now all that was past, over and done with. Bruno knew that things would only get worse, that they would move from mutual indifference to loathing. In a couple of years his son would try to go out with girls his own age; the same fifteen-year-old girls that Bruno lusted after. They would come to be rivals - which was the natural relationship between men. They would be like animals fighting in a cage; and the cage was time. — Michel Houellebecq

A winter ago I had an after-school seminar for high-school students and in one of the early sessions Una, a brilliant fifteen-year-old, a born writer who came to Harlem from Panama five years ago, and only then discovered the conflict between races, asked me, "Mrs. Franklin, do you really and truly believe in God with no doubts at all?"
"Oh, Una, I really and truly believe in God with all kinds of doubts."
But I base my life on this belief. — Madeleine L'Engle

Fifteen years old is the middle of my life, regardless of when I die. — Edouard Leve

Now I am ... like anyone with a strong preference for the fly rod, totally indifferent to how large a fish I catch by comparison with other fishermen. So when a fifteen-year-old called Fred, fishing deep in midsummer with a hideous plastic worm, caught a four and a half pounder ... I naturally felt no resentment beyond wanting to break the kid's thumbs. — Vance Bourjaily

Rocco was gripped with the panic he often experienced around her, around himself. He seemed to be both here now and simultaneously five years in the future looking back at this moment, at the loss of this moment. He was always sliding past the nowness of being with her, throwing himself at her like a cranked-up insincere clown for an exhausting fifteen minutes a day or getting cozy with booze in order to achieve the proper mood, and from the time she was born he had felt he was on his deathbed, remembering with regret how skittish and slippery his time with her had been. Had been, as if she were a hard thirty-seven and divorced instead of a two-year old baby, as if he were eighty-six and senile instead of forty-three and slightly overweight. — Richard Price

I was fifteen years old when I began to hate people. — Anne Moody

I found that I could not contemplate an adult life in which books were not dominant. I wanted to live and work with them ... I had to be able to take books from their places, run my finger over their backs, see how they opened, flick their corners straight. I wanted a perspective of bookshelves always in my eye. And books, books, books. This was not a rational way of determining on a career and was much tainted by mushiness. But it was the way in which my decision hardened, before I was fifteen years old, to become a librarian. — Clifford Currie Librarian Of The Ashmolean Library Oxford

Old is always fifteen years from now. — Bill Cosby

Can you be sure?"
"I haven't spent the last fifteen hundred years learning how to knit my own socks, boy!" The crone looked like she might box Heinrich's ears, if she could reach them. — Jessica Day George

I was fifteen years old when I understood how it is that things break down: people can't imagine someone else's point of view. — Sonia Sotomayor

Once in a while, in the middle of an ordinary life ... love gives us a fairy tale." "It's how I feel," he said, swallowing hard. "I think I've been in love with you since I was fifteen years old. — Melissa Brown

A formative influence on my undergraduate self was the response of a respected elder statesmen of the Oxford Zoology Department when an American visitor had just publicly disproved his favourite theory. The old man strode to the front of the lecture hall, shook the American warmly by the hand and declared in ringing, emotional tones: 'My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.' And we clapped our hands red. Can you imagine a Government Minister being cheered in the House of Commons for a similar admission? "Resign, Resign" is a much more likely response! — Richard Dawkins

Never again do you find friends like the ones you have when you're fifteen years old. — Fredrik Backman

She was fifteen years old, going on thirty-five, Doc, and she told me she was eighteen, she was very willing, I practically had to take to sewing my pants shut. Between you and me, uh, she might have been fifteen, but when you get that little red beaver right up there in front of you, I don't think it's crazy at all and I don't think you do either. No man alive could resist that, and that's why I got into jail to begin with. And now they're telling me I'm crazy over here because I don't sit there like a goddamn vegetable. Don't make a bit of sense to me. If that's what being crazy is, then I'm senseless, out of it, gone-down-the-road, wacko. But no more, no less, that's it. — Ken Kesey

Nothing I do can't be done by a ten-year-old ... with fifteen years of practice. — Harry Blackstone Jr.

Everything matters. The Universe is approximately fifteen billion years old, and I swear that in all that time, nothing has ever happened that has not mattered, has not contributed in some way to the totality. — Robertson Davies

APD is primarily defined as a lack of empathy,' I said. I'd looked it up too, a few months ago. Empathy is what allows people to interpret emotion, the same way ears interpret sounds; without it you become emotionally deaf.
'It means I don't connect emotionally with other people. I wondered if he was going to pick that one.'
'How do you even know that?' she said. 'You're fifteen years old, for goodness' sake. You should be ... I don't know, chasing girls or playing video games.'
'You're telling a sociopath to chase girls? — Dan Wells

If you are serious about education, then you need to start a lot earlier than fifteen years old to give each child a decent shot at life in the real world, as distinguished from make-believe equality while in school. Ability grouping or "tracking" - so hated by the ideological egalitarians - is one of the best ways of doing that. — Thomas Sowell

Those rosy memories we all share are actually memories from our favorite TV shows. We've confused our own childhoods with episodes of "Ozzie and Harriet," "Father Knows Best," and "The Brady Bunch." In real life, Ozzie had a very visible mistress for years, Bud and Kitten on "Father Knows Best" grew up to become major druggies, and Mom on "The Brady Bunch" dated her fifteen-year-old fictional son. — Cynthia Heimel

Youth is feeling seventy years old, misanthropic, and ready to die at fifteen — Nikolai Grozni

Just because you've only been alive for fifteen years doesn't mean you're less anything except old. That's all it means. It doesn't mean you're less experienced. It doesn't mean you're less intelligent. It doesn't mean you're less sensitive. It doesn't mean you take things less seriously. It's like, these are younger human beings, meaning don't, because they're only ten, start thinking that they don't know what you're talking about -because they do. Don't leave people out in the cold, and don't talk down to people -don't. It never works out. — Judd Nelson

Today age segregation has passed all sane limits. Not only are fifteen-year-olds isolated from seventy-year-olds but social groups divide those in high school from those in junior high, and those who are twenty from those who are twenty-five. There are middle-middle-age groups, late-middle-age groups, and old-age groups - as though people with five years between them could not possibly have anything in common. — Suzanne Gordon

She held her sword like she was ready to use it on anyone who got close. Darquesse could see her own reflection in the blade. A pretty girl with a scar on her cheek, fifteen years old and dark-haired. Her pale face splattered with other people's blood. Her eyes, dark-ringed. Is this what they all saw, she wondered, or did the see something else? Something magnificent and terrible? Something monstrous? — Derek Landy

He was over ninety years of age, his walk was erect, he talked loudly, saw clearly, drank neat, ate, slept, and snored. He had all thirty-two of his teeth. He only wore spectacles when he read. He was of an amorous disposition, but declared that, for the last ten years, he had wholly and decidedly renounced women. He could no longer please, he said; he did not add: "I am too old," but: "I am too poor." He said: "If I were not ruined
Heee!" All he had left, in fact, was an income of about fifteen thousand francs. His dream was to come into an inheritance and to have a hundred thousand livres income for mistresses. He did not belong, as the reader will perceive, to that puny variety of octogenaries who, like M. de Voltaire, have been dying all their life; his was no longevity of a cracked pot; this jovial old man had always had good health. — Victor Hugo

They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words - words are for "typeheads," Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips - their only proficient vocabulary is in the society's platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from "a broken home." They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words. — Joan Didion

I'm a huge advocate of prayer. I've been praying since I was fifteen years old and the doctor told me I was going to be a mother and I was like "what?" I started praying that day that God would help me do what I needed to do to be a good mother and to raise this baby boy that I was going to be blessed with. I haven't stopped praying in years. — Cathy Hughes

I read over a hundred books a year and have done so since I was fifteen years old, and every book I've read has taught me something. — Nicholas Sparks

Running away from home is not a good idea. Unless, of course, you happen to be forty years old, and then your parents will probably shout, "Hurrah!" and change the locks the minute you've stepped off the front stoop. But in the case of Gwendolyn and Homer, ages fifteen and twelve, setting off in the middle of the night would only bring their parents immense heartache and worry. — Suzanne Selfors

For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries. — Gustave Flaubert

You never want to get away from home as much as you do when you're fifteen years old. It's like her mom usually says when the cold and darkness have worn away at her patience and she's had three or four glasses of wine :"you can't live in this town,maya,you can only survive it. — Fredrik Backman

It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn't the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn't we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old deathbed? — Graham Greene

The worst have scraped out the mantle of the best and wear it around as something real. It takes no genius to see that. But I moved to San Francisco because the masquerade of kindly gestures is, at least, kind. And it remains kind. And all the people who would sit back and comment on the garishness of the costumes, the hollowness of the dialogue, the lack of divine conviction, well, all those people are either dead or fifteen years old. — Jay Caspian Kang

They were expressions of who he was and what he'd become, and he couldn't do anything about any of it, apart from retrace his steps back and back and back, until he was fifteen or ten or three years old, and start again. — Nick Hornby

There were nineteen years between my grandparents, and I was in a relationship for five years from the age of fifteen to twenty with a man who was thirteen years older than me who remains one of the loves of my life, and he passed away when I was twenty years old. — Kate Winslet

Well, when I was fifteen years old I worked in a lingerie store and that's how I feel in love with vintage lingerie because I wanted to know the history of it. — Dita Von Teese

They play in the Meadow. The dancing girl with the dark hair and blue eyes. The boy with blond curls and gray eyes, struggling to keep up with her on his chubby toddler legs. It took five, ten, fifteen years for me to agree. But Peeta wanted them so badly. When I first felt her stirring inside of me, I was consumed with a terror that felt as old as life itself. Only the joy of holding her in my arms could tame it. — Suzanne Collins

When I was fifteen years old, my dad won a video camera in a corporate golf tournament. I snatched it from his closet and began filming skateboard videos with my friends. — Steve-O

Nine years ago I was alive. Nine years ago Jessica Anne Porter was fifteen years old. — Joan Frances Turner

Back in the late 1970's, when I was fifteen years old, I spent every penny I then had in the bank to fly across the continent in a 747 jet to Brandon, Manitoba, deep in the Canadian prairies, to witness a total eclipse of the sun. — Douglas Coupland

Put 'em who threaten possessions and power together with 'em who offend our tastes in sex and dope. Those who're touched, put 'em in asylums. Pack off old ones to 'senior communities,' nursing homes. Our children? Keep'em prisoner, baby-sitter as warden. School? Good for fifteen to twenty years. Army afterward. Liberated, we live in prison. No this, no that. Kill us before we die! — John Cage

We're an easy target for remarks about crossing the border and turning the clock back fifteen years, or a hundred. We're a state that's known for pineapples and cane toads, old bad attitudes and the brain-addling heat that comes from the Tropic of Capricorn sitting right across our middle. We're that kind of state - hot and steamy, unlovely and unloved, far too much fodder here for metaphors about festering and putrefaction. — Nick Earls

Fifteen years old! Okay, okay. In our part of the world that's not so young. — Salman Rushdie

Then it hits me ...
And it hits me with the force of a blow. I am maybe fifteen years old. I am a girl. I am also acting lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and, by the Naval Rules and Regulations as regards the chain of command, I am in command of His Majesty's Ship Wolverine. — L.A. Meyer

One of the bonds between Lily and me is that we both suffer with our teeth. She is twenty years my junior but we wear bridges, each of us. Mine are at the sides, hers are in front. She has lost the four upper incisors. It happened while she was still in high school, out playing golf with her father, whom she adored. The poor old guy was a lush and far too drunk to be out on a golf course that day. Without looking or given warning, he drove from the first tee and on the backswing struck his daughter. It always kills me to think of that cursed hot July golf course, and this drunk from the plumbing supply business, and the girl of fifteen bleeding. Damn these weak drunks! Damn these unsteady men! I can't stand these clowns who go out in public as soon as they get swacked to show how broken-hearted they are. But Lily would never hear a single word against him and wept for him sooner than for herself. She carries his photo in her wallet. — Saul Bellow

I view tea drinking as a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an en-genderer of effeminancy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and maker of misery for old age. Thus he makes that miserable progress towards that death which he finds ten or fifteen years sooner than he would have found it if he had made his wife brew beer instead of making tea. — William Cobbett

It can't be done, old thing. Sorry, but it's out of the question. I couldn't go through all that again."
"Not for me?"
"Not for a dozen more like you."
"I never thought," said Bingo sorrowfully, "to hear those words from Bertie Wooster!"
"Well, you've heard them now," I said. "Paste them in your hat."
"Bertie, we were at school together."
"It wasn't my fault."
"We've been pals for fifteen years."
"I know. It's going to take me the rest of my life to live it down. — P.G. Wodehouse

She had to do that
she had to become a widow, for life, before she was even married. That's why I never got married. I'm thirty-eight years old. I can read and write very well
my mother made sure I was educated
and I do the bookwork for all the shops and businesses in the slum. I do the taxes for every man who pays them. I make a good living here, and I have respect. I shouldn't been married fifteen or even twenty years ago. But she was a widow, all her life, for me. And I couldn't do it. I just couldn't allow myself to get married. I kept hoping I would see him, the sailor with the best moustache. My mother had one very old, faded photograph of the two of them, looking very serious and stern. That's why I lived in this area. I always hoped I would see him. And I never married. And she died last week, Lin. My mother died last week. — Gregory David Roberts

Thinking of Macintosh's reaction to Veronica, Grant felt a wave of empathy. "Poor kid's going to be mooning like a puppy for a month. Did you have to smile at him?"
"Really,Grant.He can't be more than fifteen."
"Old enough to break out in a sweat," he commented.
"Hormones," she murmured as she found Fairfield's sparse selection of wine. "They just need time to balance."
Grant's gaze drifted down and focused as she bent over. "It should only take thirty or forty years," he muttered. — Nora Roberts

Because six billion of us are pursuing an evolutionarily unstable strategy, we're fundamentally attacking the very ecological systems that keep us alive. Just like the goat that refuses to suckle its kids, we're in the process of eliminating ourselves. Think about the time line Charles drew in his talk about the boiling frog. For the first six thousand years, the impact of our evolutionarily unstable strategy was minimal and confined to the Near East. Over the next two thousand years, the strategy spread to Eastern Europe and the Far East. In the next fifteen hundred years, the strategy spread throughout the Old World. In the next three hundred years, it became global. By the end of the next two hundred years - which is now - so many people were following the strategy that the impact was becoming catastrophic. We're now about two generations away from finishing the job of making this unstable strategy extinct. — Daniel Quinn

Kenneth Rexroth took me under his wing for a brief period. I was fifteen years old, and I was smoking a lot of heroin and trying to be cool, man, and I really loved poetry. And Kenneth convinced me that destroying myself was not really the best possible solution, and that I needed to look at the world's literature, and not just my own life, in order to be hip, if you will. So he had a huge influence on what became of me thereafter. — Sam Hamill

Seven, ten, fifteen, eighteen years old and still there is nothing finer than a blank sheet of paper, the white promise that the world can be what I make it. A magical place, an adventurous place, a possible place. Erasers take away the mistakes. Another coat of paint to cover them up. Black and red and purple and blue. Always Blue. — Stacey Jay

They had painted a lady leaning her arms on the sill of the window. This lady was waiting for a husband. Her flesh was slack and she was some forty-five years old. Perhaps she had been waiting since she was fifteen. A rose and mauve lady that had not yet gathered her flesh and her beauty into dark clothes, and still waited, like a rose stripped of its petals, with her faded colors and her artificial smile, bitter as a grimace. — Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio

There were, in Clochemerle, a number of lady 'invalids', their conversation one long jeremiad concerning their health, who had worn out their husbands and outlived them by fifteen or twenty years. Since, all their lives, they had spent themselves only drop by drop, their extreme old age was still charged with vital fluid, flowing very meagrely yet sufficient to keep them on their feet and living, so to speak, vegetatively, behind mask-like countenances of wood or old ivory. They breathed in slow motion, everything about them was almost dead excepting those feeble pulsations of the heart which kept just enough pale blood flowing beneath their wrinkled skins. — Gabriel Chevallier

I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him. In my defense I must say it was an engrossing book, and it was very rare to come across another person in that particular part of the world in that war year of 1915. — Laurie R. King

I have never been able to see how a thirty-year old moron can vote more wisely than a fifteen-year old genius ... — Robert A. Heinlein

No one at fifteen was ever in love, outside of Romeo and Juliet, and maybe not even them. Old Giff used to argue that the star-crossed lovers simply were buzzed on the fumes of forbidden lust. Give them thirty years of togetherness, Old Giff always said, and Juliet would be plunging the dagger into Romeo. — Laura Lippman

It is with regret that I have to say that I am just so tired of being here. I am only fifteen years old, and already I am exhausted. There must be something better out there, don't you think? I have so many minor wounds, little scrapes and bruises, that have become so large in my mind. I do not think I would ever be able to get over them. They say that time heals everything, but how do you erase loss? — Lynette Ferreira

I've supported the punishment. Your brother needed to pay for what he did. I don't disagree. He was a jealous, scheming fifteen-year-old. But the people did nothing wrong. All these years you have used them to punish him. It is enough. It's time to move on." Imogenia stood up, holding her book. "I'm sorry, Father, but I do not agree. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to read in my room." At that, she disappeared through the wall. — L.R.W. Lee

Fifteen years old, out in the world, acting was all I had. — Ben Mendelsohn

The average age of a model is fifteen years old. It's so crazy to me. And how confusing for men; they're like, "Well, I'm supposed to be attracted to that image" - like that's what it's designed for - "but it's a fifteen year old girl." I think it's a very confusing thing for every single person involved. — Laura Benanti

Reform suggests that you have already been solidified into a self. You were not. You were barely fifteen. You learn that the brain is not fully formed until you're twenty-five years old, and you wonder, then, what becomes of the mind commandeered before it has learned to follow paths of logic. You were soft as clay straight from the earth. You were reformed before you were formed. — Addie Zierman

Okay. Here's what I've learned. You can live your life being nice to everyone, you can be a loving son, a moderately decent student, never do hard drugs or impregnate anyone's daughter, be an all-around good guy and live in harmony with all of God's creatures. But crash one stolen Mercedes in front of the police station when you're fifteen years old and they'll never let you forget it. — Jonathan Tropper

I'll never forget that Depression Easter Sunday. Our son was four years old. I bought ten or fifteen cents' worth of eggs. You didn't get too many eggs for that. But we were down. Margaret said, 'Why he'll find those in five minutes.' I had a couple in the piano and all around. Tommy got his little Easter basket, and as he would find the eggs, I'd steal 'em out of the basket and re-hide them. The kid had more fun that Easter than he ever had. He hunted Easter eggs for three hours and he never knew the difference. (Laughs.) "My son is now thirty-nine years old. And I bore him to death every Easter with the story. He never even noticed his bag full of Easter eggs never got any fuller. . . . — Studs Terkel

In the old days a proposed system would have been given a three-letter acronym and bounced back and forth between different agencies and contractors for fifteen years before being launched into space. — Neal Stephenson

Are you sure?"
His strong hand grips the side of my neck, and he aligns his eyes with mine. "I've been sure about you since I was fifteen years old. And I'll be sure about you for the rest of my life. — Nicole Williams

She stands on the cliffs, near the old crumbling stone house. There's nothing left in the house but an upturned table, a ladle, and a clay bowl. She stands for more than an hour, goose-bumped and shivering. At these times, she won't confide in me. She runs her hands over her body, as if checking that it's still there, her heart pulsing and beating. The limbs are smooth and strong, thin and sinewy, her hair long and black and messy and gleaming despite her age. You wouldn't know it to look at her, that she's lived long enough to look for what's across the water. Eighty years later, and she is still fifteen. — Jodi Lynn Anderson

You needn't play, Mr. Weston," Emma said. "I only agreed to play for Lizzie's sake, so . . ." "Oh, come, Miss Smallwood. Please tell me you don't shun all things athletic as you did as a girl." A teasing light shone in his eyes. "Afraid you'll lose?" Emma huffed. "I am not afraid to lose. I know I shall. This isn't chess, after all." One eyebrow rose. "Oh, ho! A shot to the heart. The lady recalls soundly trouncing me, I see. Then you must give me a chance to redeem myself." He set aside his hat and adopted a ready stance, bouncing lightly from foot to foot. He looked fifteen years old all over again. Emma felt a grin lift a corner of her mouth. "Oh, very well. But promise not to laugh too hard." "I promise. — Julie Klassen

To me old age is always fifteen years older than I am. — Bernard M. Baruch