In The Past Year Quotes & Sayings

Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year. — May Sarton

I'll tell you what's real. Real is that I was in jail for the past year, rooming with drug dealers and eating crap food your dog wouldn't touch. Real is not being able to wear your own frickin' underwear and showering with twenty-five other dicks every day while guards watch. Real is my next-door neighbor who walks like she's balancing on stilts because her leg is so fucked up from the accident. Brian, your perception of reality is totally off. — Simone Elkeles

'Bloo' is a compilation of a few songs I've written over the past year, inspired by the necessity of finding happiness in the people I choose to surround myself with. — Kacy Hill

The moment I fell in love with her. She made me feel weightless, feel free, feel airborne. So I kicked, and I pushed, and for the past year, that's all I've been doing because it didn't feel the same and I knew in my heart that without her, I'd never be able to coast. — Jay McLean

Every passing year brings us more past futures. Here in Europe they had a Dark Age so extensive, radical and obliterative that everyone forgot how to speak Latin. It's counterproductive to blither on about "the" future. It's always somebody's future, and we're not who we used to be. — Bruce Sterling

Yeah, they did. Didn't you notice they changed the theme of the New Year Art Show? In past years fifth graders painted self-portraits, but this year they made us do those ridiculous self-portraits as animals, remember?" "So big freakin' deal." "I know! I'm not saying I agree, I'm just saying that's what she's saying." "I know, I know. This is just so messed up. — R.J. Palacio

Lucas heard a strange sound, something he hadn't heard in months. At first it didn't seem real, it was something distant from the past. It was the first time in nearly a year he had heard himself laugh, and it momentarily stunned him — Mark A. Cooper

Bruce is still my friend. We don't talk much. We don't have to. He is great and in his own league. I'm not him and he is not me. But we are on similar paths, writing and singing out own kind of songs around the world, along with Bob and a few other singer/songwriters. It is a a silent fraternity of sorts, occupying this space in people's souls with our music. Last year, I lost my right-hand man, the pedal steel guitarist Ben Keith. This year Bruce lost his right-hand man, the saxophonist Clarence Clemons. It's time for another talk; friends can help each other just by being there. Now both of us will look to our right and see a giant hole, a memory, the past and the future. I won't play with another steel player trying to recreate Ben's parts, and I know Bruce won't play with another sax man trying to play Clarence's. Those parts are not going to happen again. They already did. That takes a lot out of our repertoires. — Neil Young

I'm very grateful and proud of the progress Yahoo! has made over the past year. When I took the position as chairman, I told the board that my intention was to serve for one year in order to help Yahoo! during a critical time of transformation. — Alfred Amoroso

I see not a step before me as I tread on another year;But I've left the Past in God's keeping,-the FutureHis mercy shall clear;And what looks dark in the distance may brighten as I draw near. — Mary Gardiner Brainard

In China, women who are single past the age of twenty-seven are stigmatized as sheng nu, or "leftover women." They face severe pressure from their families to marry, stemming from the widespread belief that regardless of education and professional achievement, a woman is "absolutely nothing until she is married." One thirty-six-year-old economics professor was rejected by fifteen men because she had an advanced degree; her father then forbade her younger sister from going to graduate school. — Sheryl Sandberg

And anyway, the truth isn't all that great. I mean, what's the truth? Planes falling out of the sky. Buses blowing up and ripping little kids into millions of pieces. Twelve-year-olds raping people and then shooting them in the head so they can't tell. I can't watch the news anymore or look at the papers. It's like whoever sits up there in Heaven has this big bag of really crappy stuff, and once or twice a day she or he reaches in and sprinkles a little bit of it over the world and makes everything crazy, like fairy dust that's past its expiration date. — Michael Thomas Ford

You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better. — Andrew Solomon

walked on, thinking about the newspaper article I'd recently come across about three women in California - each one had been killed by a mountain lion on separate occasions over the past year - and — Cheryl Strayed

The green prehuman earth is the mystery we were chosen to solve, a guide to the birthplace of our spirit, but it is slipping away. The way back seems harder every year. If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding, through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations. And thus humanity closes the door on its past. — E. O. Wilson

I notice that the number of cosmetic-surgery operations has risen by 34 per cent in the past year. Once we subtract Jordan, Jodie Marsh and Michael Jackson from those figures, we can see that demand overall may have stabilised. — Michael Gove

I am convinced that being fully committed to the moment, without any worries about the past or projections into the future, is the best attribute a closer can have. You wonder why the shelf life of so many short relievers is, well, so short? Why guys can be unhittable for a year or two and then disappear? It's because it takes a ton of concentration, and self-belief, to stay in the moment in this way and not let the highs and lows mess with your psyche. — Mariano Rivera

I remember the first time I went to Italy when I was eighteen, I was in Florence and there were all these eighteen, nineteen, twenty-year-olds gliding past on Vespas with crinkly, long, hair, and I thought I was on the set of a movie. I couldn't believe that this was going on and I hadn't known about it before. I was flabbergasted. — Walter Kirn

But Amanda ... " Jadina said, looking past Maylin at the young Fate. "She doesn't ask for anything. She doesn't even try to read the future, it's just there. She ends up blurting things out. Starts talking about the car accident you're going to have in three years, or your baby boy dying in child birth in a few months, or your grandmother's funeral next year. Thing's you can't change even if you know about them. Things you're happier not knowing about. People go through life, happily oblivious. If you start telling them all the horrible things that are coming, they get upset. When those horrible things start coming true, they get scared and blame you. They say you caused it. Label you witch. Even burn you at the stake. She's safer in there. — Crissy Moss

The fancy term for what America has squandered in the past year and a half or so is legitimacy. — Todd Gitlin

The last few years I've been doing the Middle East thing, and it's a tough decision whether to go there and try and knock off some events as a European Tour member, this year I think overall looking at my results, I played a little bit better on the West Coast than I have in the Middle East, so that was another determining factor for coming back here to an event that I have had some success in the past. — Luke Donald

I first came to Brazil in the Sixties. Then I started coming back every year since touring most of the country. I grew to love it, the people, the music. I thought this is where I belong. I've been living in Brazil for the past 23 years. I call it my stress-free country. — Dionne Warwick

In survey after survey, people report that the greatest dangers they face are, in this order: terrorist attack, plane crashes and nuclear accidents. This despite the fact that these three combined have killed fewer people in the past half-century than car accidents do in any given year. — Will Self

For much of the twentieth century, 1984 was a year that belonged to the future - a strange, gray future at that. Then it slid painlessly into the past, like any other year. Big Brother arrived and settled in, though not at all in the way George Orwell had imagined. — James Gleick

So many people journey through the year without any distinctive memorable day. So many people journey through life without any definite plan, though not all plans are achievable. If there is a day you shall never forget, do your best each day to make each day a memorable day; though there exist uncertainties in each day, do your best and rest the rest! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

If he could sleep, she thought, sleep through the unhappy months, the heart's hunger, the months of death and cold and not having what you most want, and wake with time gone past and blurred and a new year coming. But perhaps it is too early in the year, she thought after that, and besides, he is not a bear. — Naomi Mitchison

grow in Texas, several as common weeds. Next time you are weeding your garden, instead of throwing the
wood sorrel in the garbage, toss the leaves into a salad or use them to flavor a soup. The fresh leaves and tender green fruit pods add a zingy sour flavor to vegetable dishes. Wood sorrel is high in vitamin C and was used in the past to prevent and treat scurvy, which is caused by a vitamin C deficiency. Wood sorrel is available year-round (Gibbons and Tucker 1979; Fleming 1975; Zennie and Ogzewella 1977). — Delena Tull

Gon be hard from here on, Handful. Since that day a year past, I'd got myself a friend in Miss Sarah and found how to read and write, but it'd been a heartless road like mauma said, and I didn't know what would come of us. We might stay here the rest of our lives with the sky slammed shut, but mauma had found the part of herself that refused to bow and scrape, and once you find that, you got trouble breathing on your neck. — Sue Monk Kidd

[Memory] ... is a system of near-infinite complexity, a system that seems designed for revision as much as for replication, and revision unquestionably occurs. Details from separate experiences weave together, so that the rememberer thinks of them as having happened together. The actual year or season or time of day shifts to a different one. Many details are lost, usually in ways that serve the self in its present situation, not the self of ten or twenty or forty years ago when the remembered event took place. And even the fresh memory, the 'original,' is not reliable in a documentary sense ... Memory, in short, is not a record of the past but an evolving myth of understanding the psyche spins from its engagement with the world. — John Daniel

I am skeptical about the idea that we can learn much from history, at least in the sense that knowledge of past follies will prevent us from making similar blunders in the future... And yet it is important to know what happened before, and to try and make sense of it. For if we don't, we cannot understand our own times. — Ian Buruma

The founders of modern Burma believed that they could guarantee prosperity and happiness by correctly choosing the moment for the rebirth of our country. They consulted astrologists and fortune-tellers, men of impeccable behaviour and uncontested wisdom, who were devout Buddhists to boot. Acting on the advice of these holy arithmeticians, they declared independence on the fourth of January in the year 1948, at twenty past four in the morning. Every year since then, we have commemorated that happy occasion on that day at that same impossible hour - in the full awareness that independence has caused more misfortune than all of the oppression and exploitation of the entire colonial period put together. — Karel Glastra Van Loon

I stopped trying to chase the perfect place to be, and realized the perfect place is with your loved ones and your closest friends, around the dinner table, over a good meal, talking about the past year and the year to come and things that you want to change in your life. You hear their stories and talk about things you'd like to see happen in the world. That's what we do. — Hilary Swank

This past year, sometimes I would get up in the mornings and actually look forward to going to school because I knew I would see you. I would wonder what you were going to wear. I loved lunch because I could sit in the cafeteria and look out the window and see you up there in the bleachers. — Sarah Addison Allen

As that fucking chandelier twinkled overhead, Blay said roughly, "I'm still in love with him."
Saxton dropped his eyes and brushed a the top of his thigh, as if there might have been a tiny piece of lint there. "I know. You thought you weren't?"
As if that were rather stupid of him.
"I'm so fucking tired of it. I really am."
"That I believe."
"Im so fucking ... " God, those sounds, that muted pounding , that audible confirmation of what he had been ignoring for the past year
On a sudden wave of violence, he pitched the brandy snifter at the marble fireplace, shattering the thing.
"Fuck, Fuck!" If he'd been able to, he'd have jumped up and torn that goddamn cocksucking light fixture off the goddamn cocksucking ceiling. — J.R. Ward

Sole Alessandra Torre I've had a lot of firsts in the last three years. Today is a new one. First time throwing a three-year-old Birthday party, Hollywood Style. Too bad my sexier-than-sin husband is absolutely no help. And Cocky is in the pool. And Ben is having a panic attack. And Justin is feeding my child sugar at every opportunity. This is past the dirt, and more than just Hollywood. This is our life as Sole. — Alessandra Torre

At any age it does us no harm to look over our past shortcomings and plan to improve our characters and actions in the coming year. — Eleanor Roosevelt

For the first time in a long time, I was nervous around a man. Vince and I have been rather close for the past year, but it's been an emotional connection. This — Jessica N. Watkins

messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, — Charles Dickens

God forgive her, but underneath the smiles and the good job and the great family, she was tired. Desperately tired. Tired to the point of breaking. In the last few years the exhaustion had grown, rising up like a specter to knock on her door. No one knew, she hadn't told even Kit, but in the past year she'd begun to question her entire existence. Why was she even here? What was life? Was she even necessary?
Maybe all women had these thoughts. Maybe all women felt tired. But the thoughts confused her. Good women weren't supposed to have doubts. Good women were supposed to be strong and selfless. Instead Meg felt needy and afraid. What if there was no reward for all the hard work? What if life was just one sacrifice after another? — Jane Porter

Christina Baker Kline writes exquisitely about two unlikely friends - one, a 91-year-old survivor of the grinding poverty of rural Ireland, immigrant New York and the hardscrabble Midwest; and the other, a casualty of a string of foster homes - each struggling to transcend a past of isolation and hardship. Orphan Train will hold you in its grip as their fascinating tales unfold. — Cathy Marie Buchanan

In the past year I've learned that love can make you do crazy, silly, stupid, ridiculous things. And the fact that one person can make you feel this way and do those things is amazing to me. — Allie Everhart

Think about how rare it is that you exist at all. Also think about time this way: If something exists, even for a second, then forever in the future that thing "existed", and forever in the past that thing "was going to exist". So to even be conscious for a millisecond is a kind of immortality, but you have more than a millisecond. You have minutes. Hours. Months. A year? Years! This is a gift. — Alex Hirsch

In sum, the fruition of 50 years of research, and several hundred million dollars in government funds, has given us the following picture of sub-atomic matter. All matter consists of quarks and leptons, which interact by exchanging different types of quanta, described by the Maxwell and Yang-Mills fields. In one sentence, we have captured the essence of the past century of frustrating investigation into the subatomic realm, From this simple picture one can derive, from pure mathematics alone, all the myriad and baffling properties of matter. (Although it all seems so easy now, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, one of the creators of the Standard Model, once reflected on how tortuous the 50-year journey to discover the model had been. He wrote, "There's a long tradition of theoretical physics, which by no means affected everyone but certainly affected me, that said the strong interactions [were] too complicated for the human mind.") — Michio Kaku

this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more — Charles Dickens

In 1989 at Greater Saint Steven Full Gospel Church, I gave my life to Christ. That's pretty much where it all started for me. I was 23 years old at the time, right after my first year in the NBA. The pastor preached a message about being fully committed. That pretty much was me. I wasn't fully committed. I was kind of in and out all of the time. So I just wanted to make a commitment. — Avery Johnson

There are guys bleeding to death who don't know it, they're smiling, they're talking, they don't feel pain because they're in shock, they ask you for some water and then they're dead. On D-day I ran past a guy lying on his spilled guts with his eyes closed and his thumb in his mouth. Eisenhower's speech had been read to us over the loudspeaker by our commander when we crossed the channel that morning. What valor and inspiration were in his words- all about how we were embarked on a great crusade, that the hopes and prayers of a liberty loving people were going with us ... I got gooseflesh when he asked for the blessing of almighty god on this great and noble undertaking. But how to reconcile that with spilled guts on a beach and flies in the eyes of some dead nineteen year old kid who traded his life for some words on paper? — Elizabeth Berg

Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past. — Henry Ward Beecher

13
NOTES
She hesitated. For two years she had kept as far away from Mikael Blomkvist as she could. And yet he kept sticking to her life like gum on the sole of her shoe, either on the Net or in real life. On the Net it was O.K. There he was no more than electrons and words. In real life, standing on her doorstep, he was still fucking attractive. And he knew her secrets just as she knew all of his. She looked at him for a moment and realized that she now had no feelings for him. At least not those kinds of feelings. He had in fact been a good friend to her over the past year. She trusted him. Maybe. It was troubling that one of the few people she trusted was a man she spent so much time avoiding. Then she made up her mind. It was absurd to pretend that he did not exist. It no longer hurt her to see him. She opened the door wide and let him into her life again. — Stieg Larsson

Perhaps if the year was 1447 instead of 1947 I might have hoodwinked my gentle nature by administering her some classical poison from a hollow agate, some tender philter of death. But in our middle-class nosy era it would not have come off the way it used to in the brocaded palaces of the past. Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. — Vladimir Nabokov

It is hard to write it in words that I can read, that re-establishes the fact that has been haunting me for the past one year. — Kudrat Dutta Chaudhary

But I've come to the point where I'm not sure anymore just what God counts as radical. And I suspect that for me, getting up and doing the dishes when I'm short on sleep and patience is far more costly and necessitates more of a revolution in my heart than some of the more outwardly risky ways I've lived in the past. And so this is what I need now: the courage to face an ordinary day - an afternoon with a colicky baby where I'm probably going to snap at my two-year old and get annoyed with my noisy neighbor - without despair, the bravery it takes to believe that a small life is still a meaningful life, and the grace to know that even when I've done nothing that is powerful or bold or even interesting that the Lord notices me and is fond of me and that that is enough. — Michael S. Horton

In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of a different stamp; some of them survivors of and devotees to past revolutions, without insight into the present movement, but preserving popular influence by their known honesty and courage, or by the sheer force of tradition; others mere brawlers, who, by dint of repeating year after year the same set of stereotyped declamations against the government of the day, have sneaked into the reputation of revolutionists of the first water They are an unavoidable evil: with time they are shaken off. — Karl Marx

We look back to times past, and we mass them together, and say in such a year such and such events took place, such wars occupied that year, and during the next there was peace. Yet each year was then divided into weeks, days, minute, and slow-moving seconds, during which there were human minds to note and distinguish them, as now. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

After the birth of printing books became widespread. Hence everyone throughout Europe devoted himself to the study of literature ... Every year, especially since 1563, the number of writings published in every field is greater than all those produced in the past thousand years. The Paracelsians have created medicine anew and the Copernicans have created astronomy anew. I really believe that at last the world is alive, indeed seething, and that the stimuli of these remarkable conjunctions did not act in vain. — Johannes Kepler

You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn't last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he's done. — Richard Hugo

Scott's friends on the forum didn't know his big picture. They read a phrase like "It's going to kill me to live without him" for its precise meaning, and nothing else. They didn't read more than those nine words into the message. They didn't take offense, didn't try to talk him out of it. Didn't resent it for its presumed relativity.

"Of course it is," they said. And it was the same way they'd responded to every other thing he'd told them about himself: his thoughts on parenting, on marriage and sex, on education and race. They read what he wrote, and only what he wrote, and they responded. Not always in agreement - he'd had plenty of heated discussions over the past year on this issue or that. But he didn't need yes-men any more than he needed someone to read twenty-one extra words into the nine he'd written. — Julie Lawson Timmer

The big idea we start with is: "How is the genome interpreted, and how are stable decisions that affect gene expression inherited from one cell to the next?" This is one of the most competitive areas of molecular biology at the moment, and the students are reading papers that in some instances were published this past year. As a consequence, one of the most common answers I have to give to their questions is, "We just don't know." — Shirley M. Tilghman

When you have a bad year, there is this need to package it up and write it off-as I have done in the past. I hope, in 2014, when things go badly-people create themselves a New Years's day the moment they need it. Don't make 12 resolutions in January but one with every breath. Don't wait until December 31st to start anew.You can divide time with months and days and weeks-but each minute is only a minute long and belongs completely to itself. What you do in those tiny moments that seem so inconsequential are what will define not only your year-but your life — S.K. Munt

About half a mile from the tunnel, Sam stopped the car, and I climbed in back. Patrick played the radio really loud so I could hear it, and as we were approaching the tunnel, I listened to the music and tought about all the things that people have said to me over the past year. I thought about Bill telling me I was special. And my sister saying she loved me. And my mom, too. And even my dad and brother when I was in the hospital. I thought about Patrick calling me his friend. And I thought about Sam telling me to do things. To really be there. and I just thought how great it was to have friends and a family. — Stephen Chbosky

Many alters can be "stuck in the past" and still think it is 1968 or 1987 or some other year when they were still physically a child and the abusers were in charge of them. — Alison Miller

For every year past the age of 27, you need to take another step toward commitment somewhere in your life. Instead of freelancing, you get a staff job. Instead of renting, you buy. Fine, instead of couch-surfing, you rent. — Tracy McMillan

Until I met you," she said, "I never realized how precious each day could be. When I was working, each day was over before I knew it, and then a week just flew by, and then a whole year ... What have I been doing all this time? Why didn't I meet you before? If I had to choose a whole year in the past, or a day with you-I'd choose a day with you ... — Shuichi Yoshida

But to be a parent is to live in the past-present-future all at once. It is to hug your children and be intensely aware of how much smaller they felt last year ... even as you wonder how much bigger they will feel the next. It is to be a time-shifter, to marvel at the budding of their intellect, their verbal dexterity, their sense of humor ... at the same time rewinding and fast-forwarding ... to when they were younger, to when they'll be older. It is to experience longing for the here and now, which I know sounds flaky - sort of like complaining about being homesick when you're already home - but can happen, trust me, when you live in multiple time zones all at once. — Youngme Moon

The script's always important, but there are some things that have come out in the past year that, when we read them, everyone was like, "Oh my god, this is going to be the next best thing!" Then the movie falls completely flat on its face. — Douglas Booth

Don't you think it's funny that the presidents are still expected to build libraries when hardly anyone reads books? I read a study that said less than ten percent of adults read a book in the past year. — Dustin Lawson

Last Christmas someone stole my present. I've spent this year living in the past. — Terry Alderton

Yes, I decided, a man can truly change. The events of the past year have taught me much about myself, and a few universal truths. I learned, for instance, that while wounds can be inflicted easily upon those we love, it's often much more difficult to heal them. Yet the process of healing those wounds provided the richest experience of my life, leading me to believe that while I've often overestimated what I could accomplish in a day, I had underestimated what I could do in a year. But most of all, I learned that it's possible for two people to fall in love all over again, even when there's been a lifetime of disappointment between them. — Nicholas Sparks

Without knowing I was going to, I started to laugh, a crazy laugh like Ian's the night before, and at first he looked worried, but then he started too. Even with the wind whipping past the station, even with Ian hugging his backpack to his chest for warmth, we were laughing, and not a laughter of release or a laughter that was really sadness in disguise. It was the laugh of the absurd. Your grandmother is a seventeen-year-old boy? That creepy Russian man just paid for your ticket? Ferret-Glo? — Rebecca Makkai

I'm a century old, an impossible age, and my brain has no anchor in the present. Instead it drifts, nearly always to the same shore. Today, as most days, it is 1962. The year I discovered love. — Meg Rosoff

Strangely enough, for many many years I didn't talk about my childhood and then when I did I got a ton of mail - literally within a year I got a couple of thousand letters from people who'd had a worse childhood, a similar childhood, a less-bad childhood, and the question that was most often posed to me in those letters was: how did you get past the trauma of being raised by a violent alcoholic? — Dean Koontz

1. In the end, as much as the responsibility seems to lie with Beijing, it also lies with the global consumer. Our appetite for the $30 DVD player and the $3 T-shirt helps keep jewelry factories filled with dust, illegal mines open and 16-year-olds working past midnight. We all pay the China price. — Alexandra Harney

It's one of the greatest honors I could ever imagine - to be able to represent my country and to be able to wear "USA" on my back. It's an incredible honor. It's an accomplishment of the past four year but of a life of dreaming and working hard and doing everything I can in pursuit of this goal. — Elana Meyers

There is nothing that anyone can get past a forty-five-year-old woman." We laugh hard, the first honest sound I make that afternoon, or in many days, each of us feeling the ravages of experience, our debt to enduring. We are not to be fucked with. We rule. Even as we age and help our children push past us, as we worry about the estimate for the roof, forget things we meant to do, regard our widening bodies, we rule. We've returned again and again to our original selves for another look; we have refined our purpose. Changes we thought we'd been resisting have anyway been wrought, and they have made us unbreakable. — Susanna Sonnenberg

I thought about how the past can become so small. An entire day, 24 separate, heavy hours, becomes the size of a tiny brown leaf falling from a tree. Before you know it, a whole year is just a pile of dead leaves on the ground. The year or so I'd spent in love with Chad was starting to feel so long ago, swept away by the wind. I knew that this year would soon feel far away too. — Kimberly Novosel

As painful as some of the past year's changes have been, they will ultimately lead to a better place. The adversity you come across in life may cause pain, but with pain comes growth and the opportunity to rise to the occasion as your strongest, best self. — Jennifer Lopez

The capital ... shall form a fund, the interest of which shall be distributed annually as prizes to those persons who shall have rendered humanity the best services during the past year ... One-fifth to the person having made the most important discovery or invention in the science of physics, one-fifth to the person who has made the most eminent discovery or improvement in chemistry, one-fifth to the one having made the most important discovery with regard to physiology or medicine, one-fifth to the person who has produced the most distinguished idealistic work of literature, and one-fifth to the person who has worked the most or best for advancing the fraternization of all nations and for abolishing or diminishing the standing armies as well as for the forming or propagation of committees of peace. — Alfred Nobel

Here lies interred in the eternity of the past, from whence there is no resurrection for the days - whatever there may be for the dust - the thirty-third year of an ill-spent life, which, after a lingering disease of many months sank into a lethargy, and expired, January 22d, 1821, A.D. leaving a successor inconsolable for the very loss which occasioned its existence. — Lord Byron

James Thompson, a twenty-six-year-old cafeteria worker, eloquently articulated the Negro dilemma in a letter he wrote to the Pittsburgh Courier: "Being an American of dark complexion," wrote Thompson, "these questions flash through my mind: 'Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?' ... 'Will colored Americans suffer still the indignities that have been heaped upon them in the past?' These and other questions need answering; I want to know, and I believed every colored American, who is thinking, wants to know. — Margot Lee Shetterly

The bodybuilding world has lost one of its greatest legends. I had a chance to speak with Steve Michalik a year ago at The Upper State Bodybuilding competition. We laughed and shared our personal opinions about bodybuilding [today's scene and how it was in the past]. Steve, we'll miss you. R.I.P. — Lee Haney

I reminded myself that according to the consensus of opinion, a forty-year-old woman was in her sexual prime, while a man's was at the age of 19. Which meant Sebastian was already past his prime: although there was no evidence that anyone had told him that. — Jane Harvey-Berrick

The future's come and gone; it's a thing of the past. That once impossibly exotic expression 'the year 2000,' for so long evocative of silver suits and robots in pinnies, now feels antiquated. — Peter Baynham

It's very encouraging to see the structural changes that the RNC has made this past year in engaging communities on the ground. Recognizing that the way to reach voters is to go into their communities instead of reaching out from an office in Washington DC is essential for victory in elections today. — S. E. Cupp

But I don't like it, okay? I don't like how everything is changing. It's like when you're a kid, you think that things like the holidays are meant to show you how things always stay the same, how you have the same celebration year after year, and that's why it's so special. But the older you get, the more you realize that, yes, there are all these things that link you to the past, and you're using the same words and singing the same songs that have always been there for you, but each time, things have shifted, and you have to deal with that shift. Because maybe you don't notice it every single day. Maybe it's only on days like today that you notice it a lot. And I know I'm supposed to be able to deal with that, but I'm not sure I can deal with that.--David Levithan (p. 201 in galley) — David Levithan

Next year, when you return, you'll bring the ashes back and toss them onto that year's bonfire. In this way, each of us comes back to this place, bringing some of the past, leaving with some of the future. — Lurlene McDaniel

I have some pretty wonderful friendships, so that's been really good for me. In the past year, I've really worked on that. I think when I was married, I let my friendships go. I think people thought, "Oh, because she's married now, she's so happy all the time." But I really was just isolated in my house. — Jen Kirkman

It had to do with the knowledge that the world was as it was because of what men believed it was ... year by year, these past three or four generations, the minds of men had been hardened to believing that there was one God, one world, one way of describing reality, and that all things which intruded on the realm of that great one-ness must be evil and of the fiends, and that the sound of the bells and the shadow of their holy places would keep the evil afar. And as more and more people believed this, it was so, and Avalon no more than a dream adrift in an almost inaccessible other world — Marion Zimmer Bradley

(Plants on the disc, while including the categories known commonly as annuals, which were sown this year to come up later this year, biennials, sown this year to grow next year, and perennials, sown this year to grow until further notice, also included a few rare re-annuals which, because of an unusual four-dimensional twist in their genes, could be planted this year to come up last year. The vul nut vine was particularly exceptional in that it could flourish as many as eight years prior to its seed actually being sown. Vul nut wine was reputed to give certain drinkers an insight into the future which was, from the nut's point of view, the past. Strange but true.) — Terry Pratchett

THE UNIVERSE PROCEEDS out of what it has been and into what it will be, inexorably, unstoppably, at the rate of one second per second, one year per year, forever. At right angles to its forward progress lie the past and the future. The future, that is to say, does not lie "ahead" of the present in the stream of time, but at a right angle to it: the future of any present moment can be projected as far as you like outward from it, infinitely in fact, but when the universe has proceeded further, and a new present moment has succeeded this one, the future of this one retreats with it into the what-has-been, forever outdated. It is similar but more complicated with the past. — John Crowley

My eyes fix on my reflection in the mirror as the water warms up for my shower.
I'm not sure if it's just my perception, but I look older than my thirty-eight years.
I certainly feel older, too.
I feel like I've lived more than one lifetime, each of them lasting an eternity. An eternity of rage, and resentment, and wrongdoing ... it takes its toll on a man, that's for certain. But none of it had half as much effect on me as this past year. Something I learned was sentiment can take it out of you. I used to have no regard for myself - or anybody, for that matter. I had no reason to live anymore. But now that I care about what happens to her - and for her sake, me - I'm growing exhausted from the constant worry.
Worry my past will catch up to us.
Worry that she'll be the one to pay for those sins.
It's the consequence, I think, of loving me.
The consequence of being with someone who lived so carelessly. — J.M. Darhower

You have to look at the past in order to learn from it and move on. I've done a lot of reflecting over the past year. And certainly, I've turned the corner and am looking more toward the future in a lot of ways. — Tiger Woods

They think America is like a major league in entertainment. For me personally being here for the past year-and-a-half, I know some of the arguments and discrepancies African American actors have with the opportunities here. — Aml Ameen

We are a generation that is obsessed with nostalgia. Everything from the past is so readily available in ways that it never was before and because of that, western civilization will experience a period of arrested growth. The future holds fifty-year-old men and women running Disney Princess blogs. Bank on it. — Jayme K.

Oh yes", said the old woman, "but I've heard these so-called stoves are by no means all they are supposed to be. I never saw a stove in my day, and yet never ailed a thing, at least as long as I could really be called alive, except for nettle rash one night when I was in my fifteenth year.. It was caused by some fresh fish that the boys used to catch in the lakes thereabouts."
The man did not answer for a while, but lay pondering the medical history of this incredible old creature who, without ever setting eyes on a stove, had suffered almost no ailments in the past sixty-five years. — Halldor Laxness

If it is true that an influx of doubt and uncertainty actually marks periods of healthy growth in a science, then evolutionary biology is flourishing today as it seldom has flourished in the past. For biologists collectively are less agreed upon the details of evolutionary mechanics than they were a scant decade ago. Superficially, it seems as if we know less about evolution than we did in 1959, the centennial year of Darwin's on the Origin of Species. — Niles Eldredge

You want to believe in black and white, good and evil, heroes that are truly heroic, villains that are just plain bad, but I've learned in the past year that things are rarely so simple. The good guys can do some truly awful things, and the bad guys can sometimes surprise the heck out of you. — Karen Marie Moning

And let us, on this birthday of the year, renew each his personal and solemn dedication to God; supplicating forgiveness for the past, and invoking grace to help in every time of need for the future. The atoning blood of Jesus! How solemn and how precious is it at this moment! Bathed in it afresh, we will more supremely, unreservedly, and submissively yield ourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead. We will travel to the open fountain, wash, and be clean. Christ loves us to come as we are. — Octavius Winslow

Over the past year, since breaking up with Martin, she had begun to notice the foreignness of the place, to suffer from the chill that dried her skin and never really left her, even in the summer. And yet she couldn't make up her mind to leave. She depended on the place now; she had grown attached to it with the obstinacy with which people become attached only to things that hurt them. — Paolo Giordano

Eleven-year-olds are supposed to be unreliable. We're past the age of being poppets: the age where people bend over and poke us in the tum with their fingers and make idiotic noises that sound like "boof-boof" - just the thought of which is enough to make me bring up my Bovril. And yet we're still not at the age where anyone ever mistakes us for a grown-up. The fact is, we're invisible - except when we choose not to be. — Alan Bradley

I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach! — Charles Dickens

Nigerians don't buy houses because they're old. A renovated two-hundred-year-old mill granary, you know, the kind of thing Europeans like. It doesn't work here at all. But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie