Nineteen Years Quotes & Sayings

And thus I left the island, the 19th of December, as I found by the ship's account, in the year 1686, after I had been upon it eight-and-twenty years, two months, and nineteen days; — Daniel Defoe

So You Want to Know

All about her. Who
she
really is. (Was?) Why
she swerved off the
high road. Hard
left
to nowhere,
recklessly indifferent to
me.
Hunter Seth Haskins,
her firstborn
son. I've been
chocking
that down for
nineteen years.
Why did she go
on
her mindless way,
leaving me spinning
in a whirlwind of
her dust? — Ellen Hopkins

I was looking for something else in books. I could not really say what, but I think I can say why: a notion started in my own brain was probably wrong, but an answer read in a work of literature would be right. That was my conviction at nineteen, and only in later years would I come to trust myself over a book. — Matthew Pearl

It was 1999 in America, he had traveled the world for three years, looking for what he didn't know, and now here he found himself: absolutely allergic to belief, nineteen years old, and totally alone. — Sunil Yapa

I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes. — Joyce Carol Oates

Nineteen years are as ages to you when you are nineteen. When you are nineteen, there is no experience to tell you that all things have an end. This aching pain has no end. — Mary MacLane

It was the butt that had done it nineteen years ago, was still doing it now. He'd seen it coming around Strawberry Alley and had followed it four whole blocks. It was mesmerizing, the way it moved, independent of the rest of her body, as though operating under the influencer of another brain entirely, one cheek knocking into the other cheek so that that cheek had to swing out before knocking back — Yaa Gyasi

Alexander the Great was not worried about what other people would think if he made a deal with a woman. It helped that the woman was very smart and knew how to benefit both sides by striking that deal. Ada of Caria negotiated with the Macedonian conqueror by making him her adoptive son and her heir. She got her power back and ruled for a total of nineteen years. — Ingrid De Haas

Twenty years before, she had sailed west from Greenland off the edge of the known world. She was nineteen, newly wed for the second or third time and pregnant for the first. With her were her husband, Thorfinn Karlsefni, and three Viking crews in clinker-built boats. They were sailing to Vinland, a fabulous land that Leif Eiriksson, son of Greenland's founder Eirik the Red, had washed up on a few years back, when he was caught in a summer storm, sailing west across the icy North Atlantic from Norway. It was Gudrid's second attempt to get to Vinland. She meant to settle in this New World. At — Nancy Marie Brown

Whatever," I said. "The point is, if it's a child small enough to throw, then she lost so much blood here she has to be dead." "She's eighteen years old," Debs said. "Almost nineteen." "Then assuming she's average size, I don't think we want to try to catch somebody who could throw her that hard. If you shoot him, he might get very annoyed and pull off your arms." Deborah — Jeff Lindsay

It's worth pointing out that [Herman Melville] worked in [the New York Custom House] as a deputy customs inspector between 1866 and 1885. Nineteen years, and he never got a raise - four dollars a day, six days a week. He was by then a washed-up writer, forgotten and poor. I used to find this subject heartbreaking, a waste: the greatest living American author was forced to spend his days writing tariff reports instead of novels. But now, knowing what I know about the sleaze of the New York Custom House, and the honorable if bitter decency with which Melville did his job, I have come to regard literature's loss as the republic's gain. Great writers are a dime a dozen in New York. But an honest customs inspector in the Gilded Age? Unheard of. — Sarah Vowell

What do you do when you build yourself - only to realize you built yourself with the wrong things? You rip it up and start again. That is the work of your teenage years - to build up and tear down and build up again, over and over, endlessly, like speeded-up film of cities during boom times and wars. To be fearless, and endless, in your reinventions - to keep twisting on nineteen, going bust, and dealing in again, and again. Invent, invent, invent. — Caitlin Moran

That is the first thing anybody has said to me for seventeen years, three months and two days, five hours, nineteen minutes and twenty seconds. I've been counting." He — Douglas Adams

I cried because nineteen years of living could leave behind no more lasting memorial than a few carefully adjusted impressions of a character in a handful of mortal minds. — Valerie Fitzgerald

It wasn't until my teenage years that a book really left a mark, and that was George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.' It was on the syllabus at school when I was about 16, and I went on to read more of his books. It was the height of the Cold War, so a lot of the messages really resonated at the time. — John Niven

She turned her head, and the skin of her cheek caught the moonlight, smooth as satin. Tough and beautiful. He grimaced.

Tu agis sans passion et sans haine.
You act without passion and without hatred.

He'd recited the line every day of his nineteen years in the Legion, but it'd never resonated as strongly as it did now. — Brynn Kelly

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

Her face had the usual fulness of expression which is developed by a life of solitude. Where the eyes of a multitude continuously beat like waves upon a countenance they seem to wear away its mobile power ; but in the still water of privacy every feeling and sentiment unfolds in visible luxuriance, to be interpreted as readily as a printed word by an intruder. In years she was no more than nineteen or twenty, but the necessity of taking thought at a too early period of life had forced the provisional curves of her childhood's face to a premature finality. — Thomas Hardy

The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn't properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen." The — Aldous Huxley

Yep. Nineteen years of trying to be everything to everyone and ending up as no one to myself. — Leisa Rayven

Michelangelo wasn't the artist who began the sculpture - in fact, he hadn't even been born when it was commissioned. The nineteen-foot block of marble had originally been the project of an artist named Agostino di Duccio, but after shaping some of the legs, feet, and torso, he inexplicably abandoned the work. Ten years later, an artist named Antonio Rossellino was hired to complete it, but his contract was subsequently cancelled. It was nearly twenty-five years before Michelangelo, just twenty-six, picked up a chisel and dared to believe he could complete a masterpiece. — Lysa TerKeurst

Even after years of war, some men retained scruples about licensed
homicide. [ ... ] Lieutenant Peter Downward commanded the sniper
platoon of 13 Para. He had never himself killed a man with a rifle,
but one day he found himself peering at a German helmet just visible
at the corner of an air-raid shelter
an enemy sniper.
I had his head spot in the middle of my telescopic sight, my safety
catch was off, but I simply couldn't press the trigger. I suddenly
realised that I had a young man's life in my hands, and for the cost
of one round, about twopence, I could wipe out eighteen or nineteen
years of human life. My dithering deliberations were brought back to
earth with a bump as Kirkbride suddenly shouted: 'Go on, sir. Shoot
the bastard! He's going to fire again.' I pulled the trigger and saw
the helmet jerk back. I had obviously got him, and felt completely
drained ... What had I done? — Max Hastings

And then there she was, a girl of elegant height, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years of age - gawky and coltish, all long legs and arms, but with the promise of stunning beauty to add graceful curves to the lean lines of her body. She was dressed in a pair of my blue jeans, cut off at the tops of her muscled thighs, and my own T-shirt, tied off over her abdomen. A pentacle amulet, identical to my own, if less battered, lay over her heart, between the curves of her modest breasts. Her skin was pale, almost luminous, her hair a shade of brown-gold, like ripe wheat, her eyes a startling, storm-cloud grey in contrast. Her smile lit up her face, — Jim Butcher

Hitler's architect and later Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer. Speer had been imprisoned for his role in the use of slave labor during the war, but though he was found guilty for a number of crimes, and served nineteen years in prison, upon his release which was supported by such people as French president Charles DeGaulle and other high-ranking politicians, he was considered in many ways a "good German". He had admitted his guilt at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials after the war, and acknowledged that the crimes committed under Hitler would haunt Germany forever. He wrote his memoirs in prison and spoke not only about his complicity in the use of slave labor but also his attempts to thwart some of Hitler's more barbaric plans at the end of the war. Much of the proceeds from his bestselling memoirs went to Jewish organizations, though this was not discovered until after Speer had died. — Leonard Cooper

If you are an eighteen or nineteen-year-old with little education, as is often the case, and you're put in charge of many, many people on the other end of the world, you have absolute power and you're not prepared for it. — Yaroslav Trofimov

He swore to kill her. She could still see his face when he said it.
He was nineteen then. He'd be thirty-nine when released. That was still years away, if there was no early parole. She didn't understand why this had started now, only three years after she was hidden from everyone. — Judith-Victoria Douglas

That educated didn't mean smart. He had a point. Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape. Yet in a few years an illiterate runaway named Harriet Tubman would make nineteen trips into this country and lead three hundred fugitives to freedom. — Octavia E. Butler

So what do we do then? What do you do when the only thing you want to do is yell at God and tell him how awful it is? You do exactly that. Cry. Yell. Scream. Be honest. Be transparent. And be vulnerable. For the first nineteen years of my life, I wanted God to give me an answer, but now I've found it is better when I get him. An answer isn't going to bring that spouse back. An answer won't ease that pain. But what will is God's Grace in the depths of our souls. — Jefferson Bethke

I felt that I had been driven from the temple where for nineteen years, along with other believers, I had worshiped the great god News on a daily basis. — Walter Cronkite

10 August, 1939

Confession: I am nineteen years old, and I've been kissed many times. But I've never been kissed like that.

It felt like drowning but not needing to breathe. Like falling but never hitting the ground. Even now, my hands are shaking, and my heart is so swollen and fat it feels like it's going to burst, or I'm going to burst. I want to cry. I want to laugh. I want to bury my head in my pillow and scream until I fall asleep, because maybe when I go to sleep I can relive it.
I can't believe it happened, yet I think I've been waiting for it to happen for the last seven years, ever since I conned Angelo into kissing me the first time. I've been waiting for him for so long, and for a couple of hours tonight, in a little world that was only big enough for the two of us, he was mine.
But I don't know if I will be able to keep him. I'm afraid when tomorrow comes, I'll be waiting for him again.
Eva Rosselli — Amy Harmon

Dimitri Tirunul was her unexpected miracle. A man beyond any she'd ever dreamt of. She was human. He was Carpathian - nearly immortal. She was nineteen years old. He was an ancient, centuries old. She held the other half of his soul, the light to his darkness. Without her, he would not survive. She was his lifemate - his savior. Yet she knew just the opposite was true - Dimitri was the one saving her. — Christine Feehan

I grew my mustache when I was nineteen in order to look older. I never shaved it off even though it overran its usefulness many, many years ago. Once you get started in television, people associate you with your physical appearance - and that includes the mustache. So I can't shave it off now. If I did, I'd have to answer too much mail. — Walter Cronkite

After 1909, Monet drastically enlarged his brushstrokes, disintegrated his images, and broke through the taming constraints and delicacy of Impressionism for good. Nineteen gnarly paintings, starting in 1909 and carrying through his final seventeen years, finish off the notion that Monet went happily ever after into lily-land. — Jerry Saltz

I stopped acting when I was about nineteen, twenty, when I got thrown out of college. I did act for about ten years. I don't know. I suspect I'm still a reasonably good actor, but I don't really know that I want to get on the stage again ... and having to say all those boring words by me over and over again ... I don't know if I want to do that. Also, I like a certain amount of freedom of movement, and if you're acting, you're stuck in one place for a long time. Having said that, I will probably be onstage next fall. — Edward Albee

Free trade and Christianity, it's the German East Africa Company, it's French Equatorial Africa, it's the Belgians cutting down the Congo population from twenty million to ten in barely twenty years, by nineteen fourteen there's nothing left to plunder in Africa so they go to war with each other in Europe instead that's what the whole damned first world war was all ab ... — William Gaddis

You have never been married? You are a spinster?" Diana laughed. "Why, she can't be above seventeen or eighteen years old, St. John," said she. "I am near nineteen: but I am not married. No. — Charlotte Bronte

Anthony grinned at her, knowing that would probably infuriate her all the more. My eyes have been a-wandering, as you put it, for the last nineteen years. Give them a rest, Roslynn. They settled on you and don't want to move on. — Johanna Lindsey

I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn't hide the truth much longer. After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race. — Sylvia Plath

I just don't understand why you're trying so hard. It was really a long time ago."
"Because, when I was nineteen years old, I fell in love with a girl who changed my life by showing me that even the darkest nights still had stars and it didn't matter one bit that you had to lie in the weeds to see them. We were kids and I barely knew her, but I loved her. I should have been there while she grew up, but I was a fool. Now, I have the woman back and I have every intention of making her fall in love with me again, and this time ...I'm never letting go. — Aly Martinez

So I am nineteen years old and don't usually know what I'm doing, snap my thoughts out of the printed page, get my looks from other eyes, do not overtake dotards and cripples in the street for fear I will depress them with my agility, love watching children and animals at play but wouldn't mind seeing a beggar kicked or a little girl run over because it's all experience, dislike myself and sneer at a world less nice and less intelligent than me. I take it this is fairly routine? — Martin Amis

Most of the barbaric and vicious acts of terror committed against innocent civilians around the world in the last thirty years have been done by Muslims. They have even carried out more bombings than the less-publicized Hindu Tamil Tiger separatists, who have committed more than two hundred suicide attacks in Sri Lanka. It is a fact that the nineteen terrorists who hijacked airplanes and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, were Muslims who practiced the teachings of the Koran and sought mental fortitude in its verses as their planes crashed. — Brigitte Gabriel

He died when he was only nineteen years old. I was still a baby at the time, so I didn't remember him. Growing up, I'd always told myself that was lucky. Because you can't miss someone you don't remember.
But the truth was, I did miss him. — Ernest Cline

Of course, there is a little more to it than that. We of the frailer sex have to have some wild hope, something to go to
otherwise a million years of slavery has conditioned us to huddle by the hearth, stony as it is, and pound some more millet, and get pounded in turn by way of thanks, and commune with the moon. I speak as one of my generation, that came of age just as the Fifties ended
I was nineteen when Lee Harvey Oswald shot them dead
and then by twenty I was married to your father and working too hard to support him really to notice that a revolution was going on, and all the old barriers were down. — John Updike

For six years, from age nineteen until I turned twenty-five, I did not sleep uninterrupted through a single night ... I felt lucky to get my shoes on the right feet ... I moved forward only, thinking each morning anew that we were leaving the worst behind. — Barbara Kingsolver

There's difference between being dead and dying. We're all dying. Some of us die for ninety years, and some of us die for nineteen. But each morning everyone on this planet wakes up one day closer to their death. Everyone. So living and dying are actually different words for the same thing, if you think about it. — Robyn Schneider

You walked into my life when I was nineteen years old. You were the only man I ever loved - the only man I ever hope to love. You took everything we did together, everything we were to each other, and scorched it to nothing: left it a cloud of ash. — Laura Barnett

You are plain, Coraline,' I said to myself; 'unmistakably plain. You have tolerable eyes, and good teeth; but your nose is a failure, your complexion is pallid, and your mouth is just twice too large for prettiness. Never forget that you are plain, my dear Coralie, and then perhaps other people won't remember quite so often. Shake hands with Fate, accept your thick nose and your pallid complexion as the stern necessities of your existence, and make the most of your eyes and teeth, and your average head of hair.' That is the gist of what I said to myself, in less sophisticated language, perhaps, before I was fifteen, and from that line of conduct I have never departed. So, if I have come to nineteen years of age without being admired, I have at least escaped being laughed at! — Mary Elizabeth Braddon

I came out to California to live with my mom in Orange County for a while, and then I came up to Hollywood. I had just turned nineteen. I took an acting class at Playhouse West and decided, 'Wow, I think I can do this!' I studied really hard for three years before I got an agent. — Jamie Anne Allman

In the case of a single nineteen year old infantry soldier mangled in the devastating blast of a carefully laid roadside bomb, some fifty or even sixty years of exigent torment - some 500,000 hours of constant, inescapable misery - has been created out of virtually nothing, far exceeding the total output of brutal (albeit dazzling) terror felt by another less fortunate soldier in the seconds before his body is irreparably torn apart by shrapnel and his life is extinguished on a poorly defined battlefield, his account closed forever. — John Zande

In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps - college students and new graduates - to do what little was left of the work of the employees they'd laid off. — Jill Lepore

Surprising. It was just like Marlow. It was accepted in silence. No one took the trouble to grunt even; and presently he said, very slow - I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago - the other day ... Light came out of this river since - you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker - may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was — Joseph Conrad

He had proved nothing, he had made no viable gesture of atonement, and he knew now that he probably never would. If he could have talked with Quint's ghost now he could only have said: "I'm sorry; there's nothing more I can do."
And Quint, he knew, would have said: "Right; you're absolutely right about that. ( ... )"
How then could he feel so good. What possible right did he have to be at peace with himself?
He didn't know. All he knew that day ( ... ) all he knew with any clarity was that he was nineteen years old, that the war was over, and that he was alive. — Richard Yates

Reiko set the ball on the ground and patted my knee. "Look," she said, "I'm not telling you to stop sleeping with girls. If you're O.K. with that, then it's OK. It's your life after all, it's something you have to decide. All I'm saying is that you shouldn't use yourself up in some unnatural form. Do you see what I'm getting at? It would be such a waste. The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older. It's true. So think carefully. If you want to take care of Naoko, take care of yourself too."
I said I would think about it. — Haruki Murakami

The outermost - Jupiter XXVII - moved backwards in an unstable path nineteen million miles from its temporary master. It was the prize in a perpetual tug-of-war between Jupiter and the Sun, for the planet was constantly capturing short-lived moons from the asteroid belt, and losing them again after a few million years. Only the inner satellites were its permanent property; the Sun could never wrest them from its grasp. — Arthur C. Clarke

So I started chanting when I was nineteen, which was about twelve years ago, and it really had a huge impact on my outlook, happiness, and general creativity. — Duncan Sheik

The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well. — J.K. Rowling

In a way, my past gives me a little credibility. Not that anybody cares what I did nineteen years ago, but I did have a career, and a legitimate one, before I met my husband. — Pia Zadora

Or maybe just an amphetamine freak? Clark's thoughts wandered to a particularly exciting week in Toronto, eighteen or nineteen years old, when he and Arthur had accepted some pills from a new friend at a dance club and stayed up for seventy-two hours straight. — Emily St. John Mandel

I've been writing since I was about thirteen but didn't start a book until 2007. I spent four years writing a sci-fi novel before I wrote 'The Bone Season' at nineteen. — Samantha Shannon

I still love it. I love lots of other music, too, and always have, but punk's the soundtrack of my youth. I think you never escape the music you're listening to and seeing when you're seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old. — Elizabeth Hand

I'm a big believer in first impressions," he finally said. "Tell me what your first thought was when Jason walked into the courtroom."
Taylor took a sip of her drink and grinned. This one was easy. "I vowed to hate him forever."
Jeremy's brown eyes twinkled at this. "That's exactly what I said nineteen years ago, five minutes after he first walked into our dorm room. — Julie James

Taylor: "Show me your craftiness. I'll give you one question."
Jeremy: "I'm a big believer in first impressions," he finally said. "Tell me what your first thought was when Jason walked into the courtroom."
Taylor: "I vowed to hate him forever."
Jeremy: "That's exactly what I said nineteen years ago, five minutes after he first walked into our dorm room."
...
Jason : "Did I miss something?"
Taylor: "You're a bit older than I thought, Jason Andrews."
Jason glanced quickly at Jeremy, who held up his hands innocently.
Jeremy: "I swear, she forced it out of me. — Julie James

Beside the watch was a pearl bracelet she always wore. She never took it off. Will had given it to her when they had been married thirty years, smiling as fastened it on. He had had gray in his hair them, she knew, though she had never really seen it. As if her love had given him his own shape-shifting ability, no matter how much time had passed, when she looked at him, she always saw the wild, black-haired boy she had fallen in love with.
It still seemed incredible to her sometimes that they had managed to grow old together, herself and Will Herondale, whom Gabriel Lightwood had once said would not live to be older than nineteen. They had been good friends with the Lightwoods too, through all those years. Of course Will could hardly not be friends with the man who was married to his sister. Both Cecily and Gabriel had seen Will on the day he dies, as had Sophie, though Gideon had himself passed away several years before. — Cassandra Clare

When I was nineteen,
I told a thirty-
year-old man what a
fool I had been when
I was seventeen.
'We were always,' he
said glancing down, 'a
fool two years ago. — Donald Hall

Nineteen years, three months, and one week before I found Seivarden in the snow, I was a troop carrier orbiting the planet Shis'urna. — Ann Leckie

Well, the teacher I studied with for nineteen and a half years was a man named Paul Gavert. He was a great lieder singer, so basically I'm a trained lieder singer because of that teacher. The teacher I currently study with - since 1995 - is Joan Lader, who also studied with Gavert. — Betty Buckley

Some of you may know my story: How for nineteen years, I worked as a manager for a tire plant in Alabama. And some of you may have lived a similar story: After nearly two decades of hard, proud work, I found out that I was making significantly less money than the men who were doing the same work as me. — Lilly Ledbetter

What's the difference between a bright, inquisitive five-year-old, and a dull, stupid nineteen-year-old? Fourteen years of the British educational system. — Bertrand Russell

An oyster has hardly any more reasoning power than a scientist has; and so it it is reasonably certain that this one jumped to the conclusion that the nineteen million years was a preparation for him; but that would be just like an oyster, which is the most conceited animal there is, except man. And anyway, this one could not know, at that early date, that he was only an incident in a scheme, and that there was some more in the scheme yet. — Mark Twain

You told me mornings were the best time to break your own heart. So here I am, smoking your brand of cigarettes for the scent. I wonder if you still sing Beatles songs as you make coffee. You said your mother used to sing them to you when you couldn't sleep, nineteen years before we met, twenty before you moved your clothes out of our closet while I was at work. By the way, I hate you for leaving all the photographs on the fridge. Taking them down felt like peeling off new scabs, like slapping a sunburn. I spent so many nights carving your body into pillows, I can promise you nothing feels like sleeping with your arm around me and your breath in my ear. Still, it's comforting to know we sleep under the same moon, even if she's so much older when she gets to me. I like to imagine she's seen you sleeping and wants me to know you're doing well. — Clementine Von Radics

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

I heard someone once say that the years from fifteen to nineteen are the best years in a girl's life. — L.M. Montgomery

How old are you?" I asked, my head cocked to the side.
"Nineteen."
It was too much to resist. "And how long have you been nineteen?"
He looked at me like I had a screw loose.
"Since I haven't been eighteen?"
"So you'be been on this planet for nineteen years?"
"That's usually what an age implies. — Heather Hildenbrand

It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail. — Donna Tartt

Help me out here, Jeremy," she said pleadingly.
He gave her a look. "Why should I do that?"
"Because once, nineteen years ago, you were wrong about him, too."
Jeremy stared at her stoically. After a long pause, his face broke into a smile.
"Aw, hell, you crazy kid, you knew I was gonna let you in - I'm a sucker for this stuff. — Julie James

On this up trip I saw a little towhead (infant island) half a mile long, which had been formed during the past nineteen years. Since there was so much time to spare that nineteen years of it could be devoted to the construction of a mere towhead, where was the use, originally, in rushing this whole globe through in six days? — Mark Twain

When I was nineteen years old, I was the number-one star for two years. When I was forty, nobody wanted me. I couldn't get a job. — Mickey Rooney

Christ said, "I and my father are one", and you repeat it. Yet it has not helped mankind. For nineteen hundred years men have not understood that saying. They make Christ the saviour of men. He is God and we are worms! — Swami Vivekananda

He loved Thelma, Jonathan said, he had never loved anyone but Thelma, he had loved Thelma for nineteen years and would always love her even though Thelma didn't give a rat's ass about him and never had. — Nora Ephron

As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the Nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired. — George Orwell

If it was nineteen years until my new life began, that meant that I was now a hundred years old. He was the singularly most beautiful thing I had seen in a hundred years. — Kiera Cass

In the nineteen years since then, I had learned eleven languages and 713 songs. I had found ways to conceal what I was - even, I was fairly sure, from the Lord of the Radch herself. I had worked as a cook, a janitor, a pilot. I had settled on a plan of action. I had joined a religious order, and made a great deal of money. In all that time I only killed a dozen people. — Ann Leckie

that is what abuse is: knowing you are going to get salt but still hoping for sugar for nineteen years. - — Amanda Lovelace

I'm not a horror movie guy, but I think the guy that did Saw, or maybe House or something, he was saying you love that age as a storyteller because a nineteen-year-old is still dumb enough to make really bad decisions, but he's allowed to be out on his own. — Craig Finn

When he told F. of his disgust at the eyelid's movement, he must have been sixteen. When he decided to study medicine, he must have been nineteen; by then, having already signed on to the contract to forget, he no longer remembered what he had said to F. three years before. Too bad for him. The memory might have alerted him, might have helped him see that his choice of medicine was wholly theoretical, made without the slightest self- knowledge.
Thus he studied medicine for three years before giving up with a sense of shipwreck. What to choose after those lost years? What to attach to, if his inner self should keep as silent as it had before? He walked down the broad outside staircase of the medical school for the last time, with the feeling that he was about to find himself alone on a platform all the trains had left. — Milan Kundera

The first dinner-party of a bride's career is a momentous occasion, entailing a world of small anxieties. The accomplishments which have won her acclaim in the three years since she left the schoolroom are no longer enough. It is no longer enough to dress exquisitely, to chuse jewels exactly appropriate to the situation, to converse in French, to play the pianoforte and sing. Now she must turn her attention to French cooking and French wines. Though other people may advise her upon these important matters, her own taste and inclinations must guide her. She is sure to despise her mother's style of entertaining and wish to do things differently. In London fashionable people dine out four, five times a week. However will a new bride - nineteen years old and scarcely ever in a kitchen before - think of a meal to astonish and delight such jaded palates? — Susanna Clarke

Was it possible that Octavia had misjudged her?
What was he thinking? Of course, it was possible. Octavia was a dear, but she was nineteen years old and thinking of Octavia. The last thing she wanted in her life was a staggeringly beautiful rival who was not conveniently evil. — Julia Quinn

Although the problem of transmuting chemical elements into each other is much older than a satisfactory definition of the very concept of chemical element, it is well known that the first and most important step towards its solution was made only nineteen years ago by the late Lord Rutherford, who started the method of the nuclear bombardments. — Enrico Fermi

It seems that I have always been ahead of my time. I had to wait nineteen years before Niagara was harnessed by my system, fifteen years before the basic inventions for wireless which I gave to the world in 1893 were applied universally. — Nikola Tesla

There were nineteen years between my grandparents, and I was in a relationship for five years from the age of fifteen to twenty with a man who was thirteen years older than me who remains one of the loves of my life, and he passed away when I was twenty years old. — Kate Winslet

When I replayed the whole incident in my mind, what bothered me most was the moment when the officer drew his weapon and I thought about running. I was a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer who had worked on police misconduct cases. I had the judgment to speak calmly to the officer when he threatened to shoot me. When I thought about what I would have done when I was sixteen years old or nineteen or even twenty-four, I was scared to realize that I might have run. The more I thought about it, the more concerned I became about all the young black boys and men in that neighborhood. Did they know not to run? — Bryan Stevenson

I was, I remember, nineteen years old, wrote poems, still wore no proper collar, ran out in the rain and snow, always woke up early in the morning, read Lenau, considered an overcoat a superfluous item, received a monthly salary of one hundred twenty-five francs and didn't know what to do with all that money. — Robert Walser

He was nineteen years old, homeless and rootless, with no family and no purpose in life. — Ken Follett

The last man, Pfc Layton, was the squad's favorite point man and didn't say much in or out of camp, but he was totally dependable. His only goal in life was to get out of Vietnam alive and get out of the Corps. He was a good point man because he didn't like to take chances. Layton was nineteen years old. — Raymond Hunter Pyle

Seem at all surprising. It was just like Marlow. It was accepted in silence. No one took the trouble to grunt even; and presently he said, very slow - I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago - the other day ... Light came out of this river since - you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker - may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday. Imagine the feelings of a commander of a fine - what d'ye call 'em? - trireme in the Mediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north; run overland across the Gauls in a hurry; put in charge of one of these craft the legionaries, - a wonderful lot of handy men they must have been too - used to build, apparently — Joseph Conrad

He sat in the living room in the dark, an expert at waiting, a nineteen-year veteran of it, waiting for people who failed to appear, missed court dates because they forgot or didn't care, and took off. Nineteen years of losers, repeat offenders in and out of the system. Another one, that's all Louis was, slipping back into the life. — Elmore Leonard

He was a player that hasn't had to use his legs even when he was nineteen years of age because his first two yards were in his head. — Glenn Hoddle

The feelings I thought I had left behind returned when, almost nineteen years later, the Islamic regime would once again turn against its students. This time it would open fire on those it had admitted to the universities, those who were its own children, the children of the revolution. Once more my students would go to the hospitals in search of the murdered bodies that where stolen by the guards and vigilantes and try to prevent them from stealing the wounded.
I would like to know where Mr. Bahri is right now, at this moment, and to ask him: How did it all turn out, Mr. Bahri - was this your dream, your dream of the revolution? Who will pay for all those ghosts in my memories? Who will pay for the snapshots of the murdered and the executed that we hid in our shoes and closets as we moved on to other things? Tell me, Mr. Bahri-or, to use that odd expression of Gatsby's, Tell me, old sport- what shell we do with all this corpses on our hands? — Azar Nafisi

The hardest thing I've had to overcome was being from my small coal-mining town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia. My mother was a coal miner for nineteen years, and the expectations of making it out of my town were slim to none. — Thomas Jones

I think it's hard to learn democracy when we make children prisoners until they're nineteen years old. — Mimsy Sadofsky