Forty Six Quotes & Sayings

His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.
His large head was pink, his brown hair thin and dry. His face was babyish in slumber, despite his wrinkles and the red spectacle-dents on the slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed; his cheeks were pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless upon the khaki-colored blanket was slightly puffy. — Sinclair Lewis

Red Ash mine was also the location of a disaster in 1900, which killed forty-six miners. This earlier catastrophe outraged Mother Jones, who spoke of it often on her organizing campaign that year, and it had triggered public pressure to improve the state's mine safety laws. The legislature rejected all proposals for reform, however. The lawmakers apparently agreed with West Virginia's Republican governor, G. W. Atkinson, who said in 1901: "It is but the natural course of mining events that men should be injured and killed by accidents. — James R. Green

shortly I should be able to live at peace in my cottage, with all the twenty four hours of the day to myself. Forty-six I am, and never yet had a whole week of leisure. What will 'for ever' feel like, and can I use it all? Please note its address from March onwards - Clouds Hill, Moreton, Dorset - and visit it, sometime, if you still stravage the roads of England in a great car. The cottage has two rooms; one, upstairs, for music (a gramophone and records) and one downstairs for books. There is a bath, in a demi-cupboard. For food one goes a mile, to Bovington (near the Tank Corps Depot) and at sleep-time I take my great sleeping bag, embroidered MEUM, and spread it on what seems the nicest bit of floor. There is a second bag, embroidered TUUM, for guests. The cottage looks simple, outside, and does no hurt to its setting which is twenty miles of broken heath and a river valley filled with rhododendrons run wild. I think everything, inside and outside my place, approaches perfection. — T.E. Lawrence

Each time they meet, they have more to discuss, and so they talk, quietly revealing themselves with and without language, their eyes moving like their hands over the plates of food between them....As he walks away from these visits, his heart almost bursts from happiness and regret. He would give anything to have made different choices. He is making those choices now, but he is forty-six years old. Sometimes he is haunted by the thought that it's all come too late. Other times he thinks, No, what is happening now could never have happened before; I was too young and too fearful. The paradox fascinates him--as the old loyalties desiccate and the danger intensifies, he feels lighter and younger than he has in years. — Karen Connelly

Happily, at forty-six I still feel as experimental and on the verge of getting at the truth as ever. — Virginia Woolf

The death of a real deer at my hands was just a vaporous, remote presence that hovered over the figure of the paper deer forty-five yards away at target six of our archery range, as I tried to hit the heart-lung section marked out in heavy black. — James Dickey

A week in the hospital she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female - a breast, a womb, a child, a man. — Anna Quindlen

My high salary for one season was forty-six thousand dollars and a Cadillac. — Duke Snider

Only a few hardy Westerners learn to speak Thai and even fewer learn to read it. At first glance it seems impossible and on second glance one would much rather not. The alphabet has forty-six wiggly consonants and thirty-one vowels, some of which are not visible to Western eyes. The language is a mixture of Pali, Sanskrit, Cambodian, and is of the Sino-Tibetan family and it seems to embrace the rules of all even when they conflict. King Rama Khamheng devised the alphabet in the thirteenth century and the writing shows the effect of having been born full-blown of kingly whim. — Carol Hollinger

Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days." 20They replied, "It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?" But the temple he had spoken of was his body. 22After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken. — Anonymous

What do you get if you multiply six by nine?"
"Six by nine. Forty two."
"That's it. That's all there is."
"I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe — Douglas Adams

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

I'm forty-six years old and I don't care who knows it, but what I will tell you is that when a woman is forty-six and has lived her life the way she's wanted to live it, she knows everything there is to know about what to do in the sack. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Won't the new 'Suggested for Mature Audience' protect our youngsters from such films? I don't believe so. I know many forty-five-year old men with the mentalities of six-year-olds, and my feeling is that they should not see such pictures, either. — Shirley Temple

Why do we look to everyone else to see what to do? Why don't we understand that they're all as lost and scared as we are? Why do we look at a random consensus, shaped by opinions and powers that drift like dunes, as an absolute truth? If "normal" could change tomorrow, why are we such slaves to it? And where has "normal" gotten us, anyway? We live in a society that can't stop pollution or environmental destruction, that can't raise educational standards, can't stay healthy and non-obese, can't balance a budget, has no sense of fiscal responsibility, is in an economic tailspin, and is rife with crime and murder and violence. Most people in this "normal" society of ours begin sitting still in a room for six to eight hours beginning in childhood. They continue that for twelve years and then begin sitting still in a different room for another forty years, at which point they hope to retire and sit still in a chair in front of the TV until they die. — Johnny B. Truant

Where complaints are made of the soldiers, it almost always turns out that the women have insulted them most grossly, swearing at them, and the like. One unpleasant old Dutch woman came in, bursting with wrath, and told the whole narrative of her blameless life, diversified with sobs: - " 'Last January I ran off two of my black people from St. Mary's to Fernandina,' (sob,) - 'then I moved down there myself, and at Lake City I lost six women and a boy,' (sob,) - 'then I stopped at Baldwin for one of the wenches to be confined,' (sob,) - 'then I brought them all here to live in a Christian country' (sob, sob). 'Then the blockheads' [blockades, that is, gunboats] 'came, and they all ran off with the blockheads,' (sob, sob, sob,) 'and left me, an old lady of forty-six, obliged to work for a living.' (Chaos of sobs, without cessation.) — Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Starting with Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia, by 1760, there had been eighteen uprisings aimed at overthrowing colonial governments. There had also been six black rebellions, from South Carolina to New York, and forty riots of various origins. By this time also, there emerged, according to Jack Greene, "stable, coherent, effective and acknowledged local political and social elites." And by the 1760s, this local leadership saw the possibility of directing much of the rebellious energy against England and her local officials. It was not a conscious conspiracy, but an accumulation of tactical responses. — Howard Zinn

Texas Rangers are men who cannot be stampeded. We walk into any situation and handle it without instruction from our commander. Sometimes we work as a unit, sometimes we work alone." He turned his attention to the jurors. "We preserve the law. We track down train and bank robbers. We subdue riots. We guard our borders. We'll follow an outlaw clear across the country if we need to. In my four years of service, I've traveled eighty-six thousand miles on horse, nineteen hundred on train, gone on two hundred thirty scouts, made two hundred seventeen arrests, returned five hundred six head of stolen cattle, assisted forty-three local sheriffs, guarded a half dozen jails, and spent more time on the trail than I have in my own bed. We've been around since before the Alamo, and" - he turned to Hood, impaling him with his stare - "we're touchy as a teased snake when riled, so I wouldn't recommend it. — Deeanne Gist

From forty-nine to fifty-six this aloneness becomes your focus of being. Everything else in the world loses meaning. The only remaining meaningful thing is this aloneness. From fifty-six to sixty-three you become absolutely what you are going to become: the potential blossoms, and from sixty-three to seventy you start getting ready to drop the body. Now you know you are not the body, you know you are not the mind either. The body was known as separate from you somewhere around the time when you were thirty-five. That the mind is separate from you was known near the time when you were forty-nine. Now, everything else drops except the witnessing self. Just the pure awareness, the flame of awareness remains with you - and this is the preparation for death. — Osho

How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese? — Charles De Gaulle

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

What will that mean to each of you? It will mean that those of you who might have lived to be seventy-one must die at seventy. Some of you who might have lived to be eighty-six must cough up your ghost at eighty-five. That's a great age. A year more or less doesn't sound like much. When the time comes, boys, you may regret. But, you will be able to say, this year I spent well, I gave for Pip, I made a loan of life for sweet Pipkin, the fairest apple that ever almost fell too early off the harvest tree. Some of you at forty-nine must cross life off at forty-eight. Some at fifty-five must lay them down to Forever's Sleep at fifty-four. Do you catch the whole thing intact now, boys? Do you add the figures? Is the arithmetic plain? A year! Who will bid three hundred and sixty-five entire days from out his own soul, to get old Pipkin back? Think, boys. Silence. Then, speak. — Ray Bradbury

Oh my God,' she said. 'I need a drink.' I was not sure why she was sharing this information with someone she had known for only forty-six minutes. I planned to consume some alcohol myself when I arrived home but saw no reason to inform Julie. — Graeme Simsion

In 1849 he had forty-six chieftains sign a treaty in which they declared themselves subjects of the queen. The Crown has had right of preemption for land sales ever since. — Sarah Lark

I have forty-six cookbooks. I have sixty-eight takeout menus from four restaurants. I have one hundred and sixteen soy sauce packets. I have three hundred and eighty-two dishes, bowls, cups, saucers, mugs and glasses. I eat over the sink. I have five sinks, two with a view. — Rick Moranis

The rest of the letters were pretty much the same as I got every day now. Two hundred and forty-six proposals, a number of them for marriage. Almost five hundred photographs taken in various stages of undress, the majority in the last. Several invitations to strange places where they wring the necks of chickens and take turns beating each other with whips, etc. (In case any of these correspondents may chance to read my book, I'd like to just say this to them: Doubtless you are sincere in what you do, but it does strike me that more useful pursuits could be found for grown people to spend their time at.) — Kenneth Patchen

scream until the drug took her. 5 They started arriving after four o'clock in the afternoon. By five, Rachael's disappearance was the lead story on all the local news stations, even in Tucson and Phoenix. When six rolled around, there were more cars parked along No-Water Lane than when the Hasslers had hosted their last Fourth of July barbecue. Come 7:15 P.M., more than forty people had crowded into Will and Rachael's modest adobe home in Ajo, — Blake Crouch

I feel very proud that we have managed to stay together. In these forty years we have made forty-six films. Each one has brought a certain name and contribution to cinema. — Ismail Merchant

And sleep that night on the cold plains of a foreign land, forty-six men wrapped in their blankets under the selfsame stars, the prairie wolves so like in their yammering, yet all about so changed and strange. — Cormac McCarthy

He kept his head down in what seemed to be a prayer. He counts. You've smiled at him four hundred and forty-six times as of a few minutes ago. He announces the number every time I see him. — Debra Anastasia

Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past. — Erica Jong

What followed were instructions for casting the spell itself and a diagram for laying the components out. Altin didn't like the secrecy thing, but a quick glance at the spell Greater Common Tongue showed that it was forty-three pages long. He didn't think he had that kind of time or expertise, so he decided to stick with the six-page version for now. He realized that getting cuttings of their hair was likely going to be an interesting trick as well. And he needed his quill pen, parchment and pot of ink, which meant he had to go back to the tower. He wondered how they were going to take his making another trip into the waterfall-pot room so soon, but he had little other choice. — John Daulton

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

That which had made Helmholtz so uncomfortably aware of being himself and all alone was too much ability. What the two men shared was the knowledge that they were individuals. But whereas the physically defective Bernard had suffered all his life from the consciousness of being separate, it was only quite recently that, grown aware of his mental excess, Helmholtz Watson had also become aware of his difference from the people who surrounded him. This Escalator-Squash champion, this indefatigable lover (it was said that he had had six hundred and forty different girls in under four years), this admirable committee man and best mixer had realized quite suddenly that sport, women, communal activities were only, so far as he was concerned, second bests. Really, and at the bottom, he was interested in something else. But in what? In what? — Aldous Huxley

In one typical battalion, of forty-one officers who had landed on Sicily in July, only nine remained, and six of them had been wounded, according — Rick Atkinson

It is cold at six-forty in the morning on a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad. — Frederick Forsyth

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

If a woman tells you she's twenty and looks sixteen, she's twelve. If she tells you she's twenty-six and looks twenty-six, she's damn near forty. — Chris Rock

In timing a film, we used to assume that sneaks move slowly. This was great for animators-thirty-six to forty-eight drawings for a single step-but it was sheer hell for the pace of the picture. So the rapid tiptoe was invented. — Chuck Jones

The average American shops six hours a week while spending forty minutes playing with his children. — Randy Alcorn

So what should I be doing?" "I don't know. Something. Working. Seeing people. Running a scout troop, or running a club even. Something more than waiting for life to change and keeping your options open. You'd keep your options open for the rest of your life, if you could. You'll be lying on your deathbed, dying of some smoking-related disease, and you'll be thinking, 'Well, at least I've kept my options open. At least I never ended up doing something I couldn't back out of.' And all the time you're keeping your options open, you're closing them off. You're thirty-six and you don't have children. So when are you going to have them? When you're forty? Fifty? Say you're forty, and say your kid doesn't want kids until he's thirty-six. That means you'd have to live much longer than your allotted three-score years and ten just to catch so much as a glimpse of your grandchild. See how you're denying yourself things? — Nick Hornby

I'd like a break. I'm forty-six, so the undertow is beginning to get to me."
"Then what are you good for?" she asked, in a kind tone.
"Oh, a man around the house has his uses. A dildo; an ear to talk to; two arms around you; a voice from the next room when you're lonesome."
"I have a dog to talk to."
"That might be a deal killer. — Edward Hoagland

Some days I hated my life. Turning forty, pre-menopausal migraines, single, gaining ten pounds in six months, not to mention having three, sometimes overbearing mothers, and an editor with no compassion.
On the other hand, I had Kline, sort of, and there was my career, or what was left of it. I had a dog that idolized me, even if no one else did, and a house of my own. Those pluses should sustain me through my crises. So now, I would go home and write. It's what I do. -- Lilly Millenovanovich — Kathryn Long

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

News of the Indian Mutiny had taken forty-six days to reach London in 1857, travelling at an effective speed of 3.8 miles an hour. News of the huge Nobi earthquake in Japan in 1891 took a single day, travelling at 246 miles an hour, sixty-five times faster.50 — Niall Ferguson

The most common metaphor for careers is a ladder, but this concept no longer applies to most workers. As of 2010, the average American had eleven jobs from the ages of eighteen to forty-six alone.1 This means that the days of joining an organization or corporation and staying there to climb that one ladder are long gone. Lori often quotes Pattie Sellers, who conceived a much better metaphor: "Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder. — Sheryl Sandberg

There are ovens at Ralph's, big ones. And no one has taken the frozen turkeys. Figure two hundred and fifty kids if pretty much everyone from Perdido Beach shows up, right? One turkey will feed maybe eight people, so we need thirty-one, thirty-two turkeys. No problem there, because there are forty-six turkeys at Ralph's." "Thirty-one — Michael Grant

When George Washington ran for election to Virginia's local assembly, the House of Burgesses, in 1758, his campaign team handed out twenty-eight gallons of rum, fifty gallons of rum punch, thirty-four of wine, forty-six of beer, and two of cider - in a county with only 391 voters. — Tom Standage

And when they finally demanded that I had to stop keeping score and that I needed to play every future contest as an exhibition, I casually made the kind of statement sixteen-year-olds should not make to forty-six-year-old Midwestern housewives: "Why are you telling me how to do my job?" I asked. "It's not like I show up in your kitchen and tell you when to bake cookies. — Chuck Klosterman

Until fairly recently it was thought that humans had
fortv-eight chromosomes in an ordinary somatic cell. We now know that the correct number is forty-six. Chimps apparently really do have forty-eight chromosomes, and in this case a viable cross of a chimpanzee and a human would in any event be rare. — Carl Sagan

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

... imagine that the earth - four thousand six hundred million years old - [were] a forty-six-year-old woman ... . It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman's life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old ... when the first single-celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty-five - just eight months ago - when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman's life ... . It was an awe-inspiring and humbling thought ... that the whole of contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge - was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman's eye. — Arundhati Roy

Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon lent their support to such interventionist measures as Medicare and the Environmental Protection Agency. Eisenhower pushed for the greatest public works project in the history of the United States - the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, which linked the nation together with four-lane (and occasionally six-lane) interstate highways covering forty thousand miles. The GOP also backed large expansion of federally supported higher education. And to many Republicans at the time, a marginal income tax rate of more than 70 percent on top incomes was not repugnant. — Robert B. Reich

Women are really demanding more flexibility in the workplace. Control is the new currency.. Forty-six percent of women want to start their own small businesses. — Celinda Lake

A new force in pro football, Taylor demanded not just a tactical response but an explanation. Many people pointed to his unusual combination of size and speed. As one of the Redskins' linemen put it, "No human being should be six four, two forty-five, and run a four-five forty." Bill Parcells thought Taylor's size and speed were closer to the beginning than to the end of the explanation. New York Giants' scouts were scouring the country for young men six three or taller, 240 pounds or heavier, with speed. They could be found. In that pool of physical specimens what was precious - far more precious than an inch, or ten pounds, or one tenth of a second - was Taylor's peculiar energy and mind: relentless, manic, with grandiose ambitions and private standards of performance. — Michael Lewis

Ever since Richard Nixon walloped George McGovern in the presidential election of 1972, political pundits have treated as a truism the proposition that liberals are out of step with the rest of the nation, and therefore all but unelectable outside the precincts of the Northeast
give or take a college town here or a ski resort there. During the course of every presidential election for the past forty years now, Republicans have sought to wield the word liberal as if it were a six-gauge shotgun. — Eric Alterman

Over the long term, it's hard for a stock to earn a much better return that the business which underlies it earns. If the business earns six percent on capital over forty years and you hold it for that forty years, you're not going to make much different than a six percent return - even if you originally buy it at a huge discount. Conversely, if a business earns eighteen percent on capital over twenty or thirty years, even if you pay an expensive looking price, you'll end up with one hell of a result. — Charlie Munger

Four hundred forty-six," Cole whispered.
"What?" she asked.
He kept his head down in what seemed to be a prayer. "He counts. You've smiled at him four hundred and forty-six times as of a few minutes ago. He announces the number every time I see him."
"I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't think you were real. Considering my line of work, I should have more faith in humanity." Cole shook his head. "I think it was smile two hundred eighty-six that drove me the most crazy. It was the night train. Blake was so sick, feverish. Honestly, I was considering taking him to the hospital. But no. He didn't want to miss a smile. He wouldn't even let me drive him. Blake walked the whole way in the pouring rain for number two eighty-six. — Debra Anastasia

Dried oregano has thirty times the brain-healing antioxidant power of raw blueberries, forty-six times more than apples, and fifty-six times as much as strawberries, making it one of the most powerful brain cell protectors on the planet. — Daniel G. Amen

I did a play I think my first six months on the show, called Bullpen. Then I got involved with Theater Forty and did this play called Plastic which is about two male models coming to a casting call. — Austin Peck

I am a hundred and forty six years old and this is not my first unwinnable war. — Cassandra Clare

Some things cannont possibly happen, because they are both too improbable and too perfect. The U.S. hockey team cannot beat the Russians in the 1980 Olympics. Jack Nicklaus cannot shoot 65 to win the Masters at age forty-six. Nothing else comes immediately to mind. — Thomas Boswell

Myth The United States of America is made up of fifty states. Truth Technically, no. There are only forty-six states in the United States - Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia are commonwealths. — Leland Gregory

Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release? What Truth sold in forty foreign territories in six hours? Who's lining up to see a sequel to Truth? — Jess Walter

Somewhere forest fires rage and somewhere else something moves beneath dark waters and somewhere blood appears in the hallway of the home of some old couple who aren't bleeding and somewhere someone else spontaneously self-combusts and somehow all the mysteries of this world as I know it offer me comfort and I don't know beans about heaven and hell and somehow all that stuff is no longer an issue and at the moment I'm a sixteen-foot-tall five-hundred-and-forty-eight-pound man inside this six-foot body and all i can feel is the pressure all I can feel is the pressure and the need for release. — David Wojnarowicz

In one hour, the highest SES children heard an average of two thousand words, while children of welfare families heard about six hundred. Differences in parental responses to children were also striking. Highest SES parents responded to their children about 250 times per hour; lowest SES parents responded to their children fewer than 50 times in the same period. But the most significant and most concerning difference? Verbal approval. Children in the highest SES heard about forty expressions of verbal approval per hour. Children in welfare homes, about four. — Dana Suskind

The faint metallic smell of the falling snow surrounds her. calm yourself. Listen. Cars splash along streets, and snowmelt drums through runnels; she can hear snowflakes tick and patter through the trees. She can smell the cedars in the Jarin des Plantes a quarter mile away. Here the Metro hurdles beneath the sidewalk; that's the Quai Saint-Bernard. Here the sky opens up, and she hears the clacking of branches: that's the narrow stripe of gardens behind the Gallery of Paleontology. This, she realizes, must be the corner of the quay and rue Cuvier. '
Six blocks, forty buildings, ten tiny trees in a square. This street intersects this street intersects this street. One centimeter at a time.
Her father stirs the keys in his packets. Ahead loom the tall, grand houses that flanked the gardens, reflecting sound.
She says, we go left — Anthony Doerr

What had really caused the women's movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women's life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn't live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was "the problem that had no name." Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives. — Betty Friedan

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

the initial ID is George Thomas Irving. Age forty-six of eight - " "Irving as in Irvin Irving? As in Councilman Irvin Irving?" "Scourge of the LAPD in general and one Detective Harry Bosch in particular. — Michael Connelly

Without conscious thought I stepped behind the altar, raised my arms, and began the celebration of the Eucharist. There was no sense of parody or melodrama in this act, no symbolism or hidden intention; it was merely the automatic reaction of a priest who had said Mass almost daily for more than forty-six years of his life and who now faced the prospect of never again participating in the reassuring ritual of that celebration. It — Dan Simmons

Ask any Ferrari, Porsche or Ray-Ban salesperson about their average customer and you will very likely hear that he is not, as the adverts would have us believe, a virile young footballer with shiny hair, a rippling six pack and a trouser pouch like a new punch bag. He is, in fact, a middle-aged bloke wearing more chins than he started life with and carrying the clear evidence of forty years of beer and pies slung across his midriff. — Richard Hammond

We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother's birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us. — Anthony Doerr

For thirty-six of the forty years between 1800 and 1840, either Jefferson or a self-described adherent of his served as president of the United States: James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren.32 (John Quincy Adams, a one-term president, was the single exception.) — Jon Meacham

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

Depending on which biologist you speak to, between thirty-six and forty total phyla are recognized on our planet. Rainforests, our flagships of biodiversity, are known to contain sixteen phyla. The spaces in between sand grains are home to twenty-two. — Michael Welland

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

What happened?" I ask. My heart hurts.
"That big guy," he says. His voice is high and tight. "Number forty-six. Jeez, he just bashed his shoulder right into my chest, and when I was on the ground, he steps on my leg with his cleat." He sniffs hard, rubs his nose on his sleeve, doesn't meet my eyes.
"That bastard," I say. "The minute he gets off the field I'm going to kick him in the balls." Oliver laughs a little, his eyes filling up at the same time. "He'll never know what hit him. His balls are gonna go flying, I promise you that. People will wish they brought their catcher's mitts. — Deb Caletti

She skidded around a corner, slamming her shoulder into the wall and bouncing off of it without slowing.

Caleb?

Silence. Forty-six meters. A long stretch of hallway. She pushed faster, harder. Twenty meters.

She burst into the room in unison with a deafening crash of metal shearing metal. — G.S. Jennsen

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

One of its most distinctive features was the ninety-six meters high and twelve thousand tons heavy sandstone dome that stood the test of time and wars until it came down during the bombing of Saxony by Anglo-American allied forces during the Second World War. Only the altar, a relief description of Jesus' agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the chancel behind it survived. The church then lay dormant for more than forty-five years before it was restored to its former glory as Communist rule enveloped Germany. One of the reasons for the delay was the tensions that ensued before the demolition of the Berlin Wall that divided East and West Germany. — K.T. Tomb

I spent the last Friday of summer vacation spreading hot, sticky tar across the roof of George Washington High. My companions were Dopey, Toothless, and Joe, the brain surgeons in charge of building maintenance. At least they were getting paid. I was working forty feet above the ground, breathing in sulfur fumes from Satan's vomitorium, for free.
Character building, my father said.
Mandatory community service, the judge said. Court-ordered restitution for the Foul Deed. He nailed me with the bill for the damage I had done, which meant I had to sell my car and bust my hump at a landscaping company all summer. Oh, and he gave me six months of meetings with a probation officer who thought I was a waste of human flesh.
Still, it was better than jail.
I pushed the mop back and forth, trying to coat the seams evenly. We didn't want any rain getting into the building and destroying the classrooms. Didn't want to hurt the school. No, sir, we sure didn't. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Maybe. Maybe not. Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They're six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I'm getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What's to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be? — Peter Benchley

Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing - or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for. — Bob Black

by a Scotch-Irish preacher, a Presbyterian named James Finley, in the year 1801, or before John Roebling was born. Finley had been a versatile and ingenious man. His "chain bridge" had a seventy-foot span, cost about six hundred dollars, and in the next ten years he built some forty more of them, including one over the Potomac above Washington. — David McCullough

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

Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn't go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold. His hands were as cold as his smile and almost as cold as his heart. He wore gloves when he was asleep, and he wore gloves when he was awake, which made if difficult for him to pick up pins or coins or the kernels of nuts, or to tear the wings from nightingales. He was six feet four, and forty-six, and even colder than he thought he was. — James Thurber

as of April 1, 2010, the U.S. government had lost thirty-four out of forty-six habeas cases. In appeals of several of those cases, — Mohamedou Ould Slahi

So, tell me," he whispers. "How fast did you climb those fourteen stories?"
Thomas makes a disapproving sound in his throat, but I break into a grin. Storm's past. Metias loves me again. "Six minutes," I whisper back to my brother. "And forty-four seconds. How do you like that?"
"That must be some sort of record. Not that, you know, you're supposed to do it. — Marie Lu

She talked to herself as she wrote. "Dark hair, about six four five, two-forty. Shoulders the size of Nebraska. Amazing blue eyes." She put down her pen. Amazing blue eyes?Where did that come from? — David Baldacci

You reach a certain age
sometimes it's fifteen, sometimes it's forty-six
and you realize the cliche you have adopted for yourself isn't working. — Matt Haig

When he arrived, he found that the two most important women in his life - his mother and his young wife - were dying. At 3:00 a.m. on February 14, Valentine's Day, Martha Roosevelt, still a vibrant, dark-haired Southern belle at forty-six, died of typhoid fever. Eleven hours later, her daughter-in-law, Alice Lee Roosevelt, who had given birth to Theodore's first child just two days before, succumbed to Bright's disease, a kidney disorder. That night, in his diary, Roosevelt marked the date with a large black "X" and a single anguished entry: "The light has gone out of my life. — Candice Millard

From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie. — Hokusai Katsushika

Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground. — Chuck Palahniuk

Are the family lists complete yet?" he asked George.
"Aye, my lord. We've gathered the names of every possible successful runner for the last forty years. Not many men, I'll tell you that. Six at most, and all were thought to be very much dead. Four apparently lost to fire-you remember the blaze that leveled the tavern in '33-one to drowning, and one bloke to, ah, wolves."
Kit raised his brows. "Wolves?"
"That's what his son said. Stirling Jacobs was his name. Liked to hunt at dawn. Liked a challenge. Known to venture out beyond our boundaries. Bones were found, possibly his. That's all."
"How old would this man be now?"
"Let's see...nearing eighty, I'd say."
Kit gazed at him over the mess of china and papers.
"Your instructions were to consider everyone." George shifted in the chair, uneasy. "And I've bloody well considered everyone."

-Kit & George — Shana Abe

At least forty million Americans can't read and write, according to this morning's New York Times. That is six times as many illiterates as there are people of Armenian descent anywhere! So many of them and so few of us! — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

In the seventeenth century, in less than forty years, twenty-six lakes were emptied. — Edmondo De Amicis