First Five Years Quotes & Sayings

At the other end of the scale I was there with a whole lot of young British athletes so I was getting to see them take their first steps on the international ladder. I'd like to think maybe in five years time I'll look back and I'll forget all about the lost luggage and I'll forget about the horrible hotel, but I'll remember these wonderful athletes stepping onto the track for the first time. — Jill Douglas

Although love could grow in times of peace, it tempered in battle. Daddy told me once - when I'd said something about how perfect his relationship with Mom was - that I should have seen the first five years of their marriage, that they'd fought like hellions, crashed into each other like two giant stones. That eventually they'd eroded each other into the perfect fit, become a single wall, nestled into each other's curves and hollows, her strengths chinking his weaknesses, her weaknesses reinforced by his strengths. — Karen Marie Moning

For the first five years of music and first five years of acting, I don't remember it because I was running to where I was going. Finally I was like, 'Man, I missed everything.' So I just stopped, and I started looking around. — Christian Kane

I think about the people I know with the absolutely largest hearts, people with a stunning capacity for endurance and grace and kindness against the most screaming terrors and pains. My Mom and Dad, for example, enduring the death of their first child at six months old, the boy the brother I never met, dying quietly in his stroller on the porch in the moment that my mother stepped back inside to get a pair of gloves because the crisp brilliant April wind was filled with a whistling cutting wind....

Fifty years later after five more children and two miscarriages she is standing in the kitchen with her usual eternal endless cup of tea and I ask her: How do you get over the death of your child?

And she says, in her blunt honest direct terse kind way,
You don't.
Her face harrowed like a hawk for a moment in the swirling steam of the tea.
p112-13 — Brian Doyle

Married life can seem as if it's only five days long. The first day you meet, the second day you marry, the third day your raise your children, the fourth day you meet your grandchildren, and the fifth day you die first or bury your spouse to go home alone for the first time in many years. — Mark Driscoll

Well first of all, I think the phrase 'jump the shark' has jumped the shark. I read it in every article and I think that when Fonzie actually jumped the shark, 'Happy Days' was on the air for another five years. — Lisa Edelstein

What the Latins have done in this text (1 John v, 7) the Greeks have done to Paul (1 Tim. iii, 16). They now read, "Great is the mystery of godliness; God manifest in the flesh"; whereas all the churches for the first four or five hundred years, and the authors of all the ancient versions, Jerome as well as the rest, read, "Great is the mystery of godliness, which was manifest in the flesh." Our English version makes it yet a little stronger. It reads, "Great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh." — Isaac Newton

I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes. — Joyce Carol Oates

I collect postage stamps. That's the only thing I can afford to collect! I hope in five years' time to say, "Yes, I specialize in Gustav Dore first editions." — Peter Webber

All were indiscriminately condemned to death; but one out of three only were really executed. Ten cannon were placed on the drilling-ground, a prisoner fastened to each of their mouths, and five times were the ten guns fired, covering the plain with mutilated remains, in the midst of air tainted with the smell of burning flesh. These men, as M. de Valbezen says in his book called "Nouvelles Etudes sur les Anglais et l'lnde," nearly all died with that heroic indifference which Indians know so well how to preserve even in the very face of death. "No need to bind me, captain," said a fine young sepoy, twenty years of age, to one of the officers present at the execution; and as he spoke he carelessly stroked the instrument of death. "No need to bind me; I have no wish to run away." Such was the first and horrible execution, which was to be followed by so many others. At — Jules Verne

My favorite memory is my five years with the Nuggets. From my first day to my last day is a great memory. There wasn't a year that I was a Nugget that I didn't think we succeeded. — Dikembe Mutombo

To live the first five years of your life feeling that you are valuable is a wonderful thing and, if you don't have it, then you spend the rest of your life trying to find it. I think my mother realised this and tried to compensate for my father's extreme preoccupation with himself. — Rick Stein

Everyone here has a different gripe, large or small. The bad fish, for instance, which I'm told is caught in polluted rivers and can be deadly. The biggest complaint, though, is the lack of queuing. "It's not first-come, first-served, it's most-obnoxious, first-served," says Abby. The lack of trust is another popular gripe. "Friends don't even trust friends. If bad things happen to their friends, people think, 'Good, maybe it won't happen to me,' " says one volunteer. Corruption is another theme. Paying professors for passing grades is widespread, so much so that Moldovans won't go to doctors under thirty-five years old. They suspect - with good reason - that they bought their degrees. Thus, the radius of mistrust is widened. — Eric Weiner

I'm really connected to people, and my relationships with people are paramount, so I write about relationships, particularly strong female ones. In my family, there were six girls born in five years. We were best friends. And my parents raised all of us as first-class citizens. — Alane Ferguson

Anytime you're with somebody, you become a reflection of that person. I believe the first five years of our relationship was me grooming her, getting her tough and getting her ready for all of this and how to deal with it. The last was just her being a strong Black woman who has her man's back. — Snoop Dogg

I'm still an amateur, of course, but I became rugby's first millionaire five years ago. — David Campese

How can I ever make you understand Cassie and me? I would have to take you there, walk you down every path of our secret shared geography. The truism says it's against all odds for a straight man and woman to be real friends, platonic friends; we rolled thirteen, threw down five aces and ran away giggling. She was the summertime cousin out of storybooks, the one you taught to swim at some midge-humming lake and pestered with tadpoles down her swimsuit, with whom you practiced first kisses on a heather hillside and laughed about it years later over a clandestine joint in your granny's cluttered attic. She painted my fingernails gold and dared me to leave them that way for work ... We climbed out her window and down the fire escape and lay on the roof of the extension below, drinking improvised cocktails and singing Tom Waits and watching the stars spin dizzily around us.
No. — Tana French

Dr. Leonard Shlain, chairman of laparoscopic surgery at California Pacific Medical Center, said they took some four and five year-olds and gave them video games and asked them to figure out how to play them without instructions. Then they watched their brain activity with real-time monitors. At first, when they were figuring out the games, he said, the whole brain lit up. But by the time they knew how to play the games, the brain went dark, except for one little point. — Roger Ebert

I spent five years of my childhood in Port Elgin and came back to spend another five years of my young adulthood there as well, including the years in which I was first published. — Susanna Kearsley

I started at a 'learn to swim' scheme when I was about five-years-old. I did it to learn water safety, but it was fun and I loved the water. I went to a club, moved up through the ranks and got better and better before taking part in my first national championships. — Liam Tancock

I started doing stand-up at the age of 20. This was back in 1976, around the time (coincidence?) that the first comedy clubs were starting. The young comedians of today gasp when I tell them how many shows I did that first year: 500. Five nights a week. — Emo Philips

I did a lot of writing for a lot of different kinds of bands that I was in and out of during those five years and that left me with a little body of songs that I liked better when I played alone, so I ended up going out solo and very soon made my first album. — Bruce Cockburn

Can fearsome Ayo, who is herself a warrior, not understand their suffering? Can she not see what fire and inundation have done to the Wakadan heart?" "Tetu, I am a woman . I saw more suffering, more of the human heart, in my first five years than you will see in five lifetimes. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I took five years on the first volume, five years on the second volume, and ten years on the third volume. — Shelby Foote

In the next two years he would sit on ninety committees, chairing twenty-five. No other congressman came even remotely close to carrying such a heavy work load. Soon he was acknowledged "to be the first man in the House," as Benjamin Rush reported.28 — John Ferling

The first time I got up in front of an audience was terror, abject terror, which continued for another four or five years. There still is, a little bit. — Bob Newhart

When I first stepped into literature twenty-five years ago, I wanted to work on behalf of the oppressed, the working masses, and it seemed to me, mistakenly, that I would not find them among the Jews. — S. Ansky

I spent the first five years of my life in Punjab, India, and then moved to New York. — Waris Ahluwalia

Michael died five years ago this January, and the first thing that really struck me about the script was the part about her peeling off from the funeral and just getting into a rowboat and having a real kind of cry where nobody was. — Judi Dench

Dad always said there were three types of workers. The ones who stood there saying "Is there anything I can do " and did nothing. Most of our city guests were like that. The ones who said "Tell me what you want done and I'll do it" and did. Most of our workers over the years had been like that. And the ones who didn't say anything but were always a jump or two ahead of you. When you were changing a flat tyre and you took the old one off and turned to pick up the new one they'd already have it in their hands and they'd move in and put it on from your left while you were still turning round to the right.
Dad reckoned one of those was worth two or the second type and five of the first type. — John Marsden

The first five years as a writer, I didn't know how to write at all. I couldn't write my way out of a white paper bag. And yet, I did some remarkable things. And later on, there were periods where I got this mission to find an articulate voice with rewrites and all. There were periods where I was as dense as Faulkner. — Richard Meltzer

I spent seven years in France. Then, I went to Asia for five years. I came to London in 1984 and then America in 1985. In 1991, I opened my first restaurant in New York City. — Jean-Georges Vongerichten

The cover was pebbled black leather, the pages onionskin, and he opened it carefully. It was his first Bible, the one his mother had given him, the one that had taken its time showing him what he was supposed to do with his life, his size, that voice of his. It was the one used for his ordination, and when he had buried his mother on a autumn hillside in Tennesee five years ago. King James. He didn't care about the scholars or the accuracy or the bringing of his church into whatever century they claimed it was these days; he cared about the poetry, and about the comfort it brought to those who needed to hear it. — Charles L. Grant

The second term of the Bush administration and first five years of the Obama presidency have been devoted to codifying and institutionalizing the vast and unchecked powers that are typically vested in leaders in the name of war. Those powers of secrecy, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, and due-process-free assassination are not going anywhere. They are now permanent fixtures not only in the US political system but, worse, in American political culture. — Glenn Greenwald

For the first time in nearly twenty-five years, our country is having anything to do with the Chinamen, an it is an event far more important than any damn ping-pong game. It is diplomacy, and the future of the human race might be at stake. Do you understand what I am saying?
I shrug my shoulders an nod my head, but something down in me sinkin' fast. I am jus' a po' ole idiot, an now I have got the whole human race to look after. — Winston Groom

The way I see it is that I grew up with a good set of values, but it was never too strict. I was always encouraged to be a free-thinking individual. I spent the first five years out of high school trying to make it work in Eau Claire, then I had to leave because there wasn't enough going on in town. — Justin Vernon

Bullock, Sam, died at the age of one-twelve. They'd been married five years. She was forty-six."
"Isn't that romantic?"
"Heart-tugging. First husband was younger, a callow seventy-three to her twenty-two."
"Wealthy?"
"Was - not Sam Bullock wealthy, but well-stocked. Got eaten by a shark."
"Step off."
"Seriously. Scuba diving out in the Great Barrier Reef. He was eighty-eight. And this shark cruises along and chomp, chomp."
She gave Eve a thoughtful look. "Ending as shark snacks is in my top-ten list of ways I don't want to go out. How about you?"
"It may rank as number one, now that I've considered it a possibility. Any hint of foul play?"
"They weren't able to interview the shark, but it was put down as death by misadventure. — J.D. Robb

I was five years old when I wrote my first song. It was out of longing for my father that I wrote it. — Shmuel Yosef Agnon

I don't mean to insinuate that you are unfeeling or stifled of life ... excuse me on
that one. I just meant to ask you how you breathe when you are down here reading or
writing."
He smiled. "I have five years more experience in breathing on this earth than you. I
know when it is I can breathe and when it is I can't and I know just what to do when
such a thing as suffocation occurs."
I can't believe it, there is actually a qualitative property to every breath
taken ... That must be wonderful. You must also know your cells are degenerating five
years faster than mine."
He smiled again, the same relaxed annoying way. "I get that you find it amusing to
liken me to my cadavers. It's not the first time you've done it, but truly we are not in
lieu to play smart."
I was wondering if you could call the cadaver of a smart man, a smart cadaver. I've
always wondered. — Dew Platt

Minerva drew unusual attention to herself on her very first evening, when she was revealed to be a Hatstall. After five and a half minutes, the Sorting Hat, which had been vacillating between the houses of Ravenclaw and Gryffindor, placed Minerva in the latter. (In later years, this circumstance was a subject of gentle humour between Minerva and her colleague Filius Flitwick, over whom the Sorting Hat suffered the same confusion, but reached the opposite conclusion. The two Heads of House were amused to think that they might, but for those crucial moments in their youths, have exchanged positions). — J.K. Rowling

Yeah it's completely different, it's matured tenfold. We wrote the first album over five years as teenagers but now we've got the opportunity to do InMe full-time. We've got closer together, we've got a better connection. — Dave McPherson

Well I've made no secret of my life long love of MAD Magazine, it's probably my first and greatest influence in terms of my comic sensibilities. I've known John [Ficarra] for many years, and we've been friends. About four or five months ago, at a dinner in New York, John made the very nice offer of my being guest editor for an issue of MAD and I thought about it for about half a nanosecond and decided that was a pretty good idea. — Al Yankovic

Even though two decades and several years had gone by since [she] first decided to be a fairy, even though Lizabeth Kane now stood five feet six inches tall in her stocking feet, even though she was thirty two years old - she still had aspirations of growing up to be a fairy. — Janet Evanovich

My first husband would never make up his mind in less than five years, so I used to get him to think that whatever course of action needed to be taken was his idea. Then he'd go right ahead. — Mary Wesley

I got my first job when I moved to Los Angeles. I worked at a coffee shop for five years and it was one of the best experiences I ever had. It was a bunch of actors covering shifts for each other and becoming great friends. — Katie Leclerc

Montana and I had a chemistry that was unbelievable. When I first came into the league he told me I added five years to his career, and I just think we complimented each other very well and were able to do some amazing things out on the football field. — Jerry Rice

And I think back over my own life and I realize that my own nature-the core me-essentially hasn't changed all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel that same way I did when I woke up at the age of five. — Douglas Coupland

Growing up in Huntington Beach, you were either a traditional sports athlete, a skateboarder, or a surfer. I got my first skateboard when I was five and skated off and on over the years, did a little BMX racing as a kid, and then in my freshman or sophomore year I started getting a little bit more into skateboarding. — Jason Lee

I'm one of those sad cases who've never wanted to be anything but a writer. I started writing my first novel when I was five years old. I have no idea what it was about, but I do remember spending considerable time trying to get the title right, though this had more to do with crayon colour than scansion. — Justine Larbalestier

The first film I was in was called 'Straight Time.' I was five-years old, and I was playing my father's son. — Jake Busey

Even though I spent the first five years of my life in Nagasaki, going to Japan can be really difficult. Even if they know I've been brought up in the West, they still expect me to understand all the subtleties of their culture, and if I get it wrong, it matters much more than if a British person gets it wrong. I find it intimidating. — Kazuo Ishiguro

You've probably noticed that after the first half-century practically everybody gets leaky, they can't keep it in ... hence the cruelty of long drawn-out meals and drinking sessions ... ships and apartment houses are the same ... everything starts to leak ... sphincters, bladders, drain pipes, bowels ... the half-century is merciless for ladies and gentlemen ... worse for dogs and cats! ... with them it comes sooner! ... five ... six years ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

At 18, my first short story was published - I was paid a penny a word by a science fiction magazine. I continued to write, and five years later I published my first novel, 'Sweetwater.' — Laurence Yep

They came here on Sunday, 30th June, 1940, after bombing us two days before. They said they hadn't meant to bomb us; they mistook our tomato lorries on the pier for army trucks. How they came to think that strains the mind. They bombed us, killing some thirty men, women, and children - one among them was my cousin's boy. He had sheltered underneath his lorry when he first saw the planes dropping bombs, and it exploded and caught fire. They killed men in their lifeboats at sea. They strafed the Red Cross ambulances carrying our wounded. When no one shot back at them, they saw the British had left us undefended. They just flew in peaceably two days later and occupied us for five years. — Mary Ann Shaffer

According to my judgement the most important point to be attended to is this: above all things see to it that your souls are happy in the Lord. Other things may press upon you, the Lord's work may even have urgent claims upon your attention, but I deliberately repeat, it is of supreme and paramount importance that you should seek above all things to have your souls truly happy in God Himself! Day by day seek to make this the most important business of your life. This has been my firm and settled condition for the last five and thirty years. For the first four years after my conversion I knew not its vast importance, but now after much experience I specially commend this point to the notice of my younger brethren and sisters in Christ: the secret of all true effectual service is joy in God, having experimental acquaintance and fellowship with God Himself. — George Muller

The first five to six years of my life were spent in and out of the hospital. — Ryan White

Where have I been? she wondered. Is a life that can now be considered an absence a life?

For some time things had been going badly for her. She could cite nothing in particular as a problem; rather, it was as if life in general had a grudge against her. Things persisted in turning grey. Although at first she had revelled in the erudite seclusion of her job, in the protection against the vulgarities of the world that it offered, after five years she now felt that in some way it had aged her disproportionately, that she was as old as the yellowed papers she spent her days unfolding. When, very occasionally, she raised her eyes from the past and surveyed the present, it faded from her view and became as ungraspable as a mirage. Although she had discussed this with the Director, who had waved away her condition of mind as an occupational hazard, she was still not satisfied that this was how the only life she had been offered should be lived. — Marian Engel

My activities, for which I gratefully accept this Award, are today what they have been for over thirty-five years and will be for the rest of my life: to counter governmental secrecy about the nuclear arms race that threatens the survival of life on earth; and to help build a world movement that will prevent a first use since Nagasaki of nuclear explosions, prevent or end interventions that could lead to such an event, and bring about a world free of nuclear weapons. — Daniel Ellsberg

Almost forty-five years after my parents first became Americans, I stand before you and them tonight as the proud governor of the state of South Carolina. — Nikki Haley

I wanted to give five solid years of being there all the time (with Sean). I hadn't seen my first son Julian grow up, and now there's a 17-year-old man on the phone talking about motorbikes. No matter what artistic gains I get, or gold records, if I can't make a success out of my relationship with the people I love, then everything else is bullsh*t. — John Lennon

Fifty-five thousand, five hundred and seventy-three dead from Bomber Command. Seven million German dead, including the five hundred thousand killed by the Allied bombing campaign. The sixty million dead overall of the Second World War, including eleven million murdered in the Holocaust. The sixteen million of the First World War, over four million in Vietnam, forty million to the Mongol conquests, three and a half million to the Hundred Years War, the fall of Rome took seven million, the Napoleonic Wars took four million, twenty million to the Taiping Rebellion. And so on and so on and so on, all the way back to the Garden when Cain killed Abel. — Kate Atkinson

I couldn't wait to get out of the car. The first thing I did was smell the air. I closed my eyes and took a breath, the biggest breath of my life, knowing I was taking the biggest breath of my life. I was taking a breath to smell Shepelevo. Breathing in Shepelevo was like hitting the right note on the piano. There was only one right note. When I was young, Shepelevo was the smell of nettles, of salted smoked fish, of fresh water from the Gulf of Finland, and of burning firewood, all wrapped up in one Shepelevo. As it had been, so it was. Across two continents, a dozen countries, twenty cities, three colleges, two marriages, three children, three books, and twenty-five years of another life, I breathed it and smelled the air. Nowhere else in the world had it. "Papa," I said, my voice breaking. "Do you think we could photograph the smell?" He gave me a look and then laughed. — Paullina Simons

The first record I spent five years writing and it was an amalgamation of all the things that happened in my life from the time I was fifteen to the time I was twenty. — Kate Voegele

Today...is the anniversary of when we first met. You were just born, and I was five years old. — Yun Kouga

Bree doesn't know me as I am now, having missed almost five years of my life. But then, my life has changed more in the last two months than ever before. And only two people were with me through it. The first is imprisoned and the second wears a crown of blood. — Victoria Aveyard

During the first million years of its existence, mankind survived five apocalypses without succumbing to extinction. It endured the Apocalypse of Steel, the Apocalypse of Hydrogen, the Apocalypse of Serotonin, and both Apocalypses of Water, the second of which occurred despite certain contracts to the contrary. — Rachel Swirsky

As a first-generation Ethiopian immigrant, Sheba had lived in Charleston since she turned five years of age. She was Ethiopian by birth, but American by preference. She had worked hard, studied and sacrificed plenty to get where she was today, no easy feat for someone who had just celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday. According to her friends, Sheba was a beauty, though when she looked in the mirror, she saw inevitable flaws; her cheekbones were too pronounced, her mouth a little too wide, her nose with that perturbing slant to it. Still, she accepted compliments gratefully, especially from her roommate, Janelle. Janelle was the true beauty, Sheba thought, with dark ebony skin so smooth that she could be a walking ad for Ghirardelli Dark Chocolate. — Joanna Hynes

While I played Ranji Trophy for five years, I used to be asked, 'When are you playing for the nation?' - a question which I didn't have any answer to. I kept playing before I got my first break in 1996; those five years were indeed frustrating. — Rahul Dravid

No, she'd spent the last five years begging the Lord to help her find contentment in her spinster status. And he'd been faithful. She had her library, her Ladies Aid work, the children's reading hour. She could come and go as she pleased, spend her money as she deemed fit, all without the hassle of first gaining a man's permission. And if the loneliness sometimes ate away at her like water poured on a sugarloaf ... ? Well, God had seen her through the last five years. She figured he could be depended upon to see her through the next fifty. — Karen Witemeyer

Received a gift - it was the first decent piece of instruction about marriage I had ever been given in my twenty-five years of life. "Does your husband make you a better person?" Edra asked. There I was in that sky-blue pool beneath a bright blue sky, my fingers breaking apart the light on the water, and I had no idea what she was talking about. "Are you smarter, kinder, more generous, more compassionate, a better writer?" she said, running down her list. "Does he make you better?" "That's not the question," I said. "It's so much more complicated than that." "It's not more complicated than that, — Ann Patchett

While I was doing the residency in Paris, I found out that I was chosen as one of the five winners of the Focus Features Africa First Program. All this happened less than a year after I made my first two short films. — Chika Anadu

The first year was hard for me to deal with. The second year was a little bit easier, but still difficult. It took me five years to get it out of me. It was a difficult moment, a difficult time. — Magic Johnson

I haven't been on a first date over five years.
Five. Years.
Which means, I haven't been on one since 2006.
Let me take you back to that time: 2006.
Tom Cruise and Kathie Holmes celebrated the birth of their little "TomKitten."
The Wii came out - and YouTube was flooded with videos of people throwing those little white remotes into their TVs.
Britney and Kevin call it quits, shocking America to its very core.
Facebook was still just a college campus thing - if you wanted to stalk someone, you had to buy a zoom lens and some night vision goggles.
It was a simpler time. — Elodia Strain

For the first few hundred years of American history, food preparation was generally approached in a no-nonsense manner. Even as late as twenty-five years ago, the general attitude was that "feeding your face" was all right, but to make too much fuss about it was somehow decadent. In the past two decades, of course, the trend has reversed itself so sharply that earlier misgivings about gastronomic excesses seem almost to have been justified. Now we have "foodies" and wine freaks who take the pleasures of the palate as seriously as if they were rites in a brand-new religion. Gourmet — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Miss Granger, you foolish girl, how could you think of tackling a mountain troll on your own? Five points will be taken from Gryffindor for this," said Professor McGonagall. "I'm very disappointed in you."
Hermione left. Professor McGonagall turned to Harry and Ron.
"Well, I still say you were lucky, but not many first years could have taken on a full-grown mountain troll. You each win Gryffindor five points. — J.K. Rowling

For seventy-five years I've made ladies dresses. That means that for seventy-five years I have made women happy. For seventy-five years I have made mature women spin around in front of the mirror like young girls. For seventy-five years I have made young girls look in the mirror and for the first time see a woman staring back at them. I have made young men's eyes pop out. I've made old men's eyes pop out. Because the right dress does that. It makes ordinary women feel extraordinary. — Jane L Rosen

I traveled the world ten times over doing something I never thought I'd do in a million years. I found myself in Tokyo, Japan. I (was in) a Dell Computer commercial, the first thing I had ever done, and I fell in love with it. I fell in love with the green screens, I fell in love with (everything). The translator was explaining everything to me. It was a passion like I had never felt before. I came back and it took me five years to really accept that that was okay. — Drew Waters

I've been studying the Bible for a long time. I remember that after the first five years or so of diligently studying the Word, I didn't feel like I had made any progress. There were a lot of things in my life that were out of order, and I didn't feel like I was getting anywhere. — Joyce Meyer

We labour under a sort of superstition that the child has nothing to learn during the first five years of its life. On the contrary the fact is that the child never learns in after-life what it does in its first five years. — Mahatma Gandhi

I was five years old the first time I got drunk. — Jack London

It suddenly occurred to him that for the first time in years, they were about to be alone together for more than five minutes.
Just the two of them. On a small jet. Tens of thousands of feet in the air.
Christ.
Maybe he should've packed a parachute, just in case. — Elle Kennedy

I did 30 Minute Meals for five years on local television, and I earned nothing the first two years. Then I earned $50 a segment. I spent more than that on gas and groceries, but I really enjoyed making the show and I loved going to a viewer's house each week. I knew I enjoyed it, so I stuck with it even though it cost me. — Rachael Ray

Commercial cellphone use began in the early 1980s, but it took 20 years to go from the first to the billionth cellphone subscriber in 2002. It then took only four years to reach two billion subscribers in 2006, the approximate beginning of the Shift Age. It then took two years to reach three billion cellphone users in 2008, four billion by 2009, five billion by the end of 2010, and 5.3 billion by the end of 2011. As of the writing of this book, there are 7.2 billion people alive today, and approximately 6.1 billion of them have cellphones. If you discount those under the age of eight and those living in remote parts of the world, humanity has now reached almost complete cellphone ubiquity. — David Houle

For the first time in the history of our country the majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. — Jimmy Carter

Find ways for people to shape their work and the company In addition to stripping leaders of the traditional tools of power and relying on facts to make decisions, we give Googlers uncommon freedom in shaping their own work and the company. Google isn't the first to do so. For over sixty-five years, 3M has offered its employees 15 percent of their time to explore: "A core belief of 3M is that creativity needs freedom. That's why, since about 1948, we've encouraged our employees to spend 15% of their working time on their own projects. To take our resources, to build up a unique team, and to follow their own insights in pursuit of problem-solving."103 Post-it Notes famously came out of this program, as did a clever abrasive material, Trizact, which somehow sharpens itself as it's used. — Anonymous

Proust has been dead since 1922, yet the annual appearance of his posthumous works has left him, to the reader, alive. Now there is nothing left to publish. Five years after his interment, Proust seems dead for the first time. — Janet Flanner

Seven million German dead, including the five hundred thousand killed by the Allied bombing campaign. The sixty million dead overall of the Second World War, including eleven million murdered in the Holocaust. The sixteen million of the First World War, over four million in Vietnam, forty million to the Mongol conquests, three and a half million to the Hundred Years War, the fall of Rome took seven million, the Napoleonic Wars took four million, twenty million to the Taiping Rebellion. And so on and so on and so on, all the way back to — Kate Atkinson

Her emotions boiled up like one of the Yellowstone geysers just down the road. First shock and right on its heels came fury. When Hud had left town five years ago, she'd convinced herself she'd never have to lay eyes on that sorry son of a bitch again. And here he was. Damn, just when she thought things couldn't get any worse. — B. J. Daniels

My parents were married for sixty-five years, and I was married for about ten minutes, my first year at Yale Drama School. Something, somehow, didn't get passed on to my generation. — Lewis Black

For the first five years of my life, I grew up in a log cabin in coastal British Columbia in a very small town, like 300 people, mostly hippies. No running water, no electricity. When I was 12, I changed my name from Dharma to Stewart. At that age, you just want to be normal. — Stewart Butterfield

I liked working with Republicans. We had five pretty good years after we had that bad year in '95 that culminated in two government shutdowns. But then they really decided that they liked being in the majority for the first time in forty years, and they wanted to get some things done, and I agreed, to get things I wanted. It was all perfectly transparent. Everybody knew what they wanted and what I wanted. — William J. Clinton

I went to Glenalmond and got the piss taken out of me for my Glasgow accent. Then I spent five years at this very posh school, came out sounding like Prince Charles, which you have to do in order to survive, and then I got called Lord Fauntleroy for the first six months at art school. — Robbie Coltraine

Imagine waking from a twenty-five-year sleep, and the first faces you saw were Sil and Lord Weirdo. Aunty Terpy's sanity would run gibbering back to whatever cracked little corner of her skull it had been occupying all these years. — Vic James

The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing merry-go-round. True, they are a merry-go-round of ill-gaited and wind-broken horses, painted first in pastel colors, then in dull grays and browns, but perplexing and intolerably dizzy the thing is, as never were the merry-go-rounds of childhood or adolescence; as never, surely, were the certain-coursed, dynamic roller-coasters of youth. For most men and women these thirty years are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I proceed with the proper subject of this discourse; namely, the further changes in scientific belief, which have occurred within my own recollection, even since the time when I first aspired to authorship, now forty- five years ago. — Asa Gray

Solzhenitsyn recounted a party conference in Moscow that ended with a tribute to Stalin. Everyone stood and clapped wildly for three minutes, then four, then five ... and then no one dared to be the first to stop. After eleven minutes of increasingly stinging palms, a factory director on the platform finally sat down, followed by the rest of the grateful assembly. He was arrested that evening and sent to the gulag for ten years.278 — Steven Pinker

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

If you're like most people, you'll do one thing for two to three years, then something else for two to three years, and then - somewhere in that five- to seven-year distance from Yale - you'll see a need to fully commit to something that's a longer-term project: graduate school, for example, or a job you need to stick with for some real time. The question is: where do you need to be with yourself such that when the time comes to 'cast your whole vote,' you're reasonably confident you're not being either fear-based or ego-driven in your choice . . . that the journey you're on is really yours, and not someone else's? If you think of your first few jobs after Yale in this way - holistically and in terms of your growth as a person rather than as ladder rungs to a specific material outcome - you're less likely to wake up at age forty-five married to a stranger." Yikes! — Marina Keegan

For the first five years of my life, things felt pretty good. A lot went wrong after that, family-wise. — Damon Galgut

My object is to show that the chief function of the child
his business in the world during the first six or seven years of his life
is to find out all he can, about whatever comes under his notice, by means of his five senses ... — Charlotte M. Mason