Forty Three Quotes & Sayings

While working at a sawmill, he slipped and fell against the whirring blade, which tore through his upper body at the shoulder, creating a hole so large that his internal organs were exposed - one witness claimed he could see the poor man's beating heart - and leaving his arm attached by just a few strands of glistening sinew. The millworkers bound the injuries as best they could and carried Lindbergh home, where he lay in silent agony for three days awaiting the arrival of a doctor from St. Cloud, forty miles away. When the doctor at last reached him, he took off the arm and sewed up the gaping cavity. It was said that Lindbergh made almost no sound. Remarkably, August Lindbergh recovered and lived another thirty years. Stoicism became the Lindbergh family's most cultivated trait. — Bill Bryson

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

Every successful man or great genius has three particular qualities in common. The most conspicuous of these is that they all produce a prodigious amount of work. The second is that they never know fatigue. And the third is that their minds grow more brilliant as they grow older, instead of less brilliant. Great men's lives begin at forty, where the mediocre man's life ends. The genius remains an ever-flowing fountain of creative achievement until the very last breath he draws. — Walter Russell

As a reminder to himself that at forty-three you don't make plans to dabble in different lives. At forty-three, what you are, what you know, is about as far as you're going to go in this life; — Richard Price

Stations were built at intervals averaging fifteen miles apart. A rider's route covered three stations, with an exchange of horses at each, so that he was expected at the beginning to cover close to forty-five miles - a good ride when one must average fifteen miles an hour. — Buffalo Bill

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

While still sixteen I am put in charge of a class of forty children who are two, three or four years younger than I. I fall in love with them. They are my possession, my mob whose forty minds, under my flashy and domineering control, are to become one, a mind unsullied by errors, unmarked by blots, contaminated by misplaced originalities outside the curriculum, and as full of facts as a pomegranate seed. — Hal Porter

Altogether, forty-three of the fifty states confer some type of civil or criminal immunity on parents who injure their children by withholding medical care on religious grounds. Surprisingly, these exemptions were required by the U.S. government in 1974 as a condition for states to receive federal aid for child protection. — Jerry A. Coyne

It struck him as a bit unfair that, at the age of eight, he should have manifested the same sense of solitude that haunted him at forty-three. — John Le Carre

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

You ought to be ashamed of yourself, running around, not married, staying out all night. Ashamed!" "Ashamed!" my grandmother echoed. Good to know they still agreed on things after forty-three years of marriage. — Jeaniene Frost

But it's believed the soul can stay on earth for three to forty days after death. It eventually recieves temporary judgment that sends it on from this world to heaven or hell-although no one will truly experience either until the actual Judgment Day, when the soul and body are reunited to live out eternity as one. — Richelle Mead

The first thing I did when I was forty years old, I put handcuffs on and I jumped off Alcatraz prison and swam to San Francisco handcuffed. That made national publicity. Then, there were three or four years where I would do more difficult feats. Another birthday I towed a thousand pound boat across the Golden Gate. On my 65th Birthday I towed 65 boats a mile and a half in Tokyo. On my 70th Birthday I towed 70 boats with 70 people in it with my feet and hands tied a mile and a half in Long Beach ... My next Birthday I will be 93. I'm gonna tow my wife across the bathtub. — Jack LaLanne

If you were to tell the thing down at the bottom of that pit it had napped through forty-two presidential inaugurations, eight British coronations, sixteen popes and three number ones by the Danish pop group, Aqua, it would have told you to stop talking nonsense and shut the fuck up. It had slept, somewhat peacefully, through Emmet's Insurrection, World War I and II, Vietnam, and even the Great War of Blur Vs. Oasis. — Adam Millard

Anybody under the age of forty knows hip-hop, gospel and R&B pretty well, and it's all a part of what we consider to be 'black music.' There is a natural synergy between the three. — John Legend

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

According to my dermatologist, the neck starts to go at forty-three, and that's that ... The neck is a dead give-away. Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth. You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn't have to if it had a neck. — Nora Ephron

We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God-given rights. — Martin Luther King Jr.

She was Mattie Tucker now, mother of three and a good forty pounds heavier, casting that burning eye over them all, reaching way back for a southern pleasantry that was more like a Halloween apple with a razor blade in it: 'Well, don't y'all make just the perfect family of four? — John Burnham Schwartz

From my own experience, I can tell you that there are mornings when you sit down at the typewriter and knock out three pages in forty-five minutes, and you look at yourself in the toaster over breakfast and your head's all misshapen and pointy, and you say, "Son, you were born with talent. — Pete Dexter

Grave-stones tell truth scarce forty years. Generations pass while families last not three oaks. — Thomas Browne

He would use a bit of string this time, and at the critical moment, when the old fool was leaning over the chair at an angle of forty-five, and trying to reach a point three inches beyond what was possible for him to reach, the string would slip, and down he would slide on to the piano, a really fine musical effect being produced by the suddenness with which his head and body struck all the notes at the same time. And Aunt Maria would say that she would not allow the children to stand round and hear such language. — Jerome K. Jerome

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

Three forty-five-pound plates on each side of what Kenji told me is an Olympic bar, which weighs an additional forty-five pounds. I can't stop staring. I don't think that I've ever been more attracted to him in all the time I've known him."
"So this gets you going, huh?"
...
"I've never seen him in sweatpants before ... "
...
"I bet you've seen him in a lot less. — Tahereh Mafi

One day,' you said, 'I watched the sunset forty-three times!'
And a little later you added:
'You know, when one is that sad, one can get to love the sunset.'
'Were you that sad, then, on the day of the forty-three sunset?'
But the prince made no answer. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Imagine a man between thirty-eight and forty, tall, slim, and pale. His clothes, except for their style, looked as if they'd escaped from the Babylonian captivity. The hat was a contemporary of one of Gessler's. Imagine now a frock coat broader than the needs of his frame
or, literally, that person's bones. The fringe had disappeared some time ago, of the eight original buttons, three were left. The brown drill trousers had two strong knee patches, while the cuffs had been chewed by the heels of boots that bore no pity or polish. About his neck the ends of a tie of two faded colors floated, gripping a week-old collar. I think he was also wearing a dark silk vest, torn in places and unbuttoned.
"I'll bet you don't know me, my good Dr. Cubas," he said.
"I can't recall ... "
"I'm Borba, Quincas Borba. — Machado De Assis

Forty-three percent of highly qualified women with children are leaving careers, or "off-ramping", for a period of time. — Sheryl Sandberg

When [men] see a pretty woman, and feel the delicious madness of love coming over them, they always stop to calculate her temper, her money, their own money, or suitableness for the married life ... Ha, ha, ha! Let us fool in this way no more. I have been in love forty-three times with all ranks and conditions of women, and would have married every time if they would have let me. How many wives had King Solomon, the wisest of men? And is not that story a warning to us that Love is master of the wisest? It is only fools who defy him. — William Makepeace Thackeray

President Obama has almost doubled our national debt to more than $19 trillion, and growing. And yet, what do we have to show for it? Our roads and bridges are falling apart, our airports are in Third World condition, and forty-three million Americans are on food stamps. — Donald Trump

No matter what the clocks and calendars say . . . The years between forty and fifty seem to take one. From thirty to forty takes two; twenty to thirty, three. From nine to nineteen takes twenty. — Edna Robinson

Three out of ten women in the United States have an abortion by the time they are forty-five years old. And women who need abortions get abortions, whether or not the procedure is legal or safe, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Blaming women who need abortions through slut-shaming is not only morally reprehensible, it also is medically irresponsible. — Leora Tanenbaum

Every forty-three blinks, the flashing lights on the police cars that follow my van into Houston synchronize. They flash separately for a few turns, then start flashing in series, like leading-in lights. Then, for a second, they all flash at once. What I learn as I'm driving into Houston under the low, still clouds, and choppers, for the first day of my trial, is that life works the same way. Most of the time you feel the potential for synchrony, but only once in a while do things actually synch up. — D.B.C. Pierre

But the last forty years had witnessed the professionalization of property management. Since 1970, the number of people primarily employed as property managers had more than quadrupled.8 As more landlords began buying more property and thinking of themselves primarily as landlords (instead of people who happened to own the unit downstairs), professional associations proliferated, and with them support services, accreditations, training materials, and financial instruments. According to the Library of Congress, only three books offering apartment-management advice were published between 1951 and 1975. Between 1976 and 2014, the number rose to 215.9 Even if most landlords in a given city did not consider themselves "professionals," housing had become a business. — Matthew Desmond

She looked like a hippie who'd been kicked to the side of the road maybe forty years ago, where she'd been collecting trash and rags ever since. She wore a dress made of tie-dyed cloth, ripped-up quilts, and plastic grocery bags. Her frizzy mop of hair was gray-brown, like root-beer foam, tied back with a peace-sign headband. Warts and moles covered her face. When she smiled, she showed exactly three teeth. — Rick Riordan

It's 2010. I'm forty-three years old. I've just turned in the final draft of what will be my third novel when I decide I want a tattoo. Maybe it's a middle-age thing. Or maybe now that my kids are nearly grown and I have a career in place, I'm finally coming into my own. — Therese Fowler

Among the seventy-three teachers who responded, scores ranged from 50 to 96! Just as Starch and Elliott found a century earlier, scores varied by more than forty-five percentage points - and that's among teachers who received specific professional development in writing assessment! — Thomas Guskey

At forty-three, I bought my first house. I'd wanted one like crazy. A house meant family, a happy childhood for my litttle girl and for the little girl self inside me ... I was soon overwhelmed by the upkeep and overcome by the yardwork ... In the bright light of closing, it was obvious: it was never a house I wanted; it was what a house symbolized to me. (254) — Victoria Moran

The only shot, his great-nephew confirmed, was fired by a forty-three year old conscripted drunkard who tried to shoot the cock off a weathervane during one of the poor sot's more exuberant outings with the bottle. — William L. Domme

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

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 hate it here... ...Everyday is actually three days, a freezing morning, a blistering day, and a cool night. You need a lot of clothes. And every day is the same day, which is why it's important to hang a calendar. I see why people move here and wake up one day scratching their heads, wondering when they turned forty or what year it is. — Caroline Kepnes

How old are you?" Isa gasped. Okay, so she hadn't gotten around to asking some things.
"One hundred and forty-three," Chance supplied, giving her a quick kiss. "But don't worry, darling. I don't feel a day over the century mark. — Jeaniene Frost

Almost three billion people live on less than two dollars a day, adjusted for purchasing power.5 Eight hundred and forty million people in the world don't have enough to eat.6 Ten million children die every year from easily preventable diseases.7 AIDS is killing three million people a year and is still spreading.8 One billion people in the world lack access to clean water; two billion lack access to sanitation.9 One billion adults are illiterate.10 About a quarter of the children in the poor countries do not finish primary school.11 — William Easterly

Ove glares out of the window. The poser is jogging. Not that Ove is provoked by jogging. Not at all. Ove couldn't give a damn about people jogging. What he can't understand is why they have to make such a big thing of it. With those smug smiles on their faces, as if they were out there curing pulmonary emphysema. Either they walk fast or they run slowly, that's what joggers do. It's a forty-year-old man's way of telling the world that he can't do anything right. Is it really necessary to dress up as a fourteen-year-old Romanian gymnast in order to be able to do it? Or the Olympic tobogganing team? Just because one shuffles aimlessly around the block for three quarters of an hour? — Fredrik Backman

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

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

You owe forty-three thousand, Count,' said Dolokhov, and stretching himself he rose from the table. 'One does get tired sitting so long,' he added. — Leo Tolstoy

I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it - yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don't give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by. — Orson Welles

In the dream of approaching forty I saw myself as about to die and realized that I was no longer myself, but a creature inhabited entirely by parasites, as a caterpillar is occupied by the grubs of the ichneumon fly. Gin, whisky, sloth, fear, guilt, tobacco, had made themselves my inquilines; alcohol sloshed about within, while tendrils of melon and vine grew out of ears and nostrils; my mind was a worn gramophone record, my true self was such a ruin as to seem non-existent, and all this had happened in the last three years. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

True, the curlers from Larga were supposed to be playing with a forty-five pound stone. The stone they has weighed an unofficial three hundred pounds, give or take; the Largans decided to train in the most difficult conditions in order to achieve maximal effectiveness. — Vladimir Lorchenkov

After all, at almost forty-three-years old, his brother — Trudy J. Smith

Chelnov directed Rubin's attention to the geography of Moses' crossing. From the Nile to Jerusalem the Jews had at most 250 miles to go, and that meant that even if they rested on the Sabbath they could have easily covered the distance in three weeks. Wasn't it necessary therefore to assume that for the remaining forty years Moses did not simply lead them but misled them all over the Arabian desert? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I told you to stay off that goddamn horse, but you wouldn't listen! And I paid the price for your stubbornness. For forty-three days I traveled through hell, wanting that woman like I've never wanted anything in my life. For forty-three days, I drew your goddamn brand in the dirt to remind myself that she belonged to you, that she deserved the best of men. Think what you want of me, but never for one goddamn minute think less of her because you forced her into my company.
-Houston to Dallas — Lorraine Heath

When I was about forty-three years of age, I had a private secretary with a beautiful baritone voice. I told him I would give anything in the world if I could only carry a tune. He laughed and said, 'Anybody who has a voice and perseverance can sing.' — Heber J. Grant

The teacher's life should have three periods, study until twenty-five, investigation until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance. — William Osler

Forty-three years old, he is handsome and he knows it, but it's not a view that is held with arrogance. His opinion on his looks are merely understood with the same logic he applies to tasting a fine wine. The grape was merely grown in the right place, under the right conditions. Some degree of nurturing and love mixed with later moments of being completely trampled on and walked all over. — Cecelia Ahern

It was an important day in my life when at last I understood that if he needed forty days in the wilderness at one point, I very likely could use three or four. — Dallas Willard

In 1 Samuel 17, we see how comfort stymied the nation of Israel and David's three older brothers up at their army camp. They repeated their battle cry every day. They got suited up and went and stood on the front lines. They had God on their side and believed he was the one true God. But for forty days they were held back by comfort. They were prevented from moving forward by the lure of ease. The giant was calling the shots. He was dictating their lives. Goliath would come out every morning and evening and shake, rattle, and roar, and the Israelites would all say, "Nope, not today. Too dangerous. Too uncomfortable. Let's go have lunch. Let's stay in the tents where it's safe. If we run out of supplies someone will arrive with more. Maybe we'll do battle tomorrow." We — Louie Giglio

Better, my brethren, [to] wear out and die within three years than live forty in slothfulness. — Jason G. Duesing

If my mother was odd enough to crave a bubble bath at three in the morning, Dorothy was inventive enough to suggest adding broken glass to the tub. If my mother insisted on listening to West Side Story repeatedly, it was Dorothy who said, 'Let's listen to it on forty-five!' And when my mother announced that she wanted a fur wrap like Auntie Mame, Dorothy bought her an unstable Norwegian elkhound from a puppy mill. — Augusten Burroughs

I don't know if this is a true statistic, but I heard somewhere that there are three times as many single women over forty as single men. That's what we got from the women's movement. The chickens have come home to roost. — Jack Nicholson

At its very core the story of Easter has nothing to do with angelic announcements or empty tombs. It has nothing to do with time periods, whether three days, forty days, or fifty days. It has nothing to do with resuscitated bodies that appear and disappear or that finally exit this world in a heavenly ascension. — John Shelby Spong

The Plowshares activists easily cut through Kitsap's perimeter fence, hiked around the huge base for four hours, ignored all the warning signs, cut through two more fences, and got to within about forty feet of the bunkers where the nuclear warheads are stored. Father Bix was eighty-one at the time. Sister Anne was eighty-three. Having survived two open-heart surgeries, Father Bix brought along his nitroglycerine tablets and paused to take some during the long hike. — Anonymous

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

Simply by not owning three medium-sized castles in Tuscany I have saved enough money in the last forty years on insurance premiums alone to buy a medium-sized castle in Tuscany. — Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

All this to say: I am forty-three years old. I may yet live another forty. What do I do with those years? How do I fill them without Lexy? When I come to tell the story of my life, there will be a line, creased and blurred and soft with age, where she stops. If I win the lottery, if I father a child, if I lose the use of my legs, it will be after she has finished knowing me. "When I get to Heaven", my grandmother used to say, widowed at thirty-nine, "your grandfather won't even recognize me. — Carolyn Parkhurst

Will wolfed down his sandwich, drank half his water, and went to work examining the boxes. He discovered that all of them had dates scrawled on the side, so he cranked up to his highest speed, motored around the room rearranging them, and had them neatly arranged in chronological order in less than twenty minutes. Three equal rows, forty boxes in each, lined up in the center of the room. Some were sealed; most were open. Their weight varied greatly; some were packed solid and heavy with books and ledgers, while others contained nothing but rolled-up maps. — Mark Frost

I practice my saxophone three hours a day. I'm not saying I'm particularly special, but if you do something three hours a day for forty years, you get pretty good at it. — Kenny G

On broader lines he's like those chappies who sit peering sadly over the marble battlements at the Pennsylvania Station in the place marked "Inquiries." You know the Johnnies I mean. You go up to them and say: "When's the next train for Melonsquashville, Tennessee?" and they reply, without stopping to think, "Two-forty-three, track ten, change at San Francisco." And they're right every time. Well, Jeeves gives you just the same impression of omniscience. — P.G. Wodehouse

Man can live about forty days without food, about three days without water, about eight minutes without air ... but only for one second without hope. — Hal Lindsey

To get the idea that you are the center," Oliveira thought, resting more comfortably on the board. "But it's incalculably stupid. A center as illusory as it would be to try to find ubiquity. There is no center, there's a kind of continuous confluence, an undulation of matter. All through the night I'm a motionless body, and on the other side of town a roll of newsprint is being converted into the morning paper, and at eight-forty I will leave the house and at eight-twenty the paper will have arrived at the newsstand on the corner, and at eight forty-five my hand and the newspaper will come together and begin to move together through the air, three feet from the ground, heading towards the streetcar stop. — Julio Cortazar

The bones said death was comin', and the bones never lied.
Eva Savoie leaned back in the rocking chair and pushed it into motion on the uneven wide-plank floor of the one-room cabin. Her grand pere Julien had built the place more than a century ago, pulling heavy cypress logs from the bayou and sawing them, one by one, into the thick planks she still walked across ever day.
She had never known Julien Savoie, but she knew of him. The curse that had stalked her family for three generations had started with her grandfather and what he'd done all those years ago.
What he'd brought with him to Whiskey Bayou with blood on his hands.
What had driven her daddy to shoot her mama, and then himself, before either turned forty-five.
What had led Eva's brother, Antoine, to drown in the bayou only a half mile from this cabin, leaving a wife and infant son behind.
What stalked Eva now. — Susannah Sandlin

I can't keep a baby," A.J. says firmly. "I haven't slept in two nights. She's a terrorist! She wakes up at, like, insane times. Three forty-five in the morning seems to be when her day begins. I live alone. I'm poor. You can't raise a baby on books alone. — Gabrielle Zevin

Try to say nothing negative about anybody.
a) for three days
b) for forty-five days
c) for three months
See what happens to your life. — Yoko Ono

He hitched Blayne up a little higher. "I have a question first."
"Of course I'll marry you! " Blayne cheered, throwing her arms around his neck.
"I wasn't going to ask that. "
"Oh." She un-hugged him. "Sorry."
"I was going to ask you that on Sunday. At three forty-five p.m. Before the surprise romantic dinner but after my Sunday laps in the pool. It was on myschedule!" he finished on a bellow.
"I know! " she bellowed back. "I saw it. You left it right out on the kitchen table! Was I supposed to ignore it? — Shelly Laurenston

it seems to me that people have far more unread books than they once did, ranging from three to more than forty. — Marie Kondo

He'd noticed that his grandson was working too hard, and he was the one who told him about the marbles. He told it this way. He said that the average life span for men was around seventy-five years. That meant thirty-nine hundred Saturdays - to play when you were a kid and to be with your family when you got older and wiser." "I see," I said. "Or to play once you got older. Or even to give lectures to anyone who'll listen." "Shush, Alex. Now, listen. So the grandfather figured out that his grandson, who was forty-three, had about sixteen hundred and sixty Saturdays left in his life. Statistically speaking. So what he did was he bought two large jars and filled them with beautiful cat's-eye marbles. He gave them to his grandson. And he told him that every Saturday, he should take one marble out of the jar. Just one, and just as a reminder that he had only so many Saturdays left, and that they were precious — James Patterson

Crystal said, "Okay, sweetie. I'm on my way. Give me five minutes to put on a garter belt under my raincoat. I'll be there in forty minutes." She also asked Brett to wait downstairs for her in the rain with an umbrella, so she wouldn't get drenched walking to the front of his apartment complex. He waited and waited and waited. Three hours later, it occurred to him like a stunning revelation: No booty cometh. — Sherry Argov

Your essays spoke of beauty, of love, of light and darkness, of joy and sorrow, and of the goodness of life. They were wonderful compositions. I have seldom read any that have touched me more.
To thank you and your teacher Mrs. Ellis, I am sending you what I think is one of the most beautiful and miraculous things in the world - an egg. I have a goose named Felicity and she lays about forty eggs every spring. It takes her almost three months to accomplish this. Each egg is a perfect thing. I am mailing you one of Felicity's eggs. The insides have been removed - blown out - so the egg should last forever. I hope you will enjoy seeing this great egg and loving it. Thank you for sending me your essays about being somebody. I was pleased that so many of you felt the beauty and goodness of the world. If we feel that when we are young, then there is great hope for us when we grow older. — E.B. White

So I write melodies - thirty, forty, fifty - then I cast them off until I have just two or three. If only one is needed, I go see the director and ask him to decide. — Michel Legrand

How many books did you get through?" he asked. She sat up in bed, brushing a few strands of long blond hair off her face. "Three hundred and forty nine." Blaise blinked. "That's very precise. Are you sure it wasn't three hundred and forty eight?" "Yes, I'm sure," she said seriously, then smiled. "In fact, it was 138,902 pages and 32,453,383 words. — Dima Zales

And if his youth was obvious, the Glorious Cause was to a large degree a young man's cause. The commander in chief of the army, George Washington, was himself only forty-three. John Hancock, the President of the Continental Congress, was thirty-nine, John Adams, forty, Thomas Jefferson, thirty-two, younger even than the young Rhode Island general. In such times many were being cast in roles seemingly beyond their experience or capacities, and Washington had quickly judged Nathanael Greene to be "an object of confidence. — David McCullough

The lady in the latrine, Julie DuBois, and I were on our first date after three weeks of shameless flirting. I'm about forty, Julie's about thirty - a PhD in English lit, a professor at American University, learned, tenured, brilliant, blonde, blue-eyed - and, not that it matters, also quite attractive. I had been looking forward to this date for a week; I really wanted to get Julie's take on Marcel Proust's persistent use of subordinate clauses, a literary mystery I can never seem to get out of my mind - and yes, Julie was having trouble believing that, too. But men who date women for their looks alone are pigs. — Brian Haig

It was the American middle class. No one's house cost more than two or three year's salary, and I doubt the spread in annual wages (except for the osteopath) exceeded more than five thousand dollars. And other than the doctor (who made house calls), the store managers, the minister, the salesman, and the banker, everyone belonged to a union. That meant they worked a forty-hour week, had the entire weekend off (plus two to four weeks' paid vacation in the summer), comprehensive medical benefits, and job security. In return for all that, the country became the most productive in the world and in our little neighborhood it meant your furnace was always working, your kids could be dropped off at the neighbors without notice, you could run next door anytime to borrow a half-dozen eggs, and the doors to all the homes were never locked
because who would need to steal anything if they already had all that they needed? — Michael Moore

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

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

The religious literature handed out by the earnest young missionaries in Temple Square makes no mention of the fact that Joseph Smith
still the religion's focal personage
married at least thirty-three women and probably as many as forty-eight. Nor does it mention that the youngest of these wives was just fourteen years old when Joseph explained to her that God had commanded that she marry him or face eternal damnation. — Jon Krakauer

How often should a woman be pregnant? Continually, or hardly ever? Or must there be a certain number of pregnancy anniversaries established by fashion? What do you, at the age of forty-three, have to say on the subject? Is it a fact that the laws of nature, or of the country, or of propriety, have ordained this time of life for sterility? — Lord Chesterfield

Although Pulcheria Alexandrovna was forty-three, her face still retained traces of her former beauty; she looked much younger than her age, indeed, which is almost always the case with women who retain serenity of spirit, sensitiveness and pure sincere warmth of heart to old age. We may add in parenthesis that to preserve all this is the only means of retaining beauty to old age. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

Forty-three years old, and still afraid of my father. Some tycoon, hunh? — John Saul

I am also four, and twelve, and fifteen, and twenty-three, and thirty-one, and forty-five and ... and ... and ... — Madeleine L'Engle

McKeon: "You know Hauptman is going to deny they had anything to do with it [smuggling]."
"Forty-three million in illegal peltries? Of course they will, just as Mondragon's captain insists the space fairies must have brought them," Honor said ironically. — David Weber

Me: just don't ask about his forty-three ex-boyfriends, okay? or ask him about why he's carrying around an axe.
mom: ...
me: i'm kidding about the axe part. — David Levithan

Three-quarters of a kilometer long, a quarter of a kilometer wide - roughly shaped like a fire hydrant - and mostly empty space inside, the Canterbury was a retooled colony transport. Once, it had been packed with people, supplies, schematics, machines, environment bubbles, and hope. Just under twenty million people lived on the moons of Saturn now. The Canterbury had hauled nearly a million of their ancestors there. Forty-five million on the moons of Jupiter. One moon of Uranus sported five thousand, the farthest outpost of human civilization, at least until the Mormons finished their generation ship and headed for the stars and freedom from procreation restrictions. And — James S.A. Corey

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

The difficult thing about a pop record is that you're given guidelines: it has to have 3 choruses, and then it must be between 3 minutes fifteen seconds and three minutes forty-five seconds. — Duncan Sheik