It's The End Of The Year Quotes & Sayings

Prior to 2015, I had kind of approached every year like, 'Let's hope for the best.' I always made these year-end videos with 100 things I did, and it would kind of build itself up throughout the year. When this year started, it was like I knew the 100 things before I even got to do them. — Tyler Oakley

At the end of the day, you should try to remember that it's not about the number of followers you have or the numbers of likes, comments, and shares your posts are getting.
It's the number of people who will be present in the hospital room when you fall terribly sick.
It's the number of people who will remember your birthday like they remember their first name.
It's the number of people who will invite you to celebrate Christmas or new year's eve.
It's the number of people who will actually show up to look at your newborn child or to bless your newly bought house.
It's the number of people who will actually cross an ocean to see your face.
It's the number of people who will wipe your tears when one of your parents passes away.
It's the number of people who will make a slightly larger than a thumb effort to be there for you. — Malak El Halabi

Obviously we're celebrating a 36-year legacy on ABC and the end of an era, but we're also celebrating the start of a new era with this great property on ESPN. It's a bit of mixed emotions. — George Bodenheimer

I write all year, and at the end of the year I put an album out. And if sucks, it sucks, and if it's good, it's good. I just let it lay where it lays. It doesn't stop from doing another one next year. — Toby Keith

Love is about giving, about caring for the other person's welfare. Love is treating someone, in the Kantian sense, never as a means but as an end in themselves. Love is sacrifice, love is something you work at, something you build like a house or tend like a plant, brick by brick, drop by drop, day by day. Nonsense. Old wives' tales, old husbands' tales. That is affection they are talking about, that is companionship, that is charity, that is tickets for the Cancer Research Ball. You must ask the young if you want to know what love is. Only they are deep enough in it to describe. We older ones have clues and simulacra, we base our judgement, like pathologists do, on the dents and scars and sediments of hearts long kept in formaldehyde. It is the pulsing heart you want to probe: the pulsing, beating, leaping, dipping, fluttering heart of a seventeen-year-old. — A.P.

I'd always assumed Beth and I would be friends forever. But then in middle of the eighth grade, the Goldbergs went through the World's Nastiest Divorce.
Beth went a little nuts.
I don't blame her. When her dad got involved with this twenty-one year old dental hygienist, Beth got involved with the junk food aisle at the grocery store. She carried processed snack cakes the way toddlers carry teddy bears. She gained, like, twenty pounds, but I didn't think it was a big deal. I figured she'd get back to her usual weight once the shock wore off.
Unfortunately, I wasn't the only person who noticed.
May 14 was 'Fun and Fit Day at Surry Middle School, so the gym was full of booths set up by local health clubs and doctors and dentists and sports leagues, all trying to entice us to not end up as couch potatoes. That part was fine. What wasn't fine was when the whole school sat down to watch the eighth-grade cheerleaders' program on physical fitness. — Katie Alender

That's right.Forteen-year old boys have better taste than you.They think I'm hot." I licked my fingertip and stuck it on my butt. "Tsssss."
And with that,I propelled myself across the slope and skidded to a stop at one end of the trick rail. "Quick," I told the boys, "act like you think I'm hot."
Chloe cracked up.josh stared blankly at me.His friends blushed deep red,but they weren't claiming it.
"Thanks for your support," I told them. "Look without looking like your looking.Is Nick gone? — Jennifer Echols

At the end of the day I'm gonna be dead one day, and what people say about me is going what I accomplished and what I did in my life and how my children are. And I don't think it's gonna be what was printed in the tabloids this year. — Angelina Jolie

I've become fascinated by the idea that it's really achievable to make two or three small improvements in a week and by the end of the year, it's 150 improvements. — Darrell Hammond

All this [Soviet labor camp for political prisoners] brings about one marked change in your physical appearance; by the end of your first year, you will have what are known as 'zek's eyes.' The look in a zek's eyes is impossible to describe, but once encountered, it is never forgotten. When you emerge, your friends, embracing you, will exclaim: 'Your eyes! Your eyes have changed!' And not one of your tormentors will be able to bear your scrutiny. They will turn away from it, like beaten dogs. — Irina Ratushinskaya

I always have a few ideas that are percolating, and then after I've finished a book and it's a year later, and things are sort of festering and things are disgusting in my house and I have to get back to work, whatever project I keep thinking about is the one I end up working on. Sort of a very simple process of elimination. — Colson Whitehead

If you wrote a page a day, at the end of the year you would have a book. Whether it's any good or not is beside the point, but you would have a book, instead of just talking about it all the time. — Jackie Collins

Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies and directed by Sundance nominee James Ponsoldt, 'The End of the Tour' is a terrific film, among the year's best with its two-man tarantella of wall-to-wall talk - and I watched it through my fingers as though it were Mad Max. — Steve Erickson

Why were we tortured? We were in love and life was a fast current swarming around our ankles, threatening to topple us into the wet part of the planet. It was intense, that's why we were tortured. It was enormous and exploding like palm tree. Iris was my Yuri-G, my Delilah, my Stella Marie. Strong dark women you had to love with a strong dark heart that throbbed in gorgeous pain because love is terrible. I mean, ultimately. It would go away like a needle lifting from the vinyl at the end of the song, we knew this. The music would cease, one of us would die or else we'd just break up, and this drove us to drink from each other like two twelve-year-olds sneaking vodka from the liquor cabinet, trying to get it all down, trying to get as fucked up as possible before we got caught. — Michelle Tea

Going into Indianapolis, playing Indiana, I guess bring it on. It's what we've caught at the end of the year, and we've got to try to make the best of it. — Bo Ryan

Nevertheless, four years later, at the end of August 2004, a Zogby poll discovered the critical fact that 57 percent of the undecided voters in that year's election would rather have a beer with George Bush than with John Kerry.
The question was odd enough on its face, but a nation to which it would matter is odder still. Be honest. Consider all the people with whom you've tossed back a beer. How many of them would you trust with nuclear launch codes? — Charles P. Pierce

Revelation, which is often associated with the end of things, also speaks of new beginnings - a new name (2:17); a new Jerusalem (3:12); a new heaven and a new earth (21:1); and all things new (21:5). It reads like a description of New Year's Eve. Ring out the old; ring in the new! — William J. Petersen

Watch this, Larry. The seeds I saved from last year bring forth plants this year. It's a death, burial, and resurrection. It's this way with the sun also. It comes up in the morning and brings us light all the day long. But in the evening it goes down. Is that the end of the sun? No... It comes up the very next day. Death, burial, and resurrection."
"I never saw it like that, Charlie. Tell me more."
"See Larry, let's go deeper with that. Just for instance, something must die for something to live. You and I eat live substance--whether it is corn or beans, it's a life. That life dies to give us life. Now watch this, Larry. If that works with the physical; then it also works in the spiritual. Jesus Christ had to die to give us life... — Jerrel C. Thomas

I was the one small brunete among tall blondes. You only get one body, might as well love it. Nothing is the end of the world. Flash forward a year and ask, "Is this really going to be that big of a deal? In the long run, it's really not". — Lucy Hale

I focus on my favorite daydream, the one where I return from London at the end of the summer and am all glamorous and drop-dead gorgeous and every girl in my school is completely jealous when Quinn McKeyan asks me to Fall Homecoming because he can't resist my charm.
Hey, it's my daydream. I can dream what I want to.
The thing is, Quinn's face keeps getting replaced in my head by Dante's.
Since I've had a mad crush on Quinn from the time we started kindergarten all the way through our junior year last year, that's saying something.
Every daydream I've had for eleven years has been of him. I'm a very loyal daydreamer. And I suddenly feel like I'm cheating on my imaginary boyfriend, a boy who happens to be real, but who has been dating my best friend Becca for the past two years. And no. Becca has no idea that I'm secretly in love with her boyfriend. It's the one secret that I've kept from her. — Courtney Cole

I spend a lot of time in L.A., and when it rains there you get the entire rainfall for the year in two days, raindrops the size of mangoes. And in Barcelona, the Mediterranean storms come up from the sea, thunder and lightning; it's like the end of the world. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

It's become something of a ritual - every year, Google publishes its year-end summary of what the world wants, and every year I complain about how shallow it is, given what Google really knows about what the world is up to. — John Battelle

Part of Sykes's motive was rooted in religiosity. A devout Catholic, he regarded a return of the ancient tribe of Israel to the Holy Land as a way to correct
a nearly two-thousand-year-old wrong. That view had taken on new passion and
urgency with the massacres of the Armenians. To Sykes, in that ongoing atrocity, the Ottoman Empire had proven it could never again be trusted to protect
its religious minority populations. At war's end, the Christian and Jewish Holy
Land of Palestine would be taken from it, and the failure of the Crusades made
right. — Scott Anderson

Crocker, it's about property values."
"It's about being in place. We -" gesturing around the Visitor's Bar and its withdrawal into seemingly unbounded shadow, "we're in place. We've been in place forever. Look around. Real estate, water rights, oil, cheap labor - all of that's ours. And you, at the end of the day, what are you? one more unit in this swarm of transients who come and go without pause here in the sunny Southland, eager to be bought off with a car of a certain make, model, and year, a blonde in a bikini, thirty seconds on some excuse for a wave - a chili dog, for Christ's sake." He shrugged. "We will never run out of you people. The supply is inexhaustible. — Thomas Pynchon

There's hardly anybody who hasn't owned or at least ridden a bicycle at some point in his or her life. I mean, sure, you do come across people occasionally who never learned how to ride a bike, but it's rare and a little unsettling. It's like meeting Someone who can't operate a washing machine, or a thirty-two-year-old guy who never learned how to pee standing up. You smile politely, you pity them silently, and then you move on down to the other end of the bar. Despite — BikeSnobNYC

I think the end of last year when we were aware of that transition was for everyone in their own way kind of bittersweet, but it's also what the show's about, one administration ends and another begins. — Stockard Channing

The carbon fee would raise the cost of the things you buy (since right now there is some carbon emitted in the production and distribution of pretty much everything). That's a little less money in your pocket. But at the end of the year, the government would take all of the money collected by the carbon fee, divide it up, and give it back to you as a dividend check. By you, of course, I mean all of you. The government wouldn't keep any of the money. All the fee would do is put a realistic price on the carbon we dump into the environment. Every factory, every company would have an incentive to reduce emissions, because then they could sell things at a lower price. Consumers, given a choice between a low-carbon pair of jeans and a high-carbon pair of jeans, would see a cost advantage in choosing the former. If you live a low-carbon lifestyle all year, when your dividend check arrives you will find that you came out ahead. — Bill Nye

We do not know what it's like to be a bat, we do not know what it's like to be in coma. we can't even say that we know what it's like to be sleeping. We can say what it's like to be restored to consciousness after sleeping. If there are no dreams during our sleep then the sleeping life is an empty life. We might say of such a life that it's not like being anything. We protect that life on the assumption that come the morning its normal functions will be restored. Suppose it was the case however that such functions were only restored every two days... every eight days... twice a year but only briefly. I assume the point is clear. Actions that end life are irretrievable. If we are mistaken at that point there is no going back. — Daniel N. Robinson

Of course there always will be darkness but I realize now something inhabits it. Historical or not. Sometimes it seems like a cat, the panther with its moon mad gait or a tiger with stripes of ash and eyes as wild as winter oceans. Sometimes it's the curve of a wrist or what's left of romance, still hiding in the drawer of some long lost nightstand or carefully drawn in the margins of an old discarded calendar. Sometimes it's even just a vapor trail speeding west, prophetic, over clouds aglow with dangerous light. Of course these are only images, my images, and in the end they're born out of something much more akin to a Voice, which though invisible to the eye and frequently unheard by even the ear still continues, day and night, year after year, to sweep through us all. — Mark Z. Danielewski

That night the first frost of autumn struck Tucker's Grove. It crept up from the ground, snaring the fragile roots of plants. It emerged from the air, etching its signature on window-panes. A portent. The year was nearing its end. Things would die soon. — Kevin J. Anderson

A year after I'd graduated college, I went to a weeklong conference intensive in Boston, and that's when things kicked into high gear. My workshop leader was a Harvard professor and editor. At the end of the week we met one-on-one over breakfast, and she said, in essence, "Look, you're ready to turn pro." She gave me a list of literary agents to query once I had something to show them. I came home and wrote my first real novel, and the agent that sold it to Tor Books was on that list. — Brian Hodge

I went to school, and I remember that you had to do these tests to find out what set you're in - how clever you are. I put down "Kit Harington," and they looked at me like I was completely stupid, and they said, "No, you're Christopher Harington, I'm afraid." It was only then I learnt my actual name. That was kind of a bizarre existential crisis for an 11-year-old to have, but in the end I always stuck with Kit, because I felt that's who I was. I'm not really a "Chris." — Kit Harington

I really do believe that chance favours a prepared mind. Wallace Stegner, who was one of my teachers when I was at Stanford, preached that writing a novel is not something that can be done in a sprint. That it's a marathon. You have to pace yourself. He himself wrote two pages every day and gave himself a day off at Christmas. His argument was at the end of a year, no matter what, you'd got 700 pages and that there's got to be something worth keeping. — Scott Turow

I never heard communism seriously propounded or argued; perhaps I was too deeply preoccupied with my own dissipations; and, as it turned out in the end it was a way of thought that I was denied or spared by a geographical fluke. From the end of these travels till the War, I lived, with a year's interruption, in Eastern Europe, among friends whom I must call old-fashioned liberals. They hated Nazi Germany; but it was impossible to look eastwards for inspiration and hope, as their western equivalents
peering from afar, and with the nightmare of only one kind of totalitarianism to vex them
felt able to do. For Russia began only a few fields away, the other side of a river; and there, as all her neighbours knew, great wrong was being done and terrible danger lay. All their fears came true. Living among them made me share those fears and they made stony ground for certain kinds of grain. — Patrick Leigh Fermor

It's been open about a year now.And it is one of my favorite places in the city."
"You never told me," he said, sounding surprised.
"So even after all these years,we can still surprise one another," she teased.
He leaned over and kissed her quickly on the cheek. "Even after all these years," he said. "So enlighten me-how often do you come to this place?"
"Five,maybe six times a week."
"Oh?"
"Every morning when I'd leave the shop,I'd usually walk down to the Embarcadero,amble along the promenade and end up walking the length of this pier.Where did you think I was for that hour?"
"I thought you'd popped across the road for coffee."
"Yea,Nicholas," Perenelle said in French. "I drink tea. You know I hate coffee."
"You hate coffee?" Nicholas said. "Since when?"
"Only for the last eighty years or so."
Nicholas blinked,pale eyes reflecting the blue of the sea. "I knew that.I think."
"You're teasing me."
"Maybe," he admitted. — Michael Scott

I, too, have felt that the war goes on and on. When my son, Ian, died at El Alamein
side by side with ... visitors offering their condolences, thinking to comfort me, said, "Life goes on." What nonsense, I thought, of course it doesn't. It's death that goes on; Ian is dead now and will be dead tomorrow and nexe year and forever. There's no end to that. But perhaps there will be an end to the sorrow of it. — Mary Ann Shaffer

It's quite possible to arrive in the year 2030 where people are no longer dying of poverty. We could actually help lead a global end-not a reduction, but an end-to absolute poverty ... I have always found that a committed, powerful group of leaders, can make a huge difference. — Jeffrey Sachs

Go play your favorite game."
Feeling the hum of anticipation in his belly, Andrew gave his alpha an innocent smile. "I have no idea what you mean."
Hawke pointed a finger at him. "I want my calm, collected lieutenant back by the end of the week, or I'm packing you in a box and shipping you to fucking Siberia."
Andrew grinned. "I hear it's nice there this time of year. — Nalini Singh

My dad, we'll be talking about goals for the next year. He's like, 'I think you can be here,' and I look at him like he's cross-eyed, like, 'Are you serious? That's so far out of my reach.' Well, then I always end up achieving it. — Miranda Leek

It's December, the year 2014 is folding, is coming to an end. But it doesn't mean everything has to end with it, it simply means you have to step into year 2015 with the continuation of your dreams and aim higher than ever. To those who still play a dilly-dally get a grip and start to dream big dreams again and again. — Euginia Herlihy

Bud, this is it," Mr. McCarthy said. "This is the last year, and then you're gone. Let me tell you this: After high school, life only gets better. You're in a tunnel right now. There's a light glimmering there at the end of it. You gotta make it to that light. High school is a nightmare, bud. It might be the worst years of your life. — Jesse Andrews

There are two kinds of businesses: The first earns 12%, and you can take it out at the end of the year. The second earns 12%, but all the excess cash must be reinvested - there's never any cash. It reminds me of the guy who looks at all of his equipment and says, 'There's all of my profit.' We hate that kind of business. — Charlie Munger

I travel a lot with my students. We go on the road and even learn about things like doing your laundry and managing your time. And maybe that's not on the test at the end of the year, but it's in the test of life and that's why my classroom is successful. — Rafe Esquith

I don't act because I love doing it, I act because it's my job. At the end of the year, I gotta pay my taxes, bills, doctors, insurance, car insurance, the occasional vacation. It's a wonderful job. The upside is that it is exciting and different ... the downside is that it is an extremely insecure job. — Clint Howard

It's the strangest feeling at the end of pregnancy: you look down at this huge belly and try to imagine how some little person, whom you haven't even met, is going to emerge from it any day and completely change your lives. First, you wonder how this pregnancy, to which you've grown so accustomed over much of the last year, can, with barely any notice, come to an abrupt end. Then you try to fathom how this baby is ever going to come out; your bowling ball stomach seems misproportioned for what lies between it and the outside world. And only then do you realize what it all means-that the easy part, pregnancy, is almost over, and it's time to gear up for the tough stuff: childbirth! — Lise Eliot

I hadn't thought about it until just now, but the night Daniel rang our bell in the winter of 1970 was the end of November, the same time of year she died twenty-seven years later. I don't know what's that supposed to tell you; nothing, except that we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none. — Nicole Krauss

He slipped his arms into the scarlet woollen cassock and fastened the thirty-three buttons that ran from his neck to his ankles - one button for each year of Christ's life. Around his waist he tied the red watered-silk sash of the cincture, or fascia, designed to remind him of his vow of chastity, and checked to make sure its tasselled end hung to a point midway up his left calf. Then he pulled over his head the thin white linen rochet - the symbol, along with the mozzetta, of his judicial authority. The bottom two-thirds and the cuffs were of white lace with a floral pattern. He tied the tapes in a bow at his neck and tugged the rochet down so that it extended to just below his knees. Finally he put on his mozzetta, an elbow-length nine-buttoned scarlet cape. — Robert Harris

The real magic in National Geographic isn't how much money they have left at the end of the year. It's the fact that through their overall focus they are reaching hundreds of millions of people and educating people about the world. It just happens to be done in a business-oriented kind of way that is more sustainable. — Steve Case

M. J. Putney's writing has always been magical; now that she has turned her hand to the telling of a fantasy tale, it sparkles on the page. Stolen Magic has to be one of the most delightful reads of the year, a witty, finely crafted tale that enchants from beginning to end. As always, Putney's intelligent wordsmithery, scholarship, eye for detail, and ability to bring to life irresistible characters add up to enjoyment on every page. Fast-moving and fun! — Elizabeth Haydon

If there was any loose money lying around, the people in government would find a way to spend it. The worst sin in the bureaucracy was to give money back because it meant the bureaucracy's budget could be reduced the following year. If at the end of the fiscal year they hadn't spent all the money in their budget, there would be a rush to buy new office furniture, take a trip at the taxpayers' expense, or spend the money on something else, just to assure their budget wouldn't be smaller in the future. The idea of returning money to taxpayers once it had been collected from them had never come up before. — Ronald Reagan

I never understood those commercials with the parents celebrating the end of summer. Now I understand that around mid-August, all the summer camps are over and you've run out of constructive things to do with your kid and you are desperate to get them out of the house. You've grown tired of your four-year-old pointing to words and asking, "What does this say?" Apparently it's not okay to respond to them with, "It says, 'Learn how to read.' " You don't want to get rid of your children, but you do want to get rid of them for a couple of hours a day. School seems like a perfect solution. Your precious child will learn something, and most important, you will be able to use the bathroom in peace. — Jim Gaffigan

I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT KING TRITON. Specifically, King, why are you elderly but with the body of a teenage Beastmaster? How do you maintain those monster pecs? Do they have endocrinologists under the sea? Because I am scheduling you some bloodwork ...
... Question: How come, when they turn back into humans at the end of Beauty and the Beast, Chip is a four-year-old boy, but his mother, Mrs. Potts, is like 107? Perhaps you're thinking, "Lindy, you are remembering it wrong. That kindly, white-haired, snowman-shaped Mrs. Doubtfire situation must be Chip's grandmother." Not so, champ! She's his mom. Look it up. She gave birth to him four years ago ... As soon as you become a mother, apparently, you are instantly interchangeable with the oldest woman in the world, and / or sixteen ounces of boiling brown water with a hat on it. Take a sec and contrast Mrs. Pott's literally spherical body with the cut-diamond abs of King Triton, father of seven. — Lindy West

It's quite funny in that I once won Rear of the Year at my school! I was about 17 in the sixth form and we used to have an end of year celebration and give out different awards. I even got a little trophy! — Jessica Ennis

It's true that this year, following my accident in the pre-season, I kind of lost morale and I felt like quitting at the end of this year. But today I can say that I want to be a professional bike rider in the year 2003 as well. — Laurent Jalabert

You're perfect- beautiful, intelligent, intractable in a kind of ... attractive way. Headstrong, but a good strategist. An amazing fighter."
"But that's not enough?"
"It's too much. You think I haven't thought about what it might be like to return to my rooms at the end of the night and find you there- to find you in my bed, to have your body and your laugh and your mind? To look across a room and know that you were mine- that *I'd* claimed you. *Me.* Ethan Sullivan. Not the four-hundred-year-old vampire, not the child of Balthasar or the Novitiate of Peter Cadogan. Me. Just me. Just you and me. — Chloe Neill

Saudia Arabia takes in half a trillion dollars every year in oil revenue, and the country has a population smaller than New York state, but when your system of government is an eleventh century monarchy, someone's going to end up poor, and it's not gonna be the guy whose first name is King. — Craig Ferguson

Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you've done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I'll be damned, I did this today. It doesn't matter how good it is, or how bad-you did it. At the end of the week you'll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I'll be damned, it's been a good year. — Ray Bradbury

When I see people with an interesting gap year, if they can explain it, if they can justify it, if they can show what they've learnt from it, it's sometimes more profitable or more intelligent than having been through a traditional, continuous race from high school to the end of university. — Jean-Pascal Tricoire

Before she was evicted, Larraine had $164 left over after paying the rent. She could have put some of that away, shunning cable and Walmart. If Larraine somehow managed to save $50 a month, nearly one-third of her after-rent income, by the end of the year she would have $600 to show for it - enough to cover a single month's rent. And that would have come at considerable sacrifice, since she would sometimes have had to forgo things like hot water and clothes. Larraine could have at least saved what she spent on cable. But to an older woman who lived in a trailer park isolated from the rest of the city, who had no car, who didn't know how to use the Internet, who only sometimes had a phone, who no longer worked, and who sometimes was seized with fibromyalgia attacks and cluster migraines - cable was a valued friend. — Matthew Desmond

Because the end of a friendship isn't even formally acknowledged - no Little Talk, no papers served - you walk around effectively heartbroken but embarrassed to admit it, even to yourself. It's a special, open-ended kind of pain, like having a disease that doesn't even have a name. You worry you must be pathetically oversensitive to feel so wounded over such a thing. You can't tell people, "My friend broke up with me," without sounding like a nine-year-old. The only phrase I can think of that even recognizes this kind of hurt - "You look like you just lost your best friend" - is only ever spoken by adults to children. You can give yourself the same ineffectual lecture your parents used to give you as a kid: anyone who'd treat you this way isn't a very good friend and doesn't deserve your friendship anyway. But the nine-year-old in you knows that the reason they've ditched you is that you suck. — Tim Kreider

The only thing I can do now," he said to himself, and his thought was confirmed by the equal length of his own steps with the steps of the two others, "the only thing I can
do now is keep my common sense and do what's needed right till the end. I always wanted to go at the world and try and do too much, and even to do it for something that was not too cheap. That was wrong of me. Should I now show them I learned nothing from facing trial for a year? Should
I go out like someone stupid? Should I let anyone say, after I'm gone, that at the start of the proceedings I wanted to end them, and that now that they've ended I want to start them again? I don't want anyone to say that. I'm grateful they sent these unspeaking, uncomprehending men to go with me on this journey, and that it's been left up to me to say what's necessary — Franz Kafka

If the Palestinian people really wish to decide that they will battle to the very end to prevent partition or annexation of even an inch of their ancestral soil, then I have to concede that that is their right. I even think that a sixty-year rather botched experiment in marginal quasi-statehood is something that the Jewish people could consider abandoning. It represents barely an instant in our drawn-out and arduous history, and it's already been agreed even by the heirs of Ze'ev Jabotinsky that the whole scheme is unrealizable in 'Judaea and Samaria,' let alone in Gaza or Sinai. But it's flat-out intolerable to be solicited to endorse a side-by-side Palestinian homeland and then to discover that there are sinuous two-faced apologists explaining away the suicide-murder of Jewish civilians in Tel Aviv, a city which would be part of a Jewish state or community under any conceivable 'solution.' There's that word again ... — Christopher Hitchens

One night last year when my father and I were eating supper at 6.17 p.m., I said to him, "Did you have a favourite?"
"A favourite what?" asked my father.
"A favourite foster mother."
"Yes, I did," said my father. "Her name was Hannah Pederson."
"That is very interesting," I told him, recalling Mrs Leibler's conversational tips, "because 'Hannah' is a kind of word called a palindrome. That means you can spell it the same way whether you start at the beginning or the end. My name is not a palindrome because if you spell it backwards it's E-S-O-R. But it does have a homonym."
My father said, "Don't get started on homonyms, Rose."
So I said, "Did you have any favourite foster brothers or sisters?"
"Yes," said my father after a moment.
"How interesting," I replied. "Did any of their names have homonyms? — Ann M. Martin

I remember the first year after my second child was born, what I can remember of it at all, as a year of disarray, of overturned glasses of milk, of toys on the floor, of hours from sunrise to sunset that were horribly busy but filled with what, at the end of the day, seemed like absolutely nothing at all. What saved my sanity were books. What saved my sanity was disappearing, if only for fifteen minutes before I inevitably began to nod off in bed ... and as it was for me when I was young and surrounded by siblings, as it is today when I am surrounded by children, reading continues to provide an escape from a crowded house into an imaginary room of one's own. — Anna Quindlen

During the course of my presidency, it feels as if a couple times a year I end up having to speak to the country, and to speak to a particular community about a devastating loss, and the grieving that the country feels is real, the sympathy, obviously the prioritizing, comforting the families, all of that's important, but I think a part of the point I wanted to make was that it's not enough just to feel bad. — Barack Obama

There are always at least five good films at the end of the year to get nominated, but generally speaking nowadays, it's more of the independent films that are recognized. — Mark Rydell

The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: "Philip Marlowe ... Investigations." It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization. The door is locked, but next to it is another door with same legend which is not locked. Come on in
there's nobody here but me an a big bluebottle fly. But not if you're from Manhattan, Kansas. — Raymond Chandler

MURRY: It's not that, it's just ... I don't really get it. I usually find myself staring at the midnight deadline filled with regrets both for opportunities and loved ones missed. It's another day closer to the end. The last thing I feel like doing is counting down to some wild celebration. It just seems so sad to say goodbye to a year and know that it's gone forever and you can't go back to it. Not to relive, not to correct.
NOEL: I've never thought about it that way.
MURRY: There's something so final about it. It's the period at the end of the sentence.
NOEL: The New Year's resolution. — Hillary DePiano

When my sister and I came along, my father's political life was completely over. He ran for president the year I was born. So that was the end of it. He had been congressman first, then governor, before all that. So when we came along, he was running the Dayton newspaper. — Anne Cox Chambers

Lie on!' cried the usurer, 'with your iron tongue! Ring merrily for births that make expectants writhe, and marriages that are made in hell, and toll ruefully for the dead whose shoes are worn already! Call men to prayers who are godly because not found out, and ring chimes for the coming in of every year that brings this cursed world nearer to it's end.
No bell or book for me! Throw me on a dunghill, and let me rot there, to infect the air! — Charles Dickens

Fall is not the end of the gardening year; it is the start of next year's growing season. The mulch you lay down will protect your perennial plants during the winter and feed the soil as it decays, while the cleaned up flower bed will give you a huge head start on either planting seeds or setting out small plants. — Thalassa Cruso

I witnessed so much death and dying that first year, it was sometimes hard to take. Every death challenged me to clarify my value system. How much should I defer to a patient's wishes regarding end-of-life care? How hard should I encourage him, as I had James Irey, to make what I thought were the right choices? How to balance a patient's autonomy with the competing ethical imperatives of beneficence or social responsibility? — Sandeep Jauhar

Chum was a British boy's weekly which, at the end of the year was bound into a single huge book; and the following Christmas parents bought it as Christmas presents for male children. — A.E. Van Vogt

It's my whole life of being the little guy and having a little chip on my shoulder, from year to year trying to prove myself, and at the end of the day to be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame is a very special honor for me. — Doug Flutie

Eid is a time of joy, after a season of fasting and prayer and reflection. Each year, the end of Ramadan means celebration and thanksgiving for millions of Americans. And your joy during this season enriches the life of our great country. This year, Eid is celebrated at the same time as Hanukkah and Advent. So it's a good time for people of these great faiths, Islam, Judaism and Christianity, to remember how much we have in common: devotion to family, a commitment to care for those in need, a belief in God and His justice, and the hope for peace on earth. — George W. Bush

It's been a harder book to write for personal reasons too. What gets me most are not the scary scientific studies about melting glaciers, the ones I used to avoid. It's the books I read to my two-year-old. Looking For a Moose is one of his favorites. It's about a bunch of kids that really, really, really want to see a moose. They search high and low - through a forest, a swamp, in brambly bushes and up a mountain, for "a long legged, bulgy nosed, branchy antlered moose." The joke is that there are moose hiding on each page. In the end, the animals all come out of hiding and the ecstatic kids proclaim: "We've never ever seen so many moose! — Naomi Klein

I've never had much luck with New Year's resolutions. Last year I only lasted three days before realizing I couldn't survive without junk food. And the year before that, when my sister and I promised not to argue anymore, we didn't even make it to the end of my dad's New Year's Eve party. I'll spare you the gory details, but fruit punch and guacamole were involved. So was dry cleaning. — James Ponti

More often than not, at the end of the day (or a month, or a year), you realize that your initial idea was wrong, and you have to try something else. These are the moments of frustration and despair. You feel that you have wasted an enormous amount of time, with nothing to show for it. This is hard to stomach. But you can never give up. You go back to the drawing board, you analyze more data, you learn from your previous mistakes, you try to come up with a better idea. And every once in a while, suddenly, your idea starts to work. It's as if you had spent a fruitless day surfing, when you finally catch a wave: you try to hold on to it and ride it for as long as possible. At moments like this, you have to free your imagination and let the wave take you as far as it can. Even if the idea sounds totally crazy at first. — Edward Frenkel

I want you to start a brand-new section in your notebooks and call it Mr. Browne's Precepts." He kept talking as we did what he was telling us to do. "Put today's date at the top of the first page. And from now on, at the beginning of every month, I'm going to write a new Mr. Browne precept on the chalkboard and you're going to write it down in your notebook. Then we're going to discuss that precept and what it means. And at the end of the month, you're going to write an essay about it, about what it means to you. So by the end of the year, you'll all have your own list of precepts to take away with you. — R.J. Palacio

The problem with water, though, is that the shortfalls don't show up until the very end. You can go on pumping unsustainably until the day you run out. Then all you have is the recharge flow, which comes from precipitation. This is not decades away, this is years away. We're already seeing huge shortages in China, where the Yellow River runs dry for part of each year. The Yellow River is the cradle of Chinese civilization. It first failed to reach the sea in 1972, and since 1985 it's run dry for part of each year. For 1997 it was dry for 226 days. — Lester R. Brown

I counted his failings in my head: his obnoxious, cocky attitude; his pierced and painted wannabe girlfriend; his leather jacket and black motorcycle; his tattoos and multiple piercings. Even his name rankled. Dante. I'd spent my formative years dodging his type. I refused to be intimidated by him. That poncy lot. I seethed some more. And geeks? Surely he could come up with something more original. My entire year's work depended on a successful outcome here, and Tristan had assured me this guy was the real deal, not just another charlatan. We only had two night's use of the control tower. As of next week, it was scheduled for demolition. I'd convinced myself Dante was just a means to an end, and then he smiled at me, his hard, uncompromising face lighting up for just a second. With his sharp cheekbones and proud chin, he looked almost beautiful, and my stomach turned cartwheels. His eyes glittered like diamonds, pale silver that appeared luminous in the badly lit room. — Sofia Grey

In the writings of a recluse one always hears something of the echo of the wilderness, something of the murmuring tones and timid vigilance of solitude; in his strongest words, even in his cry itself, there sounds a new and more dangerous kind of silence, of concealment. He who has sat day and night, from year's end to year's end, alone with his soul in familiar discord and discourse, he who has become a cave-bear, or a treasure-seeker, or a treasure-guardian and dragon in his cave - it may be a labyrinth, but can also be a gold-mine - his ideas themselves eventually acquire a twilight-colour of their own, and an odour, as much of the depth as of the mould, something uncommunicative and repulsive, which blows chilly upon every passer-by. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It hasn't even been competitive. That's the first thing we're going to have to do is just find a way to stay competitive because these (first two games) have been over by halftime. We saw that last year too (on Halloween). It was 21-3 (Steelers) at the end of the first quarter. — Bill Belichick

I watched, for the 17th and hopefully the last time, The 'Guns of Navarone' on New Year's Eve. I always watch just in case the explosives don't go off in the end. You have to watch the end, just to make sure it's OK. — David Cameron

As I ran a few blades of grass between my fingers, enjoying the breeze as it caressed my face, I contemplated the cycle of life. As this year would host the long anticipated arrival of the Mayan Doomsday, marking the end of their long count calendar, I wasn't alone in my ponderings. The whole world was focused on the potential that we would be the last generation; the witnesses of the world's end. — J.M. Northup

At the end of their first years, there are few people who would have predicted that Truman would be elected in 1948 or that Reagan would get a second term. It's always premature to make some kind of categorical judgment after the first year in office. — Robert Dallek

In the two decades after I left, I waited for the end of Wall Street as I had known it. The outrageous bonuses, the endless parade of rogue traders, the scandal that sank Drexel Burnham, the scandal that destroyed John Gutfreund and finished off Salomon Brothers, the crisis following the collapse of my old boss John Meriwether's Long-Term Capital Management, the Internet bubble: Over and over again, the financial system was, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet the big Wall Street banks at the center of it just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to twenty-six-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents' world when you can buy it and sell off the pieces? — Michael Lewis

Read at a time when everything feels intense, seminal, and like you're the first person to discover it, freshman year of college, Carol Gilligan's 'In a Different Voice' made my hair stand on end with awe. — Emma McLaughlin

Plotting covetousness and deliberate contrivance, in order to compass a selfish end, are nowhere abundant but in the world of the dramatist: they demand too intense a mental action for many of our fellow-parishioners to be guilty of them. It is easy enough to spoil the lives of our neighbors without taking so much trouble; we can do it by lazy acquiescence and lazy omission, by trivial falsities for which we hardly know a reason, by small frauds neutralized by small extravagances, by maladroit flatteries, and clumsily improvised insinuations. We live from hand to mouth, most of us, with a small family of immediate desires; we do little else than snatch a morsel to satisfy the hungry brood, rarely thinking of seed-corn or the next year's crop. Mr. — George Eliot

About a year before this, K had had several nasty falls, and Jolly had said that either the Alzheimer's or the medicine for it was somehow affecting her balance. Perhaps K's fear of falling made her over compensate and walk hunched forward; perhaps it made her feel more balanced, more in control of her body. Bit it also made her look like hell--almost to the "hump" stage.........(end of quote)

Connie's comment: My dad was aggravated by a physical therapist who tried to re-teach him to walk. My dad did not appreciate someone telling him how to walk. He finally explained to us that he walked hunched over so he would be closer to the ground if he fell. — John West

Count Harry Kessler noted laconically: "It's a sad New Year, the end of a catastrophic year and the beginning of what looks to be an even more catastrophic one. — Volker Ullrich

Quantitative easing is just the latest chapter in the Federal Reserve's hundred-year history of failure. ( ... ) The American people have suffered long enough under a monetary policy controlled by an unaccountable, secretive central bank. It is time to finally audit - and then end - the Fed. — Ron Paul

His forty-third year. His small time's end. His time-
Who saw Infinity through the countless cracks
In the blank skin of things, and died of it. — A.S. Byatt

We could start, perhaps, with the seemingly simple question, What is History? Any thoughts, Webster?' 'History is the lies of the victors,' I replied, a little too quickly. 'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. Simpson?' Colin was more prepared than me. 'History is a raw onion sandwich, sir.' 'For what reason?' 'It just repeats, sir. It burps. We've seen it again and again this year. Same old story, same old oscillation between tyranny and rebellion, war and peace, prosperity and impoverishment.' 'Rather a lot for a sandwich to contain, wouldn't you say?' We laughed far more than was required, with an end-of-term hysteria. 'Finn?' '"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." ' 'Is it, indeed? Where did you find that?' 'Lagrange, sir. Patrick Lagrange. He's French. — Julian Barnes

NEW YEAR


All endings have beginnings.
All beginnings have their end.
Sometimes our cards bring us winnings,
Sometimes the dealer's not our friend.

Time can bring us sadness.
Time can bring us joy.
But let it not bring madness.
Never be Time's toy.

Now the year has gone.
It cannot be redone.
At least we carried on.
Regrets? Let us have none.

A glorious New Year beckons,
Seducing with its hope.
Its day, its hours, its seconds,
All have happiness within their scope.

Be glad for what Life dealt,
Cards of joy, or cards of pain.
You were alive and felt.
You may not pass this way again — Carl Martin Johnson

Okay, I've only just found out the final lineup for Slytherin," said Angelina, consulting a piece of parchment. "Last year's Beaters, Derrick and Bole, have left now, but it looks as though Montague's replaced them with the usual gorillas, rather than anyone who can fly particularly well. They're two blokes called Crabbe and Goyle. I don't know much about them
"
"We do," said Harry and Ron together.
"Well they don't look bright enough to tell one end of a broom from another," said Angelina, pocketing her parchment, "but then I was always surprised Derrick and Bole managed to find their way onto the pitch without signposts."
"Crabbe and Goyle are in the same mold," Harry assured her. — J.K. Rowling

Well, birthdays are merely symbolic of how another year has gone by and how little we've grown. No matter how desperate we are that someday a better self will emerge, with each flicker of the candles on the cake, we know it's not to be, that for the rest of our sad, wretched pathetic lives, this is who we are to the bitter end. Inevitably, irrevocably; happy birthday? No such thing. — Jerry Seinfeld

At the end of the day, it's all about what's on the shelf at the end of the year. — Steve Coppell

The Princess's so-called 'time and space speech' at the end of '93 about a year after the formal separation, looking back on it it's called her retirement from public life but we've seen in fact it's nothing of the kind. — Anthony Holden

We're living through an age of irrationality and religious "fervor" I would call it religious idiocy. It's exhausting to year after year be on the receiving end of this demagoguery. — Dan Savage