Ninety Seven Quotes & Sayings

The tiny waiter, who looks to be about ninety-seven years old, comes over and wheezes through what I assume are the specials. Szabolcs, his nametag says. I can't understand a word he says. He may be telling me that his great-great-grandchildren are in the kitchen being gnawed on by a pack of wolves. I nod and smile. "I'll have the chicken," I say. Szabolcs asks something that has a lot of sht and tsz and ejht sounds in it. "Sounds good," I tell him. This is how people end up eating cats, I believe. — Kristan Higgins

You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future. — John Steinbeck

You're saying no ninety-seven times out of a hundred, and most founders find they have to make a very conscious effort to do this. — Sam Altman

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked that if you ask a man how much is two plus two and he tells you five, that is a mistake. But if you ask a man how much is two plus two and he tells you ninety-seven, that is no longer a mistake. The man you are talking to is operating with a wholly different logic from your own. — Thomas Friedman

I have known ninety-five of the world's great men in my time, and of these eighty-seven were followers of the Bible. — William E. Gladstone

Lots of forms. Stacks of forms. An average of nine thousand, seven hundred, and forty-seven of them were required to gain entrance to Hell. The largest form ran to fifteen thousand, four hundred, and ninety-seven questions. The shortest to just five, but five of such subtle phraseology, labyrinthine grammar, and malicious ambiguity that, released into the mortal world, they would certainly have formed the basis of a new religion or, at the least, a management course. — Jonathan L. Howard

Their conversation topics are very rarely the things they want to be talking about, and I could write ninety-seven books on body shame and clothing etiquette before you would get even close to understanding them. — Matt Haig

Please forgive me, Mother. I apologize for saying 'fuck.'"
Then he straightened and addressed Doug. "Which, by the way, was repeated sixty-seven times in this particular film. It has a running length of ninety-four minutes. So last night while watching it, she heard fuck, or a derivative thereof, spoken every one and a half minutes, give or take a few seconds. But if my saying fuck offended her, then I'm fucking sorry. — Sandra Brown

The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times. — Robert Anton Wilson

Koan ninety-seven: "Do unto otters as you would have them do unto you." Hmm. No real help there. Besides, he'd occasionally been unsure that he'd written that one down properly, although it certain had worked. He'd always left aquatic mammals well alone, and they had done the same to him. — Terry Pratchett

He thought, Yeah. Yeah, non-smokers live seven years longer. Which seven will be subtracted by the god called Time? It won't be that convulsive, heart-bursting spell between twenty-eight and thirty-five. No. It'll be that really cool bit between eighty-six and ninety-three. — Martin Amis

After the Battle of Midway it was clear that the Pacific war would be won by planes launched from ships. Both Japan and the United States began crash programs to build aircraft carriers as fast as possible. During 1943 and 1944, Japan produced seven of these huge, costly vessels. In the same period, the United States produced ninety. — Ken Follett

Ninety-seven saint days a year wouldn't affect the theater, but two Yom Kippurs would ruin it. — Brendan Behan

What can I do? I have no talents. I refuse to cripple myself for ninety roubles ... Well, all right, so I'll eat two thousand hamburgers in my lifetime. Wear out twenty-five dark-grey suits. Leaf through seven hundred issues of the local newspaper. And die without scratching the earth's surface. Is that it? ... I'd rather live only a minute, but live it right! (Fred Kolesnikov) — Sergei Dovlatov

This one is from an ancient Zoroastrian legend of the first parents of the human race, where they are pictured as having sprung from the earth in the form of a single reed, so closely joined that they could not have been told apart. However, in time they separated; and again in time they united, and there were born to them two children, whom they loved so tenderly and irresistibly that they ate them up. The mother ate one; the father ate the other; and God, to protect the human race, then reduced the force of man's capacity for love by some ninety-nine per cent. Those first parents thereafter had seven more pairs of children, every one of which, however - thank God! - survived. — Joseph Campbell

careful evaluation of various surveys has taken place and support the idea that the number of qualified scientists believing global warming is primarily man-made is less than three percent - rather than ninety-seven percent. — Sally Fernandez

I'm under strict instructions to write a happy ending. Rule number ninety-seven: You're not allowed to make a dragon cry."
"Right," Said Sophie, starting the engine. "Tears might quench their fire. — Chris D'Lacey

My dad used to say that life was like turning the pages in a book. 'Oh, look,' he'd say, pretending to flip the pages in the air after we'd had something bad happen to us. 'Bad luck here on page ninety-seven. And on ninety-eight. But something good here on ninety-nine! All you had to do was keep reading! — Ally Condie

Yeah, I know," he agreed. "It was a surprise," he admitted. "I mean, who the hell would have expected a ninety-seven-year-old man to just up and die?" Bill's dad had indeed been only three years from his one-hundredth birthday when he shocked everyone by waking up dead one morning. — Hope Jahren

You must get your living by loving. But as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure, and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied. — Henry David Thoreau

I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other. When you're five, you know your age down to the month. Even in your twenties you know how old you are. I'm twenty-three, you say, or maybe twenty-seven. But then in your thirties something strange starts to happen. It's a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I'm - you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you're not. You're thirty-five. And then you're bothered, because you wonder if this is the beginning of the end. It is, of course, but it's decades before you admit it. You start to forget words: they're on the tip of your tongue, but instead of eventually dislodging, they stay there. You go upstairs to fetch something, and by the time you get there you can't remember what it was you were after. — Anonymous

Their ascent was accomplished via a wide spiral staircase that sat within the reflective tube. Each of the metal steps were welded to its core. But even here in this elegant construct, the infernal touch hadn't been neglected. Each of the steps was set not at ninety degrees to the core, but at ninety-seven, or a hundred, or a hundred and five, each one different from the one before but all sending out the same message: nothing was certain here; nothing was safe. There was no railing to break the slide should someone lose their footing, only step after disquieting step designed to make the ascent as vertiginous as possible. — Clive Barker

Ninety percent of the time, you're going to hear no. It took me seven years to make 'Once Upon a Time ... When We Were Colored.' Nobody wanted to see the movie made. I got the movie made. — Tim Reid

When you have seven percent unemployed, you have ninety-three percent working. — John F. Kennedy

Have you ever looked at a map of our country, Necdet?' Green Headscarf says. 'It's a map of the human mind. We're split by water over two continents, Europe and Anatolia. We are seven per cent Europe, ninety-three per cent Asia. Conscious Thrace, unconscious, pre-conscious, sub-concious Anatolia. And Istanbul - have you ever seen a neuron, Necdet? A brain cell? The marvel is that the synapses don't touch. There is always a gap - there must a gap, otherwise consciousness would not exist. The Bosphorus is that synaptic cleft. Potential can flow across the cleft. It's the cleft that makes consciousness possible. — Ian McDonald

He was able to prove that the South had surrendered ninety-seven million acres to erosion (an area larger than the two Carolinas and Georgia); it had squandered the chances of millions of people by tolerating poverty and illiteracy; and it had ignored human potential by refusing to provide technological training, or even basic services, to its people. The overwhelming power of Odum's data undercut (what Odum himself called) Gone with the Wind nostalgia - the collective self-image elite southerners had cultivated. — Nancy Isenberg

Larry's such a liar---
He tells outrageous lies.
He says he's ninety-nine years old
Instead of only five.
He says he lives up on the moon,
He says that he once flew.
He says he's really six feet four
Instead of three feet two.
He says he has a billion dollars
'Stead of just a dime.
He says he rode a dinosaur
Back in some distant time.
He says his mother is the moon
Who taught him magic spells.
He says his father is the wind
That rings the morning bells.
He says he can take stones and rocks
And turn them into gold.
He says he can take burnin' fire
And turn it freezin' cold.
He said he'd send me seven elves
To help me with my chores.
But Larry's such a liar---
He only sent me four. — Shel Silverstein

We're always trotting out some story of a ninety-seven-year-old who runs marathons, as if such cases were not miracles of biological luck but reasonable expectations for all. Then, when our bodies fail to live up to this fantasy, we feel as if we somehow have something to apologize for. — Atul Gawande

Those smooth, spit-cleaned cheeks gave no indication of the dreams crowding her skull. Should she make it to adulthood, the girl would arrive with two hundred and six bones. Two and a half million sweat glands. Ninety-six thousand kilometers of blood vessels. Forty-six chromosomes. Seven meters of small intestines. Six hundred and six discrete muscles. One hundred billion cerebral neurons. Two kidneys. A liver. A heart. A hundred trillion cells that died and were replaced, again and again. But no matter how many ways she dismembered and quantified the body lying beside her, she couldn't say how many years the girl would wait before she married, if at all, or how many children she would have, if any; and between teh creation of this body and its end lay the mystery the girl would spend her life solving. — Anthony Marra

Does anyone beside me experience a deep sorrow that someone called a "Hero for the Planet" and a "star of the sustainability movement" is designing truck factories and Nike headquarters? Ninety percent of the large fish in the ocean are gone. Ninety-seven percent of the world's native forests have been cut. There are 2 million dams just in the United States. Once-mighty flocks of passenger pigeons are gone. Islands full of great aucks, gone. Rich runs of salmon, gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. The oceans are filled with plastic. Every stream in the United States is contaminated with carcinogens. The world is being killed, and this is the respond? Not only am I angry, not only am I disgusted, I am also deeply, deeply sorrowful.
And I am deeply ashamed.
We need to act differently. — Derrick Jensen

Yes," Bitterblue said. "I suppose you could convert everything into minutes. Twelve times sixty is seven hundred twenty, and fifteen times fifty is seven hundred fifty. So our seven-hundred-twenty-minute half day equals its seven-hundred-fifty-minute half day. Let's see ... Right now, the watch reads a time of nearly twenty-five past two. That's one hundred twenty-five total minutes, which, divided by seven hundred fifty, should equal our time in minutes divided by seven hundred twenty ... so, seven hundred twenty times one hundred twenty-five is ... give me a moment ... ninety thousand ... divided by seven hundred fifty ... is one hundred twenty ... which means ... well! The numbers are quite neat, aren't they? It's just about two o'clock. I should go home. — Kristin Cashore

The four horsemen of the human apocalypse, which cause the most premature and avoidable death in poor countries, are and will be for many years the same: hunger, dirty water, indoor smoke and malaria, which kill respectively about seven, three, three and two people per minute. If you want to do your fellow human beings good, spend your effort on combating those so that people can prosper, ready to meet climate challenges as they arrive. Economists estimate that a dollar spent on mitigating climate change brings ninety cents of benefits compared with $20 benefits per dollar spent on healthcare and $16 per dollar spent on hunger. Keeping climate at 1990 levels, assuming it could be done, would leave more than 90 per cent of human mortality causes untouched. — Matt Ridley

Ninety-seven. Ninety-eight. Two more and I've won. I hear the same girl - she must be standing close by - whisper, "Come on."
On the ninety-ninth push-up, Reznik shoves me down with his heel. I fall hard on my chest, roll my cheek against the asphalt, and there's his puffy face and tiny pale eyes an inch from mine.
Ninety-nine; one short. The bastard. — Rick Yancey

Ninety-seven percent of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 are white men, and what they do radiates all the way down into poor areas and cities around our country. Like predatory lending and misallocation of municipal services. These guys get municipal service, poor areas don't. So they run the economy into the ground, and who suffers the most? The poor pay more and they die earlier. — Ralph Nader

My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the heck she is. — Ellen DeGeneres

Ninety-seven is my lucky number. — Antonia Fraser

Don't blame you, said Marvin and counted five hundred and ninety-seven thousand million sheep before falling asleep again a second later. — Douglas Adams

sometimes i feel like a great chef
who has devoted his entire life
to monastic study of the art of cooking
& gathered the finest ingredients
& built the most advanced kitchen
& prepared the most exquisite meal
so perfect, so delicious, so extraordinary
more astounding than any meal ever created
yet each day i stand in my window
& watch ninety-seven percent of the world
walk past my restaurant
into the mcdonald's
across the street — Daniel Lyons

All of Europe is tremendously integrated now; perhaps from all those years of colonization. Everybody that they've colonized has come to the mainland, so you'll have a racially diverse audience as well. You'll have many Middle Easterners, Asians, Africans, from seven to ninety sitting in the audience, and the really incredible thing is that they all know the music. I don't mean they just know a song here and there. They know the music. They are a very educated audience. — Patti Austin