Senior Life 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

My life came complete with a factory-installed biological brother seven years my senior. — Augusten Burroughs

No matter how perfect our circumstances, most of us, as Adam Phillips observed, "learn to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like." The hard part is to make peace with that misty zone and to recognize that no life - no life worth living anyway - is free of constraints. — Jennifer Senior

A slave's life is mostly composed of patience and study. Yes, study. If not with actual books, then following the example of greater, senior slaves. Or learning every nuance of their owner's character, so that they can more completely and seamlessly offer themselves at the right time and in the right manner. — Laura Antoniou

It is very telling what we don't hear in eulogies. We almost never hear things like: "The crowning achievement of his life was when he made senior vice president." Or: "He increased market share for his company multiple times during his tenure." Or: "She never stopped working. She ate lunch at her desk. Every day." Or: "He never made it to his kid's Little League games because he always had to go over those figures one more time." Or: "While she didn't have any real friends, she had six hundred Facebook friends, and she dealt with every email in her in-box every night." Or: "His PowerPoint slides were always meticulously prepared." Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh. — Arianna Huffington

Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish
Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed
himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and
has lived selflessly for the art — Seamus Heaney

More than almost anything else, the experience of parenthood exposes the gulf between our experiencing and remembering selves. Our experiencing selves tell researchers that we prefer doing the dishes
or napping, or shopping, or answering emails
to spending time with our kids. (I am very specifically referring here to Kahneman's study of 909 Texas women.) But our remembering selves tell researchers that no one
and nothing
provides us with so much joy as our children. It may not be the happiness we live day to day, but it's the happiness we think about, the happiness we summon and remember, the stuff that makes up our life-tales. — Jennifer Senior

The parent-adolescent relationship is like a partnership in which the senior partner (the parent) has more expertise in many areasbut looks forward to the day when the junior partner (the adolescent) will take over the business of running his or her own life. — Laurence Steinberg

As a senior in high school, you figure out what you want to do with your life. I asked myself if I wanted to get back into acting and thought: 'Yes, but under my own terms and nothing like it was before.' — Macaulay Culkin

Why is it that we claim to want certainty? Only fools and cowards seek certainty. Certainty is a dead end; it's a rich old widow living out the rest of her days on the Upper East Side with a little dog and big memories. Unless you are a senior citizen, you'll go nuts after a few weeks of knowing what the rest of your life will bring. You'll die of boredom. But uncertainty is what keeps us alive. It is that flip of a coin, that brief moment when it's in the air or spinning on its side, that snaps us out of our daily stasis. Some invisible Odds Gods are giving you a chance to become better, smarter, richer. What fun it is to get paid if you earned it by the skin of your teeth, by the close call. And how dreadful it is to shoot fish in a barrel. Exposure to uncertainty earns you membership in a select tribe: You are a Padawan mastering the Force. Once the trade is on, once the die has been cast, you're in a parallel, auspicious universe. — Katya G. Cohen

If there's a senior citizen in downstate Illinois that's struggling to pay for their medicine and having to chose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer even if it's not my grandparent. — Barack Obama

You know what's given me the greatest pleasure in my life? It's been our bungalow, the normalcy of it, the ordinariness of my waking, Almaz rattling in the kitchen, my work, my classes, my rounds with the senior students. Seeing you and Shiva at dinner, then going to sleep with my wife ... I want my days to be that way. — Abraham Verghese

This increase in the life span and in the number of our senior citizens presents this Nation with increased opportunities: the opportunity to draw upon their skill and sagacityand the opportunity to provide the respect and recognition they have earned. It is not enough for a great nation merely to have added new years to lifeour objective must also be to add new life to those years. — John F. Kennedy

Becoming a parent is one of the most sudden and dramatic changes in adult life. — Jennifer Senior

Your children are going through life with their eyes closed, so YOU'RE the one who has to steer. — Jennifer Senior

Q, you're going to go to Duke. You're going to be a very successful lawyer-or-something and get married and have babies and live your whole little life, and then you're going to die, and in the last moments, when you're chocking on your own bile in the nursing home, you'll say to yourself:'Well, I wasted my whole goddamned life, but at least I broke into SeaWorld with Margo Roth Spiegelman my senior year of high school. At least I carpe'd that one diem. — John Green

At this point the reader should possess insight into the Atonist origins of both the exoteric and esoteric branches of Judaism and Christianity. The highest ranking members of Europe's nobility, as well as senior members of both Catholic and Protestant Churches, know the truth revealed here. Naturally, such men are sworn to keep the salient facts from the masses of the world and normally do not admit the truth in words. However, as we show in The Trees of Life, the truth has been conveyed via the symbolism repeatedly employed by hierarchs and their lieutenants down through the ages to the present. This is the crucial thing to remember when inquiries are made into the shadowy — Michael Tsarion

Our stories may not always be pleasant as they're being lived. They can in fact be just the opposite, acquiring a warm hue only in retrospect. "I think this boils down to a philosophical question rather than a psychological one," Tom Gilovich, a professor of psychology at Cornell, tells me. "Should you value moment-to-moment happiness more than retrospective evaluations of your life?" He says he has no answer for this, but the example he offers suggests a bias. — Jennifer Senior

People build continuity into their life: Places, friends and goals. We go to work on Monday with plans for Friday night, enroll as freshmen intending to be seniors and save money for retirement. We try to control what comes next and shape it to meet our will. — Nathaniel Fick

It is unrealistic, I think - and by "unrealistic" I mean it is a demand that cannot be met - to assume that if all goes well in a child's life, he or she will be happy. Not because life is the kind of thing that doesn't make you happy; but because happiness is not something one can ask of a child. Children, I think, suffer - in a way that adults don't always realize - under the pressure their parents put on them to be happy, which is the pressure not to make their parents unhappy, or more unhappy than they already are. — Jennifer Senior

Now that he's gone, I feel like I'm a senior citizen who gave away her life savings over the phone.
And this is the crux: I never in my life believed in someone as much as I believed in him.
The shame is overwhelming. — Emma Forrest

One Life With Many Names, Childhood, Boyhood, Manhood And Old, Then? Then! All Unknown, Uncertain Destination ... — Muhammad Imran Hasan

You know a person is having a severe personality crisis if you see a high school class ring on a finger beyond the first semester in college. Male or female. It's a big sign saying nothing has mattered to my life since senior year. — Nikki Giovanni

YOU KNOW HOW WHEN you're a senior in high school, and you officially know absolutely everything about everything and no one can tell you different, but on the other hand, at the same time, you're dumber than a poorly translated instruction manual for a spoon? — Andrew Smith

He [Hamlet] sees ghosts and listens to dreams. And when his ghost father tells him that he (Hamlet Senior) was killed by his brother and asks Hamlet Junior to avenge his death, in the right, honorable way, Hamlet says yes, yes, yes, he'll do it.
But somehow he never gets round to it. Not like the other two young men in the play. The Norwegian Prince Fortinbras(...) has made his life [!!] pursuing the honor that his father lost when Hamlet Senior beat him in single combat. (...). When the lord chamberlain,Polonius, is killed, his son, Laertes, returns to the court immediately, demanding restitution, (...).
So there is no shortage of examples of how young men are expected to and do act in this world where honor demands an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. But Hamlet doesn't do it. Instead, he beats up on his girlfriend and he's cruel to his mother. — Tina Packer

When I started Teach For America, I wasn't trying to come up with an idea that would change the world. I was trying to solve a problem much closer to home: I was a senior in college, and I had no idea what I was going to do with my life! — Wendy Kopp

My whole life, I wanted to be a fighter pilot; it's what I wanted to do. I set up all of my classes for it, but I got lazy my senior year in high school and didn't get my paperwork in. — Mike Vogel

On Pt. K.L. Misra
Panditji lived a full life replete with achievements and honours. He was such a versatile and noble man that the like of him may not be born again. - Shanti Bhushan, Senior Advocate — Munindra Misra

I have learned a great deal in my life, and DeMolay helped me to learn that character and integrity should be cornerstones in your life. As a Senior DeMolay, as a father, the best advice I could ever give would be to take the high road in life, and you will be able to build trusting relationships. — Larry Wilcox

I learned to canoe at summer camp and thought I'd pursue Olympic whitewater canoeing. In my senior year of high school, I instead decided to attend M.I.T. I like to say I've had only two jobs in my life: whitewater canoeing instructor and wilderness guide in college, and C.E.O. of iRobot. — Colin Angle

When I first ran for Congress, I went to my daughter Alexandra, who was going to be a senior in high school, and said: 'I have a chance to run. I may not win, but I'd be gone three nights a week. So, if you want me to stay, I'll be happy to.' And do you know what she said to me? 'Mother, get a life!' — Nancy Pelosi

I was voted Most Humorous in my senior class in high school, and I was a fan of comedy, my whole life. I never got into the horror genre, and action was fine, but I just loved comedy. Any comedy I could get my hands on, I would. I watched Saturday Night Live religiously. I've just been a fan of comedy, my whole life. — Rob Riggle

Would you accept "slackers by hand and brain"?' said Ridcully, always happy to see how far he could go. 'Slackers by hand and brain by statute,' said the Senior Wrangler primly. Ridcully gave up. He could do this all day, but life couldn't be all fun. — Terry Pratchett

That women bring home the bacon, fry it up, serve it for breakfast, and use its greasy remains to make candles for their children's science projects is hardly news. Yet how parenting responsibilities get sorted out under these conditions remains unresolved. Neither government nor private business has adapted to this reality, throwing the burden back onto individual families to cope. And while today's fathers are more engaged with their children than fathers in any previous generation, they're charting a blind course, navigating by trial and, just as critically, error. Many women can't tell whether they're supposed to be grateful for the help they're getting or enraged by the help they're failing to receive; many men, meanwhile, are struggling to adjust to the same work-life rope-a-dope as their wives, now that they too are expected to show up for Gymboree. — Jennifer Senior

The good die young, but I have been spared to build myself up so that I may end my life as good as gold. The senior dead will be proud of me ... I will join the Y.M.C.A. of the immortals. Only, in this very hour, I may be missing eternity. — Saul Bellow

The experience of death is going to get more and more painful, contrary to what many people believe. The forthcoming euthanasia will make it more rather than less painful because it will put the emphasis on personal decision in a way which was blissfully alien to the whole problem of dying in former times. It will make death even more subjectively intolerable, for people will feel responsible for their own deaths and morally obligated to rid their relatives of their unwanted presence. Euthanasia will further intensify all the problems its advocates think it will solve. — Rene Girard

Leigh smiled. For her thirty-five years of life she had worked her way through the system, gained academic honours and achieved a senior government role. She was a leading scientist on the most far-reaching scientific experiment ever undertaken in the eighty years of the Greater Germanic Reich, or arguably in the whole history of humanity. She had run a good race. If it ended now, well that was what God intended. If not, she would continue her work to undo everything; in His name. — Ian Andrew

Small science, which includes most research in the life sciences all over the world, is science directed usually by an individual senior scientist and a small team of junior associates, perhaps three, ten, fifteen, something in that order. — Daniel Nathans

If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription, who has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer - even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab-American or Mexican-American family being rounded up by John Ashcroft without benefit of an attorney or due process, I know that that threatens my civil liberties. And I don't have to be a woman to be concerned that the Supreme Court is trying to take away a woman's right, because I know that my rights are next. It is that fundamental belief - I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper - that makes this country work. — Barack Obama

I am successful because of my brains and my guts, put together, and I don't need some fancy-ass degree from a bunch of sweater-vest-wearing pricks who haven't gotten laid since Bush Senior was president ... Do you know who studies sociology? People who would rather observe life than live it. — Erin McCarthy

I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another you. One's enough. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Probably Verrari," muttered the senior, who was methodically torturing a piece of ivory with a slender carving knife. He wanted it to come out like a sculpted terrace he'd seen at the Temple of Iono, alive with lovely relief and fantastical representations of drowned men taken by the Lord of the Grasping Waters. What he seemed to be producing more closely resembled a lump of white dogshit, life-size. "Sooner trust a sailing ship to a blind drunkard with no hands than a Verrari. — Scott Lynch

My life has been amazing. How many other ladies of 76 can say that the snapshot on their senior citizen's card was taken by Norman Parkinson? — Carmen Dell'Orefice

In fact, in the last job I had before coming to the White House - I remember this clearly - I was on maternity leave with Sasha, still trying to figure out what to do with my life, and I got a call for an interview for this position, a senior position at the hospitals. And I thought, okay, here we go. So I had to scramble to look for babysitting, and couldn't find one. — Michelle Obama

[The Republican plan will] make sure we bring down the cost of health care for all Americans and that ensures affordable access for all Americans and is pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government. — Virginia Foxx

ON THIS GLOBE WE HUMANS ASSEMBLED IN A SOCIETY TO GET LIVED TOGETHER WITH CERTAIN TREDITIONS AND COSTOMS AS PER OUR OWN CAST AND CREED.OLD MASTERS OUR SENIOR CITIZONS HAVE FRAMED A FEW SPECIFIC AND LOT MORE GENERAL RULES AND REGULATIONS IN THE WORLD TO ADOPT AND FOLLOW IN EVERY ASPECT OF OUR MOVE OF LIFE . — Various

Stages of life are artifacts. Adolescence is a useful contrivance, midlife is a moving target, senior citizens are an interest group, and tweenhood is just plain made up. — Jill Lepore

I wrote to Mr. McEnroe, Senior. I said: "Here is the sentence once written by the immortal Bobby Jones. I thought you might like to have it done in needlepoint and mounted in a suitable frame to hang over Little John's bed. It says, The rewards of golf - and of life, too, I expect - are worth very little if you don't play the game by the etiquette as well as by the rules." I never heard from Mr. McEnroe, Senior. I can only conclude that the letter went astray. — Alistair Cooke

My mom believed that you make your own luck. Over the stove she had hung these old, maroon painted letters that spell out, "MANIFEST." The idea being if you thought and dreamed about the way you wanted your life to be
if you just envisioned it long enough, it would come into being.
But as hard as I had manifested Astrid Heyman with her hand in mine, her blue eyes gazing into mine, her lips whispering something wild and funny and outrageous in my ear, she had remained totally unaware of my existence. Truly, to even dream of dreaming about Astrid, for a guy like me, in my relatively low position on the social ladder of Cheyenne Mountain High, was idiotic. And with her a senior and me a junior? Forget it.
Astrid was just lit up with beauty: shining blonde ringlets, June sky blue eyes, slightly furrowed brow, always biting back a smile, champion diver on the swim team. Olympic level.
Hell, Astrid was Olympic level in every possible way. — Emmy Laybourne

to linger in the factory after clocking-off time (though now a manager, simon had never ceased to think in the terms of his apprenticeship) would constitute a fatal admission that your home life was lacking or, worse, that you were trying to brownnose senior management — J.K. Rowling

If one takes meaning into consideration, happiness might best be described as "a zest for life in all its complexity," as Sissela Bok writes in her book. To achieve it means to "attach our lives to something larger than ourselves." To be happy, one must do. It could be something as simple as teaching Sunday school or as grand as leading nonviolent protests. It could be as cerebral as seeking the cure for cancer or as physical as climbing mountains. It could be creating art. And it could be raising a child - my "best piece of poetrie," as Ben Jonson said in his elegy for his seven-year-old son. — Jennifer Senior

While their normal working relations are pervaded by an atmosphere of intrigue and competitive resentment, Diana still feels a sense of responsibility towards her husband. When he returned to public duties last year following a lengthy recuperation from his broken arm he intended to make a bizarre "statement" regarding the intense speculation surrounding his injury. He instructed his staff to find a false arm with a hook on the end so that he could appear in public like a real-life Captain Hook. Diana was consulted by senior courtiers worried that he would make a fool of himself. She suggested that a false arm should be obtained but then conveniently mislaid shortly before he was to attend a medical meeting in Harley Street, central London. While Charles was annoyed by the subterfuge, his staff were relieved that his dignity had been preserved thanks to Diana's timely intervention. — Andrew Morton

In the darkest hour of winter, when the starlings had all flown away, Gretel Samuelson fell in love. It happened the way things are never supposed to happen in real life, like a sledgehammer, like a bolt from out of the blue. One minute she was a seventeen year-old senior in high school waiting for a Sicilian pizza to go; the next one she was someone whose whole world had exploded, leaving her adrift in the Milky Way, so far from earth she was walking on stars. — Alice Hoffman

How Not to Spend Your Senior Year,
Rule #3:
No matter how dire things get,
do not panic.

It will only make a bad situation even worse. Besides, by the time you've reached the hit-the-panic-button stage, it's way too late. Nothing you do will make a difference anyhow.
This is a phenomenon known to the ancients as irony. You may be more familiar with the contemporary expression of this concept: Life sucks.
Particularly weekends. — Cameron Dokey

I made my first Australian senior team when I was 16, first Olympics when I was 19, and I retired. I'm 32, I retired four years ago, so a good third of my life or nearly a third of my life has been all about running. — Cathy Freeman

It is amazing, the number of business executives and senior leaders who get to be appointed and elevated to positions of authority on the basis of technical competences whilst lacking essential grooming on basic good manners and customs of conduct that must come from the home training process. — Archibald Marwizi

All Cabinet Ministers and other senior ministers are still sworn in as Privy Counsellors for life. The oath (which dates back to the thirteenth-century and has been described as Britain's oldest secrecy provision) commits them to keep all advice to the monarch secret. — Clive Ponting

No senior politician can expect to have work-life balance. I'm afraid there are some jobs for which work-life balance inevitably goes out the window. If you want work-life balance you just have to accept that you can't be a senior member of a government, or for that matter a senior member of an opposition. — Tony Abbott

When I hire somebody really senior, competence is the ante. They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, Are they going to fall in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself. They'll want to do what's best for Apple, not what's best for them, what's best for Steve, or anybody else. — Steve Jobs

Rich old people are more attractive than poor old people, so by all means, try to get rich before age sets in. Otherwise, you'll just be playing catch-up for the rest of your life and that will just wear you out, let me tell you. — Jill Conner Browne

You take a deep breath and you walk through the doors. It's the morning of your very first day. You say hi to your friends you ain't seen in a while, try and stay out of everybody's way. It's your freshman year and your gonna be here for the next four years in this town. Hopin' one of those senior boys will wink at you and say, "You know I haven't seen you around before." 'Cause when you're fifteen and somebody tells you they love you, you're gonna believe them. And when you're fifteen, feelin' like there's nothin' to figure out, but, count to ten, take it in. This is life before you know who you're gonna be. Fifteen. — Taylor Swift

I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up ...
You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it). — Nora Ephron

Mark Frankel was just a very tender, thoughtful person, and that was really nice. At that point in life, I hadn't met a lot of people my senior who were that tender, and still doing well and making a real go of it. That was a treat, for sure. — Brigid Brannagh

Things I didn't expect to do my senior year:
Become a drug dealer.
Become my mother.
Find and lose the love of my life. — Leah Raeder

ERIK ERIKSON, ONE OF the most innovative psychoanalysts of the twentieth century, wrote about these moments of existential review in his work on the human life cycle. He famously argued that all of us go through eight stages of development, each marked by a specific conflict. — Jennifer Senior

My old school, St Stella's, only goes to Year Ten and most of my friends now go to Pius Senior College, but my mother wouldn't allow it because she says the girls there leave with limited options and she didn't bring me up to have limitations placed upon me. If you know my mother, you'll sense there's an irony there, based on the fact that she is the Queen of the Limitation Placers in my life. — Melina Marchetta

'Deadline' is the story of a young man forced to discover who he is, and what's important in life, during the short span of his senior year in high school. — Chris Crutcher

Children live life as a controlled experiment. — Jennifer Senior

And if that's the case
if we are our remembering selves
then it matters far less how we feel moment to moment with our children. They play rich and crucial roles in our life stories, generating both outsize highs and outsize lows. Without such complexity, we don't feel like we've amounted to much. "You don't have a good story until something deviates from the expected," says McAdams. "And raising children leads to some pretty unexpected happenings. — Jennifer Senior

Senior year. And then life. Maybe that's the way it worked. High school was just a prologue to the real novel. Everybody got to write you
but when you graduated, you got to write yourself. At graduation you got to collect your teacher's pens and your parents' pens and you got your own pen. And you could do all the writing. Yeah. Wouldn't that be sweet? — Benjamin Alire Saenz

All through my school life I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed quite literally to wound other boys, and sometimes very severely. — Roald Dahl

Growing up in rural Utah had a lot of benefits, but in an environment that prized conformity, fit wasn't one of them. I ended up in my senior year with a 0.9 GPA, which I think you actually have to work pretty hard to get. In the exact same month they kicked me out of school, my girlfriend - still my wife today - told me she was pregnant. So, it was an interesting start to life: working 10 or 12 minimum-wage jobs; getting bored really quickly and quitting; having my in-laws - rightly - in full panic mode and thinking I had some kind of character flaw. — L. Todd Rose

You're going to be a very successful lawyer-or-something and get married and have babies and live your whole little life, and then you're going to die, and in your last moments, when you're choking on your own bile in the nursing home, you'll say to yourself: 'Well I wasted my whole goddamned life, but at least I broke into SeaWorld with Margo Roth Spiegelman in my senior year of high school. At least I carpe'd the one diem — John Green

For my senior prom, my father finally said I could go - as long as I was home by 9 P.M.! That was around the time that most people were heading out. When I was little I was so mad at them all the time. 'Why can't I do this?' 'Why are there so many rules?' But looking back now, my parents gave me the foundation to have so many choices in life. — Amy Chua