Forty Seven Quotes & Sayings

As there is no narrative, his poetry has been described as lyrical. As A. J. Smith observes, 'The most directly influential body of lyric poetry in European literature Il Canzoniere of Petrarch consists of some three hundred and eighty sonnets, madrigals and canzoni, sensitively registering every nuance of the poet's forty-seven-year devotion to one Laura. — Brenda Liddy

It seems to me that a man who can think straight along for forty-seven years without changing a single idea ought to be kept in a cabinet as a curiosity. — Jean Webster

Christmas was over. It had passed, as usual, in a fever of generosities, and left an aftertaste of swindle in its wake. "Anticippointment" Pamela said ... and there was in that invented word all the regret and resignation that forty-seven years of Christmases had built up in her. — David Leavitt

Twenty-two hours, forty-seven minutes, and eighteen seconds to go! — Shannon Hale

In a cab back in Jersey, I finally answered one of thirty-three of Kyle's text messages (he called forty-seven times, I shit you not. Who does that!) — L.D. Davis

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

In the 1954 Internal Revenue Code, a Republican Congress changed forty-year, straight-line depreciation for buildings to permit 'accelerated depreciation' of greenfield income-producing property in seven years. By enabling owners to depreciate or write off the value of a building in such a short time, the law created a gigantic hidden subsidy for the developers of cheap new commercial buildings located on strips. Accelerated depreciation not only encouraged poor construction, it also discouraged maintenance ... After time, the result was abandonment. — Dolores Hayden

Oz had arranged rows of folding chairs for the women facing one of the soft suede couches where he had placed himself and Kermit. "Big mistake," Oz later told me. "The sofa was about a foot and a half lower than the chairs and now Kermit and I are looking up at forty-seven women - our knees under our chins. — Lynn Povich

I was up watching Meet Joe Black at four AM. I was hoping Brad Pitt would die, and he was still alive at seven forty in the morning! I actually felt sorry for once, for critics. — Rose McGowan

For instance, a race of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings once built themselves a gigantic supercomputer called Deep Thought to calculate once and for all the Question to the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe and Everything. For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two - and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was. And this computer, which was called the Earth, was so large that it was frequently mistaken for a planet - especially by the strange apelike beings who roamed its surface, totally unaware that they were simply part of a gigantic computer program. And this is very odd, because without that fairly simple and obvious piece of knowledge, nothing that ever happened on the Earth could possibly make the slightest bit of sense. — Douglas Adams

I detest all books which run chronologically, which commence at the cradle and end with the grave. Even life doesn't run that way, much as people think it does. Life only commences at the hour of spiritual birth - which may be at eighteen or at forty-seven. And death is never the goal - but life! more life! — Henry Miller

I'm still not at my ideal weight. I didn't lose forty-five pounds before the wedding. Who knows if I ever will. I've lost twenty-seven and a half pounds, and that's better than nothing. Somehow, though, today I'm thinking more about what I've gained than what I've lost. — K.A. Barson

Because of our library system anyone in America can educate themselves in any field they desire. If they are confused, librarians (that without exception in my forty-seven years experience with them) actually want to help; they take the time to try and get whatever is needed. For free. For anybody. — Nevada Barr

I feel like I'm playing some giant video game, or trying to solve a really complicated math equation. 'One girl is trying to avoid forty raiding parties of between fifteen to twenty people each, spread out across a radius of seven miles. If she has to make it 2.7 miles through the center, what is the probablitiy she will wake up tomorrow morning in a jail cell? Please feel free to round pi to 3.14'. — Lauren Oliver

Lots of forms. Stacks of forms. An average of nine thousand, seven hundred, and forty-seven of them were required to gain entrance to Hell. The largest form ran to fifteen thousand, four hundred, and ninety-seven questions. The shortest to just five, but five of such subtle phraseology, labyrinthine grammar, and malicious ambiguity that, released into the mortal world, they would certainly have formed the basis of a new religion or, at the least, a management course. — Jonathan L. Howard

Throughout my life, there has always been a number that sounded old. When I was sixteen, it was twenty-seven; at twenty-nine, it was forty-two; at thirty-eight, it was fifty-two. At sixty-five, however, it was sixty-five. — Mark Jacobson

Since I was forty and definitely slipping, I have won seven full marathons, got second six times, and third four times ... I'm wondering what I can do after I'm fifty. — Clarence DeMar

Interestingly, my first director's cut was an hour and forty-one minutes. Then, the studio actually wanted to add more to the story, so we went all the way up to an hour and forty-seven minutes. After that, I made some additional cuts and now we are where we are. — Kim Jee-woon

By 1929, one out of every five Americans had a car (as opposed to one out of thirty-seven Englishmen, one out of forty Frenchmen, and one out of forty-eight Germans). — Maureen Corrigan

Let me share a famous life history with you. This was a man who failed in business at the age of twenty-one; was defeated in a legislative race at age twenty-two; failed again in business at age twenty-four; had his sweetheart die when he was age twennty-six; had a nervous breakdown at age twenty-seven; lost a congressional race at age thirty-four; lost a senatorial race at age forty-five; failed in an effort to become vice-president at age forty-seven; lost a senatorial race at age forty-nine; and was elected president of the United States at age fifty-two. This man was Abraham Lincoln. — Shiv Khera

The scoreboard read 2:2 with forty-seven seconds left on the clock. Cheerleaders, including Audrey, clapped, chanted, and danced. Jane, the mascot, in a knight's suit of armor, jumped up and down with them. An announcer stood on the field with a golden microphone, as the teams got into their huddles and took up positions along the kill zones. Mal and Evie stood in the bleachers, watching Jay and Carlos down on the bench. — Walt Disney Company

No mathematician should ever allow him to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game. ... Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty. There have been men who have done great work later; ... [but] I do not know of a single instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty. ... A mathematician may still be competent enough at sixty, but it is useless to expect him to have original ideas. — G.H. Hardy

Wendelin the Weird enjoyed being burned so much that she allowed herself to be caught no less than forty-seven times in various disguises. — J.K. Rowling

But the ear, let us not forget, starts operating on the forty-fifth day of the pregnancy of a woman. Seven and a half months advance over the eye ... (but) what do we do in our society, in our civilisation, to continue this process? — Daniel Barenboim

Don't talk to me about sense.
i've been alive for forty-seven years and I have absolutely no understanding of human nature whatsoever. I might as well be living with a completely different species, giant squids or perhaps some kind of insect colony. — Christopher Fowler

You're so bad at good-byes, he whispers in my ear. Which is true. There is an average of about forty-seven minutes between the time we first type "goodnight" and the moment we actually stop sending our words back and forth. — Stephanie Perkins

In Ukraine's cities - Kharkiv, Kiev, Stalino, Dnipropetrovsk - hundreds of thousands of people waited each day for a simple loaf of bread. In Kharkiv, the republic's capital, Jones saw a new sort of misery. People appeared at two o'clock in the morning to queue in front of shops that did not open until seven. On an average day forty thousand people would wait for bread. Those in line were so desperate to keep their places that they would cling to the belts of those immediately in front of them. Some were so weak from hunger that they could not stand without the ballast of strangers. The waiting lasted all day, and sometimes for two. Pregnant women and maimed war veterans had lost their right to buy out of turn, and had to wait in line with the rest if they wanted to eat. Somewhere in line a woman would wail, and the moaning would echo up and down the line, so that the whole group of thousands sounded like a single animal with an elemental fear. — Timothy Snyder

My wife Mary and I have been married for forty-seven years and not once have we had an argument serious enough to consider divorce; murder, yes, but divorce, never. — Jack Benny

I read a recent statistic that eighty-seven percent of women are dissatisfied with themselves, and over forty-seven percent of men. My work is visu-medicine to heal people and see beauty within people. — Jamel Shabazz

I could stay with Mears-Starbuck for forty-seven years, I thought. I could live with a crazy girlfriend, get my left ear sliced off and maybe inherit Ferris' job when he retired. — Charles Bukowski

So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens - four dowager and three regnant - and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Forty minutes later, I leaned back in my chair, and looked at the thousand or so pages of manuscript towering on my desk. It hit me. Holy cow. This author had total control over this book. Total. And it was one of seven. One. Of. Seven. — Carla Bolte

And let's say that I know it will take you forty-seven situations and events before you actually hear me-that is, before you will hear clearly enough to agree with me and change. So when you don't hear me the first time, I'm not frustrated or disappointed, I'm thrilled. Only forty-six more times to go! And that first time will be a building block to construct a bridge of healing that one day-that today-you will walk across. - Papa — William Paul Young

I went to bed wearing my oldest, most faded flannel shirt, the bra that had looked all right in the catalog but was obviously an escapee from a downmarket nursing home when it arrived, white cotton panties that had had pansies on them about seven hundred washings ago and were now a kind of mottled gray, and the jeans I usually wore for housecleaning or raking Yolande's garden because they were too shabby for work even if I never came out of the bakery. Food inspector arrest-on-sight jeans. Oh, and fuzzy green plaid socks. It was a cool night for summer. Relatively. I lay down on top of the bedspread. And slept through till the alarm at three-forty-five. He hadn't come. T — Robin McKinley

ROSEMARY AND EUNICE'S brother Ted, a senator from Massachusetts for more than forty-seven years, would take over as legislative champion for the cause of the disabled by initiating, sponsoring, and supporting hundreds of pieces of legislation. He believed that Rosemary "taught us the worth of every human being. — Kate Clifford Larson

Forty-seven generations before, the King of the Southerners had stolen a rhinoceros out of the Northern King's private zoo. ( - That's it? - Wars have started for less. - But that's stupid. - Precisely.) — Patrick Ness

In Pennsylvania, 38 percent of Pennsylvania seniors chose to get their Medicare from a plan called Medicare Advantage. It's their choice. Forty-seven percent of them are going to lose it under 'Obamacare' according to Medicare by 2017. — Paul Ryan

All right gentlemen, we have a job to do. At approximately 01:30 tonight, three children made an escape. Our job is to find them and bring them back. Every minute the factory is down, I lose two thousand, seven hundred and thirty-eight dollars and forty-seven cents. Therefore, we must find them and find them fast. They were last seen heading south by southwest in three makeshift kites. We'll head in that direction, fanning out and using our heat sensors to track them. Any questions?" Tubaface raised his hand. "Yes?"
"Where do babies come from?"
"That question is wholly innapropriate to our present situation. Someone slap him. — Sean Cullen

I've got the flask I stole from Elliot down in my locker," Annie says.

Time: three minutes, forty-two seconds. And the record of nine minutes, seven seconds continues to hold strong.

"You want a nip before you head over?" Annie offers sweetly.

She's a good friend - like Helen to Jane in Jane Eyre. As kind as she is pretty.

I shake my head. Then I pull my big-girl knickers up all the way to my neck. "I'll let you know how it goes — Emma Chase

After forty years in the lab, I was asked in 1991 to become president of The Rockefeller University. Unlike a working scientist, being president for seven years provided an opportunity to interact with scientists in many different fields and broadened my scope of the natural sciences. — Torsten Wiesel

Jim Snow pretty much looked his age. Slouching in his swivel chair to the right of Alice's desk, his thinning brown hair was cut short and parted along the side. He wore dark blue slacks and a plaid shirt. At forty-seven and a couple inches over six feet, Snow's muscular frame overshadowed his body fat, but only when he made an effort to suck in his gut. Usually he didn't bother. — Rex Kusler

FORTY-SEVEN We found Diva in a shriek of Divas, in the lobby of the President hotel. The three of them stopped, staring at us with well-practised aghast. Didier was in a rumpled, white linen jacket and — Gregory David Roberts

I now realize that the small hills you see on ski slopes are formed around the bodies of forty-seven-year-olds who tried to learn snowboarding. — Dave Barry

And when the governess had left, he would slip out of his own room and peer at her door until her light was extinguished at last, before he returned to bed to stew anew in lust and yearning.
A habit that he'd kept to this day, whenever they happened to be under the same roof.
Her light turned off. He sighed. How long would he keep at this? Soon he would be twenty-seven. Did he still plan to stand in a dark passage in the middle of the night and gaze upon her door when he was thirty-seven? Forty-seven? Ninetyseven? — Sherry Thomas

I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo. — Harry Truman

Had campaigned hard to the very end, but Barack had won and now it was time to support him. The causes and people I had campaigned for, the Americans who had lost jobs and health care, who couldn't afford gas or groceries or college, who had felt invisible to their government for the previous seven years, now depended on his becoming the forty-fourth President of the United States. — Hillary Rodham Clinton

The second simultaneous thing Reacher was doing was playing around with a little mental arithmetic. He was multiplying big numbers in his head. He was thirty-seven years and eight months old, just about to the day. Thirty-seven multiplied by three hundred and sixty-five was thirteen thousand five hundred and five. Plus twelve days for twelve leap years was thirteen thousand five hundred and seventeen. Eight months counting from his birthday in October forward to this date in June was two hundred and forty-three days. Total of thirteen thousand seven hundred and sixty days since he was born. Thirteen thousand seven hundred and sixty days, thirteen thousand seven hundred and sixty nights. He was trying to place this particular night somewhere on that endless scale. In terms of how bad it was. Truth was, it wasn't the best night he had ever passed, but it was a long way from being the worst. A very long way. — Lee Child

I wasn't there that day to get on the three forty-seven to Yass", he says. "I was there to throw myself in front of it. — Melina Marchetta

We have had a hard and somewhat dangerous but very successful trip. No less than six weeks were spent... forcing our way down through what seemed a literally endless succession of rapids and cataracts. For forty-eight days we saw no human being. In passing these rapids we lost five of the seven canoes... One of our best men lost his life in the rapids. Under the strain one of the men went completely bad... and when punished by the sergeant he... murdered the sergeant and fled into the wilderness... We have put on the map a river about 1500 kilometres in length... Until now its upper course has been utterly unknown to every one, and its lower course... unknown to all cartographers. — Theodore Roosevelt

Once a hunter met a lion near the hungry critter's lair,
and the way that lion mauled him was decidedly unfair;
but the hunter never whimpered when the surgeons, with their thread,
sewed up forty-seven gashes in his mutilated head;
and he showed the scars in triumph, and they gave him pleasant fame,
and he always blessed the lion that had camped upon his frame.
Once that hunter, absent minded, sat upon a hill of ants,
and about a million bit him, and you should have seen him dance!
And he used up lots of language of a deep magenta tint,
and apostrophized the insects in a style unfit to print.
And it's thus with worldly troubles;
when the big ones come along, we serenely go to meet them, feeling valiant, bold and strong, but the weary little worries with their poisoned stings and smarts, put the lid upon our courage, make us gray, and break our hearts. — Walt Mason

Pessimism always sounds more sophisticated than optimism - it's the Eden-collapse myth over and over again - and then you look at G.D.P. per capita worldwide, and it's up and to the right. If this is collapse, let's have more of it!" Global unemployment is rising, too - this seems to be the first industrial revolution that wipes out more jobs than it creates. One 2013 paper argues that forty-seven per cent of all American jobs are destined to be automated. — Anonymous

New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two. — Donald Hall

I had made sure of what to say to him before I came to the table. 'The Amanita phalloides,' I said to him, 'holds three different poisons. There is amanitin, which works slowly and is most potent. There is phalloidin, which acts at once, and there is phallin, which dissolves red corpuscles, although it is the least potent. The first symptoms do not appear until seven to twelve hours after eating, in some cases not before twenty-four or even forty hours. The symptoms begin with violent stomach pains, cold sweat, vomiting
— Shirley Jackson

On the next clear night, look up in the direction of the constellation humanity calls Cancer. Between the pincers of the right claw of that giant crab in the sky sits a faint star. No matter how hard you stare, you won't see it with the naked eye. It can only be viewed through a telescope with a thirty-meter aperture. Even if you could travel at the speed of light, fast enough to circle the earth seven and a half times in a single second, it would take over forty years to reach that star. — Hiroshi Sakurazaka

The climax came on May 1, when Liverpool and the Mersey were attacked for seven successive nights. Seventy-six thousand people were made homeless and three thousand killed or injured. Sixty-nine out of a hundred and forty-four berths were put out of action, and the tonnage landed for a while was cut to a quarter. — Winston S. Churchill

A year or two younger than his eminently practical friend, Mr. Bounderby looked older; his seven or eight and forty might have had the seven or eight added to it again, without surprising anybody. He had not much hair. One might have fancied he had talked it off; and that what was left, all standing up in disorder, was in that condition from being constantly blown about by his windy boastfulness. — Charles Dickens

Non-magic people (more commonly known as Muggles) were particularly afraid of magic in medieval times, but not very good at recognizing it. On the rare occasion that they did catch a real witch or wizard, burning had no effect whatsoever. The witch or wizard would perform a basic Flame-Freezing Charm and then pretend to shriek with pain while enjoying a gentle, tickling sensation. Indeed, Wendelin the Weird enjoyed being burned so much that she allowed herself to be caught no less than forty-seven times in various disguises. Harry — J.K. Rowling

She bit the inside of her cheek. "You wouldn't keep secrets from me, would you? I mean we've been friends how long?"
"We have been friends, thirteen years, eight months, two weeks, four days," The wheelchair stopped and Ari watched the long shadow look at his watch. "Sixteen hours, four minutes and forty seven seconds and counting I'd say; give or take thirty minutes. Or if you want the short version: five thousand and four days plus or minus a few hours."
She put her hands to her face and laughed to keep from crying. "Please tell me you made half of that up. Who actually keeps track of time like that? — Victoria Escobar

Do you think I don't deserve to grieve as much as someone who lost their son after forty years? Twenty-seven years is a short time to have a son. Just because it was short, it doesn't mean it didn't happen. It was just short. That's all. — Taylor Jenkins Reid

On the opposite wall was a Damien Hirst spot painting, bought by Arabella after a decent bonus season. Roger's considered view of the painting, looking at it from aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of view, was that it had cost forty-seven thousand pounds, plus VAT. — John Lanchester

How does he do it? Bob in Charge of All Three Kids is an entirely different show
than Sarah in Charge of All Three Kids. With Bob, they're happily willing to be independent little taskmasters, content to leave him in peace until he comes to them with an offer of a new activity. With me, I have all the magnetism of a favorite rock star without the bodyguards. They're on me. A typical example: Linus is under my feet, whining, begging to be picked up, while Lucy hollers, "Mom, I need help!" from another room, while Charlie asks me forty-seven hundred relentless questions about what happens to trash. — Lisa Genova

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

Before Admiral Guzzetti traveled to Washington to see Kissinger in October 1976, Hill had met him and told him that "murdering priests and dumping forty-seven bodies in the street in one day could not be seen in the context of defeating the terrorists quickly; on the contrary such acts were probably counterproductive. What the USG [United States Government] hoped was that the GOA [Government of Argentina] could soon defeat terrorists, yes, but as nearly as possible within the law." Even this admonition, which might be seen by some as containing a loophole or two, was considered too harsh by Kissinger. Guzzetti — Christopher Hitchens

WHAT IS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN? "How many drinks have you had?" FORTY-SEVEN. "Just about anything, then," said the barman — Terry Pratchett

Out," I instructed as I began peeling my clothes from my body. "I am going to pee for twenty-seven minutes, and then I'm going to shower for forty-two minutes, followed by scrubbing my teeth for sixty-one minutes. — Robyn Peterman

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

You were too young back then to understand how much you would later forget - and too locked in the present to realize that the person you were writing to was in fact your future self. So you put down the journal, and little by little, over the course of the next forty-seven years, almost everything was lost. — Paul Auster

Cloak, how many laws of physics did we just break?" I asked, stunned by what had just happened. "You can't break the laws of physics. Whenever you seem to violate one, it only means your understanding of them is incomplete. To answer your question, though, three hundred and forty-seven." "I thought so." I was amazed at the power — C.T. Phipps

Apparently it takes, like, forty-seven muscles to frown. Flippin' the bird' s a hell of a lot easier. — Lois Greiman

Forty-five minutes later, Benedict was slouching in his chair, his eyes glazed. Every now and then he had to stop and make sure his mouth wasn't hanging open.
His mother's conversation was that boring.
The young lady she had wanted to discuss with him had actually turned out to be seven young ladies, each of which she assured him was better than the last.
Benedict thought he might go mad. Right here in his mother's sitting room he was going to go stark, raving mad. He'd suddenly pop out of his chair, fall to the floor in a frenzy his arms and legs waving, mouth frothing-
"Benedict, are you even listening to me?"
He looked up and blinked. Damn. Now he would have to focus on his mother's list of possible brides. The prospect of losing his sanity had been infinitely more appealing. — Julia Quinn

If you were looking aside and mentally adding up the hours until the execution of a young killer, all that registered was something dark flashing by. But if you happened to be gazing directly at the window in question and you happened as well to be feeling unprecedentedly calm, four-tenths of a second was more than enough time to identify the falling object as your husband of forty-seven years. — Jonathan Franzen

Yet early on in the marriage I found myself
despite all my self-promises
drifting into the role of wife: focusing on the renovations of the apartment, doing silly little domestic things instead of writing, using the wife role as cop-out from my work, my work which had always involved me in so much controversy and which some part of me longed to retreat from ... Even when I was forty-seven, full of my own power, my own identity, something in me wanted to escape from the fray and dwindle into a wife. It seemed to comfy, so safe. — Erica Jong

[A Buddhist monk on a pilgrimage speaks to a museum curator.]
And I come here alone. For five
seven
eighteen
forty years it was in my mind that the old Law was not well followed; being overlaid, as thou knowest, with devildom, charms, and idolatry ... '
So it comes with all faiths. — Rudyard Kipling

When, sometime around my fortieth birthday, I was struck by the urge to try to write a novel, I was vastly comforted to learn that Rex Stout didn't write his first Nero Wolfe tale until he was forty-seven, and that he proceeded to write them right up to his death at the age of eighty-eight. It was considerably less comforting to learn that he typically completed a novel in thirty-eight days, and that he always got it right on the first try. P. G. Wodehouse once said, "Stout's supreme triumph was the creation of Archie Goodwin." That's how I've always felt about it, too. When I returned those first Rex Stout books to my librarian, I said to her, "Do you have any more of these Archie Goodwin stories?" She smiled, I recall, and said, "Why, yes. Dozens. — Rex Stout

looting is a hard-won and dangerous act with potentially terrible consequences, and looters are only stealing from the rich owners' profit margins. Those owners, meanwhile, especially if they own a chain like KwikTrip, steal forty hours every week from thousands of employees who in return get the privilege of not dying for another seven days. — Anonymous

Forty-seven is nothing at all, nor is any age unless you're a cheese ... — Billie Burke

I've learned that when you get to be a certain age, you can get away with saying a lot of things, some of which wouldn't even be remotely funny if someone forty years younger said them. The Golden Girls ran for years off the same theory and basically used the same four jokes for seven marvelous seasons. — George Takei

Any messages for me?" Usually I got one or two, but mostly people who wanted my help preferred to talk in person.
"Yes. Hold on." She pulled out a handful of pink tickets and recited from memory, without checking the paper. "Seven forty-two a.m., Mr. Gasparian: I curse you. I curse your arms so they wither and die and fall off your body. I curse your eyeballs to explode. I curse your feet to swell until blue. I curse your spine to crack. I curse you. I curse you. I curse you. — Ilona Andrews

Solomon'sexcess became an insult upon the privileges of mankind; for by the same plan of luxury, which made it necessary to have forty thousand stalls of horses,
he had unfortunately miscalculated his other wants, and so had seven hundred wives ...
Wise
deluded man! — Laurence Sterne

About 90 percent of all soy is genetically modified (GMO). Soy is also one of the top seven allergens, and is widely known to cause immediate hypersensitivity reactions. While in the last forty years soy has occupied an important place in the transition from an unhealthy meat-based diet to vegetarian and vegan cuisine, it is time for us to upgrade our food choice to one having more benefits, and fewer negative possibilities. In 1986, Stuart Berger, MD, placed soy among the seven top allergens - one of the "sinister seven." At the time, most experts listed soy around tenth or eleventh. — Gabriel Cousens

Those smooth, spit-cleaned cheeks gave no indication of the dreams crowding her skull. Should she make it to adulthood, the girl would arrive with two hundred and six bones. Two and a half million sweat glands. Ninety-six thousand kilometers of blood vessels. Forty-six chromosomes. Seven meters of small intestines. Six hundred and six discrete muscles. One hundred billion cerebral neurons. Two kidneys. A liver. A heart. A hundred trillion cells that died and were replaced, again and again. But no matter how many ways she dismembered and quantified the body lying beside her, she couldn't say how many years the girl would wait before she married, if at all, or how many children she would have, if any; and between teh creation of this body and its end lay the mystery the girl would spend her life solving. — Anthony Marra

I'm thirty-eight, going on forty. I'm not like Naoko. There's nobody waiting for me to get out, no family to take me back. I don't have any work to speak of, and almost no friends. And after seven years, I don't know what's going on out there. Oh, I'll read a paper in the library every once in a while, but I haven't set foot outside this property for seven years. I wouldn't know what to do if I left." "But maybe a new world would open up for you," I said. "It's worth a try, don't you think?" "Hmm, you may be right," she said, turning her cigarette lighter over and over in her hand. "But I've got my own set of problems. I — Haruki Murakami

So now I started playing hardball; now I picked the Dictaphone up and demanded to know about the shrapnel, for Harvey has some shrapnel in his groin, I know he does, and he knows I know. A doctor found it in a routine X-ray in 1991, forty-seven years after Harvey thought it had been removed. I was sixteen at the time, EMF had a hit with "Unbelievable" and I was wearing harem pants. If — Zadie Smith

This was puzzling, as the standard textbook of psychiatry at the time stated that incest was extremely rare in the United States, occurring about once in every million women.8 Given that there were then only about one hundred million women living in the United States, I wondered how forty seven, almost half of them, had found their way to my office in the basement of the hospital. Furthermore, the textbook said, "There is little agreement about the role of father-daughter incest as a source of serious subsequent psychopathology." My patients with incest histories were hardly free of "subsequent psychopathology" - they were profoundly depressed, confused, and often engaged in bizarrely self-harmful behaviors, such as cutting themselves with razor blades. The textbook went on to practically endorse incest, explaining that "such incestuous activity diminishes the subject's chance of psychosis and allows for a better adjustment to the external world."9 — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

Has the gift of laughter been withdrawn from me? I protest that I do still, at the age of forty-seven, laugh often and loud and long. But not, I believe, so long and loud and often as in my less smiling youth. And I am proud, nowadays, of laughing, and grateful to any one who makes me laugh. That is a bad sign. I no longer take laughter as a matter of course. — Max Beerbohm

Sorry, boyfriends everywhere - you're doomed to sit through an hour and forty-seven minutes of syrupy drivel. The payoff? Between my face, Tadd's abs and Quinton's biceps, your girl will be ready for takeoff as soon as the credits roll. You're welcome. — Tammara Webber

I am thinking about the way that life can be so slippery; the way that a twelve-year-old girl looking into the mirror to count freckles reaches out toward herself and that reflection has turned into that of a woman on her wedding day, righting her veil. And how, when that bride blinks, she reopens her eyes to see a frazzled young mother trying to get lipstick on straight for the parent/teacher conference that starts in three minutes. And how after that young woman bends down to retrieve the wild-haired doll her daughter has left on the bathroom floor, she rises up to a forty-seven-year-old, looking into the mirror to count age spots. — Elizabeth Berg

She was only forty-seven according to the file his aide had put together for him, but had gone totally gray by thirty-two. That early sign of aging was a genetic family trait that hadn't been bred out, likely because it gave the possessors a regal appearance, regardless of their chronological age. — Nalini Singh

The lady who works in the grocery store at the corner of my block is called Denise, and she's one of America's great unpublished novelists. Over the years she's written forty-two romantic novels, none of which have ever reached the bookstores. I, however, have been fortunate enough to hear the plots of the last twenty-seven of these recounted in installments by the authoress herself every time I drop by the store for a jar of coffee or can of beans, and my respect for Denise's literary prowess knows no bounds. So, naturally enough, when I found myself faced with the daunting task of actually starting the book you now hold in your hands, it was Denise I turned to for advice. — Dave Gibbons

The most impressive person I've ever met? Elaine Wynn is no slouch. She's a much better person than me. But I've got her. Finders keepers, losers weepers. And it's been forty-seven years. — Steve Wynn

Forty-seven years old, tired, but none the worse for wear. In a little more than thirteen months, he had discovered, analyzed, and packed tens of thousands of pieces of artwork, including eighty truckloads from Altaussee alone. He had organized the MFAA field officers at Normandy, pushed SHAEF to expand and support the monuments effort, mentored the other Monuments Men across France and Germany, interrogated many of the important Nazi art officials, and inspected most of the Nazi repositories south of Berlin and east of the Rhine. It would be no exaggeration to guess he put 50,000 miles on his old captured VW and visited nearly every area of action in U.S. Twelfth Army Group territory. And during his entire tour of duty on the continent, he had taken exactly one and a half days off. — Robert M. Edsel

...every period of life has its necessities, and at forty-seven it's just as well to trust a little to the head. — James Fenimore Cooper

Mao would hardly be deterred by the universal condemnation of the civilized world. He saw Stalin as his model. In the agrarian reforms, Stalin had killed seven million; Mao himself killed an estimated forty million Chinese in his reforms.49 — William J. Bennett

Forty-seven years
and I find I mind it less and less. — Louise Andrews Kent

It's a baby plane," Angel whispered when we first got inside the dollhouse-like interior. "It's going to grow up to be a seven forty-seven someday. — James Patterson

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

Or consider how we citizens of rich countries obtain our oil and minerals. Teodoro Obiang, the dictator of tiny Equatorial Guinea, sells most of his country's oil to American corporations, among them Exxon Mobil, Marathon, and Hess. Although his official salary is a modest $60,000, this ruler of a country of 550,000 people is richer than Queen Elizabeth II. He owns six private jets and a $35 million house in Malibu, as well as other houses in Maryland and Cape Town and a fleet of Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and Bentleys. Most of the people over whom he rules live in extreme poverty, with a life expectancy of forty-nine and an infant mortality of eighty-seven per one thousand (this means that more than one child in twelve dies before its first birthday). — Peter Singer

Yes. It was awful. What sucks even more is that it happened at 'World Famous San Diego Zoo,' that whore of a tourist attraction that insists on forty-seven billboards on every highway and nonstop advertising loops on radio and television. — Michelle Gable

Forty of Paracelsus's theological manuscripts still survive, as well as sixteen Bible commentaries, twenty sermons, twenty works on the Eucharist, and seven on the Virgin Mary. Half of these have never been properly edited, let alone printed in modern form. There is no question that Paracelsus thought long and hard about Christianity, and by styling himself a professor of theology (without, it seems, any official academic sanction) he implies that he regarded this component of his output to be the equal of his medical and chemical theories. That his role in the history of science and medicine has received far more attention than his theological oeuvre is, however, understandable and probably apt, for it cannot be said that he had much influence even on the religious debates of his day. In theology he never aspired to be a Luther, and that would in any case have been a futile aspiration for one so lacking in political acumen or the ability to foster disciples. — Philip Ball

Curious People
Soledad, five, daughter of Juanita Fernandez: "Why don't dogs eat dessert?"
Vera, six, daughter of Elsa Villagra: "Where does night sleep? Does night sleep here under the bed?"
Luis, seven, son of Francisca Bermudez: "Will God be angry if I don't believe in him? I don't know how to tell him."
Marcos, nine, son of Silvia Awad: "If God made himself, how did he make his back?"
Carlitos, forty, son of Maria Scaglione: "Mama, how old was I when you weaned me? My psychiatrist wants to know. — Eduardo Galeano