Just One Day And Just One Year Quotes & Sayings

Lincoln," Sam had asked him on one of those nights, the summer before their senior year, "do you think we'll get married some day?"
"I hope so," he'd whispered. He didn't usually think about it like that, like "married." He thought about how he never wanted to be without her. About how happy she made him and how he wanted to go on being that happy for the rest of his life. If a wedding could promise him that, he definitely wanted to get married.
"Wouldn't it be romantic," she said, "to marry your high school sweetheart? When people ask us how we met I'll say, 'We met in high school. I saw him, and I just knew.' And they'll say, 'Didn't you
ever wonder what it would be like to be with someone else? — Rainbow Rowell

I spent my childhood and youth on the outskirts of the Alps, in a region that was largely spared the immediate effects of the so-called hostilities. At the end of the war I was just one year old, so I can hardly have any impressions of that period of destruction based on personal experience. Yet to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war I feel as if I were its child, so to speak, as if those horrors I did not experience cast a shadow over me ... I see pictures merging before my mind's eye - paths through the fields, river meadows, and mountain pastures mingling with images of destruction - and oddly enough, it is the latter, not the now entirely unreal idylls of my early childhood, that make me feel rather as if I were coming home ... — W.G. Sebald

Resurrection plants are usually tiny, no bigger than your fist. They are ugly and small and useless and special. When it rains, their leaves puff up but do not become green for forty-eight hours because it takes time for photosynthesis to start up. During those strange days of its reawakening the plant lives off of pure concentrated sugar, an intense sustained infusion of sweetness, a year's worth of sucrose coursing through its veins in just one day. This little plant has done the impossible: it has transcended the wilted brown of death. The miracle is not sustainable, of course, and within a day or two things will inevitably go back to normal. Such a crazy life takes its toll, and in the long term, even a resurrection plant withers and dies completely. But for a brief, glorious moment it knows something that no other plant has ever known: how to grow without being green. — Hope Jahren

One day the Buddha was sistting with some of his monks in the woods. They had just come back from an almsround and were ready to share a mindful lunch together. A farmer passed by, looking distraught.
He asked the Buddha, "Monks, have you seen some cows going by here?"
"What cows?" the Buddha responded.
"Well," the man said, "I have four cows and I don't know why, but this morning they all ran aay. I also have two acres of sesame. This year the insects ate the entire crop. I have lost everything: my harvest and my cows. I feel like killing myself."
The Buddha said, "Dear friend, we have been sitting here almost an hour and we have not seen any cows passing by. Maybe you should go and lookin the other direction."
When the farmer was gone, the Buddha looked at his friends and smiled knowingly. "Dear friends, you are very lucky," he said. "You don't have any cows to lose. — Thich Nhat Hanh

The dawn that Anna feared might never come would appear on schedule, just as it always had - and after it another, and another. And yesterday would become Last Month, then Last Winter, then Last Year, then Two and Five and Ten Years Ago, and one day the people would have to stop and think before they could say how long ago it was ... — Howard Bahr

The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It's not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don't know its happening until one day you feel you've lost something but you're not sure what it is. It's like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you 'sir'. It just happens. — Robert McCammon

On a clear night the naked eye can see about 4,500 stars, so the astronomers say. The telescope of even a small observatory makes nearly 2,000,000 stars visible, and a modern reflecting telescope brings the light from thousands of millions more to the viewer - specks of light in the Milky Way. But in the colossal dimensions of the cosmos our stellar system is only a tiny part of an incomparably larger stellar system - of a cluster of Milky Ways, one might say, containing some twenty galaxies within a radius of 1,500,000 light-years (1 light-year=the distance traveled by light in a year, i.e., 186,000 x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365 miles). And even this vast number of stars is small in comparison with the many thousands of spiral nebulae disclosed by the electronic telescope. Disclosed to the present day, I should emphasize, for research of this kind is only just beginning. — Erich Von Daniken

There you are: a normal person. A little person. You're just like everyone else - you go to work, you return from work. You get an average salary. Once a year you go on vacation. You're a normal person! And then one day you're suddenly turned into a Chernobyl person. Into an animal, something that everyone's interested in, and that no one knows anything about. — Svetlana Alexievich

The worst day is just that I did not enter the culinary world sooner. And the best day was seeing the reaction of my one year old daughter when she tasted her first crisp apple! — Geoffrey Zakarian

After hearing much from his patients about alleged faith-healing, a Minnesota physician named William Nolen spent a year and a half trying to track down the most striking cases. Was there clear medical evidence that the disease was really present before the 'cure'? If so, had the disease actually disappeared after the cure, or did we just have the healer's or the patient's say-so? He uncovered many cases of fraud, including the first exposure in America of 'psychic surgery'. But he found not one instance of cure of any serious organic (non-psychogenic) disease. There were no cases where gallstones or rheumatoid arthritis, say, were cured, much less cancer or cardiovascular disease. When a child's spleen is ruptured, Nolen noted, perform a simple surgical operation and the child is completely better. But take that child to a faith-healer and she's dead in a day. — Carl Sagan

There was a point where I was making four movies a year. I was always on a set. I had no stories to tell. I was feeling empty. My life was just luggage and hotels and from set to set, from character to character. And one day, I said, 'And where is mine?' You know? And the moment I started to feel that fear, I stopped and I slowed down. — Penelope Cruz

What's it like to fall in love, Tessie?" I asked.
She gazed into the darkness for a long moment, then her smile widened. "Well, when you see that certain man you heart flies like paper on the wind
don't matter if you just see him one minute ago or one year ago. When you with him, ain't nothing or nobody else in the whole world but him. You might be walking down the same old street you walk on every day, but if you with him, your feet don't hardly touch the ground anymore, like you just floating on a little cloud. And, honey, you want his arms to be around you more than you want air to breathe. — Lynn Austin

Breeze chuckled. "He was completely insane, you know. The worse things got, the more he'd joke. I
remember how chipper he was the very day after one of our worst defeats, when we lost most of our
skaa army to that fool Yeden. Kell walked in, a spring in his step, making one of his inane jokes."
"Sounds insensitive," Allrianne said.
Ham shook his head. "No. He was just determined. He always said that laughter was something the
Lord Ruler couldn't take from him. He planned and executed the overthrow of a thousand-year
empire - and he did it as a kind of ... penance for letting his wife die thinking that he hated her. But, he
did it all with a smirk on his lips. Like every joke was his way of slapping fate in the face."
"We need what he had," Elend said. — Brandon Sanderson

I get an abundance of e-mail every day, some say 'dear Richard, can you call my husband, he weighs 400 pounds ... ' or 'my 14-year-old is 200 pounds ... ' or 'I just got divorced, no one wants me, I am 500 pounds.' So I pick up the phone and I call people. — Richard Simmons

At least one day out of the year all musicans should just put their instruments down, and give thanks to Duke Ellington. — Miles Davis

I never wanted to get to a point in my life where I knew what was going to happen next. I felt like most people just couldn't wait until they found themselves settled down into a routine and they didn't have to think about the next day, or the next year, or the next decade because it was all planned out for them. I can't understand how people can settle for having just one life. — Dan Chaon

Maybe not this year or the next but one day they'd end up married. In this lifetime and every one after it. Just knowing that I'd get to watch them find each other and fall in love in every life made me smile. — Abbi Glines

If I told my 18-year-old self that one day I'd have a sitcom and a sketch show on TV, I think he'd just drum his fingers and go, 'When? How long is that going to take?' — Robert Webb

Most of us would give anything for the chance to play just one day of MLB baseball - especially for our favorite team. Well, there once was a pitcher named Bock Baker who actually got two opportunities to pitch in the big leagues. He took the mound for Cleveland against the Chicago White Sox in his big league debut. How did he fare? Well, he pitched a complete game. Pretty spectacular, right? Well, sure - but it depends on your perspective. He gave up 23 hits and 13 runs. Baker never pitched for Cleveland again, but the Philadelphia Athletics gave him a second big league start that same year (1901). He lasted juts six innings, and lost again after giving up 11 runs - and then his career was over. — Tucker Elliot

No matter how limited their powers of reason might have been. still they must have understood that living like that was just murder, a capital crime - except it was slow, day-by-day murder. The government (or humanity) could not permit capital punishment for one man, but they permitted the murder of millions a little at a time. To kill one man - that is, to subtract 50 years from the sum of all human lives - that was a crime; but to subtract from the sum of all human lives 50,000,000 years - that was not a crime! No, really, isn't it funny? This problem in moral math could be solved in half a minute by any ten-year-old Number today, but they couldn't solve it. All their Kant's together couldn't solve it (because it never occurred to one of their Kant's to construct a system of scientific ethics - that is, one based on subtraction, addition, division, and multiplication). — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Many people experience the travesty of regret in their end days; the realization that nothing held them back, that nothing was in their way, that there is no one to blame, only themselves. Don't just sit by waiting for your life to happen, make it happen! Don't just hope your dreams will come alive, breathe life into them! Don't let your fear help you birth a well-nourished regret, take action today! At the end of the day, at the end of the year, at the end of your life, live in such a manner that you can hold your head up high, smile, and be proud of a life well lived. — Steve Maraboli

Sounds awful."
"No, it's wonderful. And it's just for one year. Let's take a break. Blair's not here. she'll be back next year and we can jump back into the Christmas chaos, if that's what you want. Come on, Nora, please. We skip Christmas, save the money, and go splash in the Caribbean for ten days."
"How much will it cost?"
"Three thousand bucks."
"So we save money?"
"Absolutely."
"When do we leave?"
"High noon, Christmas Day."
They stared at each other for a long time. — John Grisham

Will knew he would never be good in that way. He would never look at a hairy jumper and work out why it was precisely right for him, and why he should wear it at all hours of the day and night. He would look at it and conclude that the person who bought it for him was a pillock. He did that all the time: he'd look at some twenty-five-year-old guy on roller-skates, sashaying his way down Upper Street with his wraparound shades on, and he'd think one of three things: 1) What a prat; or 2) Who the fuck do you think you are?, or 3) How old do you think you are? Fourteen?
Everyone in England was like that, he reckoned. Nobody looked at a roller-skating bloke with wraparound shades on and thought, hey, he looks cool, or, wow, that looks like a fun way of getting some exercise. They just thought: wanker. But Marcus wouldn't. Marcus would either fail to notice the guy at all, or he would stand there with his mouth open, lost in admiration and wonder. — Nick Hornby

I was really unfit last year, so I worked out for a long time, then spent time by myself in Oregon. For about two months the only person I saw was my trainer. Every day I did a lot of running and I just didn't want to talk to anyone for two months. So when I started talking again, it was like you would communicate wrongly, like you wouldn't really remember how to speak. That was one of the key things as well as just reading the book, reading the script a million times, just figuring things out. — Robert Pattinson

We'd been living at Grandpa's for a little more than a year when Mrs. Crandel died. And the next day Kate Helen Branch had a baby. Uncle Burley said that was just the way things were. They put one in and pull another one out. — Wendell Berry

The Naval Academy is a very prestigious place, and I choose to try it. I got there and darn near didn't pass, just about flunked out the first year, but a commandant by the name of Bush Bringle managed to call me in one day and taught me more about leadership in about 15 minutes than I have learned in the rest of my life. And because of Bush Bringle I regained some faith and confidence in myself, learning I had a little bit more in me than I thought, and I went back to work and finished. — Sam Smith

The study of one year and the meditation of one day are equal. By this meditation is meant the right kind of meditation. If a person closes his eyes and sits doing nothing, he may just as well go to sleep. Meditation is not only an exercise to be practiced; in meditation the soul is charged with new light and life, with inspiration and vigor; in meditation there is every kind of blessing. — Hazrat Inayat Khan

If you could not do much in the month of April with five letters, think of what really you can do with the month of May with three letters before you open the door of the month of June with four letters. Which is the break time for the entire twelve months of the year. Until you clearly understand how you are spending the year, you shall finish spending it and ponder over how you spent it, year after year! No one is absolutely free from excuses and the challenges of life. You just have to do something great with each day in the year! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

It is a shame you plan to go home after the summer. With just one more year you could become a tutor. Cat's-eye green would become you, Miri of Mount Eskel.' 'Just one more year?' she asked. He nodded. 'Or stay two years, don the honey-drop robes, and become the first historian of Mount Eskel. You have a keen mind. One day you could wear raven's head.' She — Shannon Hale

Josh: I love you. Do you still love me?

Isla: How could you ask me that? Of course I love you. This hasn't changed anything.

Josh: But it was my fault. The whole weekend was my idea.

Isla: Hey. Hey. I wanted to go. It was my decision, too. I love you. I have always loved you.

Josh: What do you mean? Always?

Isla: I mean that you never have to worry about me leaving you, because I've been in love with you since our freshman year. There's no story. I saw you one day, and I just knew. — Stephanie Perkins

She was without a doubt the girl I would marry one day; I knew that. Not next month or even next year, but one day. I had never in my life ever felt the peace I had when I was anywhere near Olivia. She made all the shit seem like it was miles away. In her eyes, I wasn't the poor boy from Texas who had some shit family. I was just Keeton Pearce, the man she loved. She was free of judgement, and nothing felt better than the love of a woman so pure and compassionate. Olivia Sawyer was an amazing woman, and in that moment I found myself falling even deeper than I already was. Falling felt natural, uncontrollable, and I wanted it so badly I could feel it in my bones. — C.A. Harms

Your name will be in a history book one day, and some bored ten-year-old will memorize it for a test and then forget all about you. You have a job, just like everyone in the world. Stop acting like it makes you more or less than anyone else. — Kiera Cass

One day a Muslim friend and I were out for the day together. I had forgotten that the Fast of Ramadan had just begun and suggested that we step into a restaurant for a cup of coffee. "I will spend years in jail for that cup of coffee," he said, so of course I apologized for the suggestion. Then in low tones he admitted that his fast was restricted to public view and that he did not practice it in private. "I cannot work ten hours a day without eating," he said. There was an awkward silence, and he muttered these words: "I don't think God is the enforcer of these rules." As anyone knows who has asked any Muslim, they will admit with a smile upon their faces that during the month of the Fast of Ramadan more food is sold than during any other month of the year. But its consumption takes place from dusk to dawn rather than from dawn to dusk. Legalism always breeds compliance over purpose. In — Ravi Zacharias

I might go visit it one day, but I couldn't do any more than just visit. I love it, don't get me wrong, but it's just too big. I'm going to be at a lot of other conventions this year, with the book and everything. — Lance Henriksen

Law Number XVI: In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3-1/2 days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day. — Norman Ralph Augustine

In America, even the homeless were profligate. Back in Toronto, after a big bank dinner, Brad would gather the leftovers into covered tin trays and carry them out to a homeless guy he saw every day on his way to work. The guy was always appreciative. When the bank moved him to New York, he saw more homeless people in a day than he saw back home in a year. When no one was watching, he'd pack up the king's banquet of untouched leftovers after the NY lunches and walk it down to the people on the streets. "They just looked at me like, 'What the fuck is this guy doing?'" he said. "I stopped doing it because it didn't feel like anyone gave a shit. — Michael Lewis

It was just one day and it's been just one year. But maybe one day is enough. Maybe one hour is enough. Maybe time has nothing at all to do with it. Willem — Gayle Forman

My mom was a manic depressive schizophrenic who, after a year in prison, went home and shot herself. My sister, Kirsten, an amazing poet, who was raised by this woman, and was dating a guy who broke up with her for the fourth time in three weeks. And one day, she came to his house, got a gun, and blew her brains out all over his headboard. I just went through a divorce, five years in court and cost me $2 million dollars. If anyone, by law, should be forced to take antidepressants it's me ... But instead, I choose to be an antidepressant. And you can take me with alcohol. — Christopher Titus

At least ten times as many people died from preventable, poverty-related diseases on September 11, 2011, as died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that black day. The terrorist attacks led to trillions of dollars being spent on the 'war on terrorism' and on security measures that have inconvenienced every air traveller since then. The deaths caused by poverty were ignored. So whereas very few people have died from terrorism since September 11, 2001, approximately 30,000 people died from poverty-related causes on September 12, 2001, and on every day between then and now, and will die tomorrow. Even when we consider larger events like the Asian tsunami of 2004, which killed approximately 230,000 people, or the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that killed up to 200,000, we are still talking about numbers that represent just one week's toll for preventable, poverty-related deaths - and that happens fifty-two weeks in every year. — Peter Singer

g) Time it takes to reinvent yourself: five years. Here's a description of the five years: Year One: You're flailing and reading everything and just starting to do. Year Two: You know who you need to talk to and network with. You're doing every day. You finally know what the Monopoly board looks like in your new endeavors. Year Three: You're good enough to start making money. It might not be a living yet. Year Four: You're making a good living, and you can quit your day job. Year Five: You're making wealth. Sometimes you get frustrated in years one through four. You say, "Why isn't it happening yet?" That's okay. Just keep going. Or stop and pick a new field. — James Altucher

As we did every New Year's Eve we made ridiculous resolutions that no one would keep, and quietly we all wondered what the coming year would hold, each of us praying for our own private miracles. Good health. Better health. A marriage for this child, a good job for another. This hopefulness was something hardwired into our psyches, that a new year might mean some monumental something wonderful could happen to bring us happiness at a level we had never known. A new year was a chance to start over. Maybe even, just maybe, there would be peace on earth for one entire day. — Dorothea Benton Frank

In the spring of 2009, I was the 217th person ever to be diagnosed with anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis. Just a year later, that figure had doubled. Now the number is in the thousands. Yet Dr. Bailey, considered one of the best neurologists in the country, had never heard of it. When we live in a time when the rate of misdiagnoses has shown no improvement since the 1930s, the lesson here is that it's important to always get a second opinion.
While he may be an excellent doctor in many respects, Dr. Bailey is also, in some ways, a perfect example of what is wrong with medicine. I was just a number to him (and if he saw thirty-five patients a day, as he told me, that means I was one of a very large number). He is a by-product of a defective system that forces neurologists to spend five minutes with X number of patients a day to maintain their bottom line. It's a bad system. Dr. Bailey is not the exception to the rule. He is the rule. — Susannah Cahalan

When it seems impossible that a deep connection with another person could just go away instead of changing form. It seems impossible that you will one day look up and say the words "I used to date someone who lived in that building," referring to a three-year relationship. As simple as if it was a pizza place that is now a dry cleaner's. It happens. Keep walking. — Sloane Crosley

There are kinds of human problems which really do seem, as our tidy expressions would have it, to "come to a head" and "demand to be dealt with." But there are also problems, often just as serious, which come to nothing that we can recognize or openly deal with. Some long-lived, insidious problems simply slip us off to one side of ourselves. Some gently rob us of just enough energy or faith so that days which once took place on a horizontal plane become an endless series of uphill slogs. And some - like high water working year after year at the roots of a riverside tree - quietly undercut our trust or our hope, our sense of place, or of humor, our ability to empathize, or to feel enthused, and we don't sense impending danger, we don't feel the damage at all, till one day, to our amazement, we find ourselves crashing to the ground. — David James Duncan

I would ... go up to the mailbox and sit in the grass, waiting ... Till it came to me one day there were women doing this with their lives, all over. There were women just waiting and waiting by mailboxes for one letter or another. I imagined me making this journey day after day and year after year, and my hair starting to go gray, and I thought, I was never made to go on like that ... If there were woman all through life waiting, and women busy and not waiting, I knew which I had to be. — Alice Munro

I was able to go from stage hand to floor manager to assistant director to director in a year because there was just no one else to do it and what I didn't realise and what people don't understand now about television is that we used to do about five shows a day. — Richard Lester

Consider this. It took the earth's population thousand of years-from the early dawn of man all the way to the early 1800s-to reach one billion people. Then astoundingly, it took only about a hundred years to double the population to two billion in the 1920s. After that, it took a mere fifty years for the population to double again to four billion in the 1970s. As you can imagine, we're well on track to reach eight billion very soon. Just today, the human race added another quarter-billion people to planet Earth. A quarter million. And this happens ever day-rain or shine. Currently every year er 're adding the equivalent of the entire country of Germany. — Dan Brown

It goes Christmas, New Year's Eve, Valentine's Day. Is that fair to anyone who's alone? These are all days you gotta be with someone. And if you didn't get around to killing yourself at Christmas or New Year's, boom! There's Valentine's Day. I think there should be one more after Valentine's Day just called, 'Who could love you?' — Laura Kightlinger

Once a year, take her somewhere she's never been. Once a month, do something new that melts her in the sack. Once a week, stop everything and just listen to her. Once a day, catch her doing one thing you love. Once an hour, kiss her on the mouth. And every minute of every day, be grateful that you got her. — Roxanne St. Claire

My wife and I work out together almost every day. It's just a great way to spend time together. We're going to run a marathon together later this year, and that's one more goal that we'll accomplish as husband and wife. — Bill Rancic

Austin. Interesting you were able to make it. I was just talking to Justin about you the other day. He said he hadn't seen you in months." Not since I'd fucked his brains out and he left my apartment almost wearing a goddamn disguise. Fuckin' thirty-one-year-old closet case. — A.E. Via

(About importance of focusing on one sport at a time) I've never tried to do that, we have more of a holistic approach. We want to become better decathletes and better competitors. I think for us that means just toeing the line at whatever it is we're doing that day and being confident in preparing as best as we can. Later in the year, late in the season when we have all of the thousands of reps under our belt, we can try to maybe focus on one or two things and leave some stuff off one week. Really, we like to keep everything inside the routine and part of the process. — Trey Hardee

At different times in my life, I've made grand statements like, 'I want these many kids, and I want them by this age.' I think, with every year that goes by, I accept that I don't know when it's going to happen or how it's going to happen. I'll just take it one day at a time, and when I'm ready, I'll be ready. It'll reveal itself, I guess. — America Ferrera

This is about all the bad days in the world. I used to have some little bad days, and I kept them in a little box. And one day, I threw them out into the yard. "Oh, it's just a couple little innocent bad days." Well, we had a big rain. I don't know what it was growing in but I think we used to put eggshells out there and coffee grounds, too. Don't plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me. Choke those little bad days. Choke 'em down to nothin'. They're your days. Choke 'em! — Tom Waits

They ask me what kind of perfume I wear or how I choose a signature scent or what to wear to what occasion. The truth is, I just go into the perfumery and pick out the most beautiful smell. I sniff the scent and then see with my mind's eye the vision that it brings to my heart. If I want to wear that vision with me every day until the bottle is all used-up, then that's the perfume I'll purchase. And I do use it up until there's nothing left and only then do I go out to buy another one. Another vision for another year or two. Fragrance, to me, is about wearing a perspective on your skin. The scent itself is the vehicle by which you can be reminded of those pictures that those notes have opened in your soul. — C. JoyBell C.

A couple months after school started that year, I just plain stopped going to see the Maje. I remember coming home one day and checking the answering machine in my bedroom. The first message was from the Maje. He was waiting for me to come over. He sounded feeble and desperate: "Steve, where are you? I need you? Are you coming? Please . . ." I deleted it. The next message was also from the Maje and said pretty much the same thing. Delete. There must have been a dozen messages on that machine from the Maje, all begging me, pleading with me, to come help him. I deleted every single one of them. To this day, I have no idea what happened to the Maje, no idea if he ever got that cataract surgery. That's how our relationship ended. It still makes me feel horrible to think about now: I just deleted the Maje. — Stephen "Steve-O" Glover

this is real, and it is happening now, just as it happened before: We are under the big tree in my backyard, on that patch of dirt where we used to build fairy houses from moss and sticks and scraps of birch. It is late afternoon. All around us is golden light. We have been together all day, in our cutoff shorts and bare feet. It is the start of fifth grade, the start of being the oldest in the school. Next year, we will be the youngest all over again. But not yet. We are playing that hand-slapping game, the one we like to play at recess. You hold your hands out, palms up, and I place mine lightly on top. You pull yours out and try to slap mine. You hit air three times. On the fourth try, your — Ali Benjamin

I'm very proud of Seungri. I worked over a year for my album, but one day YG told Seungri to make an album and he made one in just 2 weeks. Ah, maybe 3 weeks. He's a true genius. I'm jealous of his propulsion. — G-Dragon

There is this classic thing about surfers as they grow up,' John McCarthy said one day. 'The adult surfer says, "Oh yeah, I got the wave and rode it all the way to the beach!" But when you talk to a five year old who has just surfed, he or she will say, "Oh, the wave picked me up and brought me the whole way to the beach. — Keith Duggan

I went to university for a year, and I'm not one for schooling and have no enjoyment sitting in a classroom all day and ended up going to live in England for two years, just to travel. I worked in a bar in a hotel for a couple of years and had no intention of becoming an actor. That's where I met my agent. — Travis Fimmel

Instead of buying into that negative self-talk, state what you intend to invite into your life each day. Be as specific as possible. When I stated my intention of becoming a Best-Selling Author, I didn't know HOW I would do it. I just stated my intention and desire with certainty. Before I knew it, I started to manifest what I intended to attract and the "how" showed up. The right people at the right time came into my life. Within one year, my book, Me, Myself, and Why? The Secrets to Navigating Change, was sitting on the Best Sellers List. That's what happens when you state an intention. It sparks a series of events bringing your intention into reality. — Lisa A. Mininni

Growing up with an exterminator as a father was always slightly embarrassing for Anna and her brother, Kevin. "I remember," Tommy begins, "one year when Anna was about eight, and it was 'bring your daughter to work day.' That was a big thing back in the eighties," he chuckles. "Well, I remember Anna came down to breakfast that morning and told me she didn't want to come." Tommy half smiles, but shakes his head slightly and closes his eyes for a second. " 'Dad-dyyy, bugs are nasty. Why can't you be a pilot or a doctor or something cool like that?' I didn't even argue with her, I just let her go to school." Tommy sighs, "I told her I was sorry I didn't have a cooler job. — Marina Keegan

It puzzled him that she did not mourn all the things she could have been. Was it a quality inherent in women, or did they just learn to shield their personal regrets, to suspend their lives, subsume themselves in child care? She browsed online forums about tutoring and music and schools, and she told him what she had discovered as though she truly felt the rest of the world should be as interested as she was in how music improved the mathematics skills of nine-year-olds. Or she would spend hours on the phone talking to her friends, about which violin teacher was good and which tutorial was a waste of money. One day, after — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The single greatest pleasure that I have in doing ('Bizarre Foods') is when I meet families with 6, 7, 8-year-olds, or teenagers, who say, 'It's something the whole family can watch, and it lets us show our younger children that one man's 'weird' is another man's 'wonderful,' and we all kind of live in the same place.' It's just the best part of my day. — Andrew Zimmern

The reason I hadn't washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly. I saw the day of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue. It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be done with it. — Sylvia Plath

I was trying my best not to drink. I'd go a day or two, and I just couldn't stand it. It kinda got around that 'Hamilton got religion.' So for about a year, it was the most miserable time of my life because I was secretly still drinking. One night I came home, after about a year of this, and I woke up the next day and the desire was gone. — Jim Hamilton

I'm not gonna wish you happiness, 'cause you've already got that. So I'll just say, may the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon our face. May you live as long as you want, and never want as long as you live. May there be a generation of children on the children of your children. May you live to be a hundred years, with one extra year to repent. And may the saddest day of your and Kate's future be no worse than the happiest day of your past. — Emma Chase

On every birthday, I ask my wife, 'What would you like this year?' and her instant reply is, 'Diamonds! Diamonds! Diamonds!' I'm always living in hope that one day she'll say she just wants me! — Akshay Kumar

A one-hundred-thousand-word novel might take a year or several years, and then you just come to 'The End' one day. But it takes hundreds of days to get to 'The End.' As a writer, you have to put in those hundreds of days. — Bob Mayer

For years I'd been awaiting that overriding urge I'd always heard about, the narcotic pining that draws childless women ineluctably to strangers' strollers in parks. I wanted to be drowned by the hormonal imperative, to wake one day and throw my arms around your neck, reach down for you, and pray that while that black flower bloomed behind my eyes you had just left me with child. (With child: There's a lovely warm sound to that expression, an archaic but tender acknowledgement that for nine months you have company wherever you go. Pregnant, by contrast, is heavy and bulging and always sounds to my ear like bad news: "I'm pregnant." I instinctively picture a sixteen-year-old at the dinner table- pale, unwell, with a scoundrel of a boyfriend- forcing herself to blurt out her mother's deepest fear.) (27) — Lionel Shriver

You think maybe if you just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you're changing a patio light bulb with a five-year life span and you realize how you'll only be changing this light maybe ten more times before you'll be dead. — Chuck Palahniuk

Merton. Gethsemani required a vow of silence, and at dinner if you wanted salt, you had to stare hard at the shaker until another brother noticed. One day, cutting down a tree, Jack couldn't contain himself. He held his head back and roared, "Timber." After that, his days at the monastery were numbered. Within a couple of years, he had married, and he and his young wife, Fran, who herself had just spent a year in a nunnery, opened a Catholic Worker farm in eastern Missouri for recovering alcoholics. — Alex Kotlowitz

I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my fourth volume - and no farther than to my first day's life - 'tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I first set out; so that instead of advancing, as a common writer, in my work with what I have been doing at it - on the contrary, I am just thrown so many volumes back - — Laurence Sterne

If you want to understand what a year of life means, ask a student who just flunked his end-of-the-year exams. Or a month of life: speak to a mother who has just given birth to a premature baby and is waiting for him to be taken out of the incubator before she can hold him safe and sound in her arms. Or a week: interview a man who works in a factory or a mine to feed his family. Or a day: ask two people madly in love who are waiting for their next rendezvous. Or an hour: talk to a claustrophobia sufferer stuck in a broken-down elevator. Or a second: look at the expression on the face of a man who has just escaped from a car wreck. Or one-thousandth of a second: ask the athlete who just won the silver medal at the Olympic Games, and not the gold he trained for all his life. Life is magic, Arthur, and I know what I'm saying because since my accident I appreciate the value of every instant. So I beg you, let's make the most of all the seconds that we have left. — Marc Levy