This Is Forty Quotes & Sayings

I think every woman in our culture is a feminist. They may refuse to articulate it, but if you were to take any woman back forty years and say, 'Is this a world you want to live in?' they would say, 'No. — Helen Mirren

The odd superstitions touched upon were all prevalent among children and slaves in the West at the period of this story - that is to say, thirty or forty years ago. Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in. THE AUTHOR. HARTFORD, 1876. CHAPTER I "TOM!" No answer. "TOM!" No answer. "What's gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM! — Mark Twain

As a reminder to himself that at forty-three you don't make plans to dabble in different lives. At forty-three, what you are, what you know, is about as far as you're going to go in this life; — Richard Price

Viscount St. John? He's got the intelligence of a goat. If this is an indication of the kind of suitors I've got simpering after me, it speaks to a significant problem with my perceived quality." "Alexandra, there are some forty bouquets in this room alone, and I've had several posies sent to the upstairs parlor because of space constraints here. I feel confident that there are several notes from gentlemen who are not dull-witted. — Sarah MacLean

Here's what I've learned about the people in this city," Darcy was saying. "They grade their women on a curve. If someone is described as sophisticated, it means once during college she visited Paris, and if someone is described as beautiful, it means she's fifteen pounds overweight instead of forty. And — Curtis Sittenfeld

I ask for your indulgence when I march out quotations. This is the double syndrome of men who write for a living and men who are over forty. The young smoke pot - we inhale from our Bartlett's. — Rod Serling

On this perfect day, when everything is ripening and not only the grape turns brown, the eye of the sun just fell upon my life: I looked back, I looked forward, and never saw so many and such good things at once. It was not for nothing that I buried my forty-fourth year today; I had the right to bury it; whatever was life in it has been saved, is immortal. The first book of the Revaluation of All Values, the Songs of Zarathustra, the Twilight of the Idols, my attempt to philosophize with a hammer - all presents of this year, indeed of its last quarter! How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life? - and so I tell my life to myself. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The decision to use torture as a terror of retribution gives an inner satisfaction to the person who practises it, even if this is difficult for him to accept openly. Having been injured and humiliated by aggression, he can now humiliate in his turn those whom he considers to be his aggressors, and rediscover his self-esteem. As an ex-soldier of the Algerian War explains, forty years after the events: 'You could feel a certain form of jubilation while being present at such extreme scenes . . . Doing to a body whatever you feel like doing to it.' Reducing the other to a state of complete impotence gives you a feeling of supreme power. This feeling is one which torture gives you more than murder does, since the latter does not last: once dead, the other becomes an inert object and no longer produces that jubilation which stems from fully triumphing over the will of another, without his ceasing to exist. — Tzvetan Todorov

In general, it would be a peculiar type of 'justice' to declare a majority all the better and more just the more overwhelming it is, and to maintain abstractly that ninety-eight people abusing two persons is by far not so unjust as fifty-one people mistreating forty-nine. At this point, pure mathematics becomes simple inhumanity. — Carl Schmitt

In the warm language of personal feeling this is stated in the Forty-second Psalm: "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?" This is deep calling unto deep, and the longing heart will understand it. — A.W. Tozer

I see so many fools in this world that sometimes I could just go home and cry about what people do to themselves Hey, wake up, wake up, look here! Think a minute, think a minute. This is your life! You got, what, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years here, and you gonna be gone.' — J. California Cooper

The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent. A man will tell you that he has worked in a mine for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he should apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink; and it is often observable, that the older a man gets, the more difficult it is to him to retain a believing conception of his own death. — George Eliot

It's different now but I enjoy it more than I did then. I think I appreciate it more now and I love playing acoustically. This is the way I started. Herb and I met each other forty years ago when we were both eighteen years old, playing bluegrass, and that's what drew me into music, and I enjoyed every particular part of my career. But now I enjoy it because it's the twilight of my career, where I can play what I want and I can play when I want and where I want. And that's the greatest part it all. So it's sort of a right that I've earned. I can record records the way I want to. — Chris Hillman

Once she had thrown a square of birch bark into the fire when her father came in the door. He might then have asked her why her quill pen had shaped a row of straight and crooked question marks and after each one an exclamation point
in rows of ten, perhaps forty running along
?! ?! ?! ?!
arranged in pairs or couples. If he had asked her what is this folderol and what can this nonsense mean she would have said the same she said when shaping them with her pen, one pair, one couple after another. Each question mark stands for my ignorance and asks if I may learn and know the answer. And each exclamation point stands for my surprise at how little I know, my amazement at my vast ignorance, my utter astonishment at how much there is for me to learn. — Carl Sandburg

But Zelda was never about plot. Indeed, one's head could explode if all the games were considered one story, since Link is always meeting Zelda and villainous Gannon for the first time. Imagine trying to explain why James Bond has stayed forty years old for forty years, while changing faces and hair color. Better to accept the story as a constant retelling, and don't dwell on continuity matters. Mario has made a cottage industry of jokes about how Bowser had only one playbook - kidnap the princess - and this time it'll work! He's utterly incapable of coming up with any other plan. Aside from that one time he obtained a degree in hotel management. — Jeff Ryan

One simple answer is that there has been a massive rise in the incidence of sanctimony and smugness among the successful that has nothing to do with any change in the underlying reality. Rather, it has been stimulated by politicians who have realized that it is possible to win power by recruiting the most economically successful forty per cent or so of the population in a crusade to roll back the gains made by their fellow citizens in the previous forty years. And how better to rationalize this than to tell people that they deserve the incomes that the market generates? — Brian M. Barry

At this point they came in sight of thirty forty windmills that there are on plain, and as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to his squire, "Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God's good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth." "What giants?" said Sancho Panza. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

There is nothing new about prophecies to the effect that the end of the world is near if we do not repent. What is new is that such a prophecy is now true, for two obvious reasons. First, nuclear weapons give us the means to wipe ourselves out quickly: no humans possessed this means before. Second, we already appropriate about forty per cent of the Earth's net productivity (that is, the net energy captured from sunlight). With the world's human population now doubling every forty-one years, we will soon have reached the biological limit to growth, at which point we will have to start fighting each other in deadly earnest for a slice of the world's fixed pie of resources. In addition, given the present rate at which we are exterminating species, most of the world's species will become extinct or endangered within the next century, but we depend on many species for our own life support. — Jared Diamond

Sure enough the goldfish was swimming upside down, its boggle eyes wide and staring, its fins flapping madly at its sides. Brandon felt like the fish looked. He was anxious over how Lewis
knew he was a vet and the address of the practice he worked at.
"I don't think it has vertigo, Lewis." A professional approach was all he could think of. "Has it ever done this before?"
"He. He's not an 'it' and his name is Fluffles. I'd appreciate it if you referred to Fluffles by his name rather than a generic term demeaning him into nothing more than an object devoid of gender." Lewis cocked his head, staring unblinking. "Fluffles is a beloved pet. I demand you show him respect!"
"Ooookaaaay." Brandon pressed his lips together and released them with a loud pop. "Has Fluffles ever done this before?"
"Don't know." Lewis peered into the bag. "I've only had him forty-five minutes. — Zathyn Priest

It took me forty years on earth To reach this sure conclusion: There is no Heaven but clarity, No Hell except confusion. — Jan Struther

Normal relations, never. We should never forget what has happened to the people in Cuba for forty years. All baseball cares about is getting players out of Cuba. It doesn't care about the suffering, just money. The Orioles shouldn't have gone to Cuba. This is a free county, but that's the way I feel. — Luis Tiant

I have always been aware that human life is dream-like because most human beings exist passively. Their consciousness is little more than a reflection of their environment. In the sexual orgasm, the voltage power of their minds surges, and they become momentarily aware that they are not forty-watt bulbs, but two hundred and fifty, five hundred, a thousand ... Then the voltage drops, and they sink back to forty watts without a protest. They are like empty-headed fools who cannot remember anything for more than a few seconds. Human beings are so mediocre that they can scarcely be said to possess minds in any real sense. In a flash, I understood the absurd and obvious truth: nothing is worth possessing except intensity of consciousness. This is the truth we glimpse in the orgasm. — Colin Wilson

Over a period of forty years, God gave the children of Israel nothing to eat except manna ... From John 6 we ... know that this heavenly manna is a type of Christ. Christ came from God to be our diet. We need to eat Him, drink Him, and breathe Him ... As God's people today, we need to be reconstituted with Christ as our very element. In this way, we shall become Christ as far as our constitution is concerned. — Witness Lee

Remember, Maya: the things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life. — Gabrielle Zevin

I have been studying for forty years, which is to say forty wasted years; I teach others yet am ignorant of everything; this state of affairs fills my soul with so much humiliation and disgust that my life is intolerable. I was born in Time, I live in Time, and do not know what Time is. I find myself at a point between two eternities, as our wise men say, yet I have no conception of eternity. I am composed of matter, I think, but have never been able to discover what produces thought. I do not know whether or not I think with my head the same way that I hold things with my hands. Not only is the origin of my thought unknown to me, but the origin of my movements is equally hidden: I do not know why I exist. Yet every day people ask me questions on all these issues. I must give answers, yet have nothing worth saying, so I talk a great deal, and am confused and ashamed of myself afterwards for having spoken. — Voltaire

I crammed a handful of Ativan into his mouth and flooded that orifice with forty ounces of Coca-Cola from the cup holder. 'This is going to take effect immediately,' I lied. 'Breathe, Mr. Sakha, breathe. Would you like me to sing a calming Western song? My name is Luka', I sang. 'I live on the second floor. — Gary Shteyngart

When [men] see a pretty woman, and feel the delicious madness of love coming over them, they always stop to calculate her temper, her money, their own money, or suitableness for the married life ... Ha, ha, ha! Let us fool in this way no more. I have been in love forty-three times with all ranks and conditions of women, and would have married every time if they would have let me. How many wives had King Solomon, the wisest of men? And is not that story a warning to us that Love is master of the wisest? It is only fools who defy him. — William Makepeace Thackeray

It is better to say, "This one thing I do" than to say, "These forty things I dabble in." — Washington Gladden

legislatures at different levels of government, researchers, journalists, and judges involved in one or more aspects of the process. Each of these actors (either individual or corporate) has potentially different values/interests, perceptions of the situation, and policy preferences.
2. This process usually involves time spans of a decade or more, as that is the minimum duration of most policy cycles, from emergence of a problem through sufficient experience with implementation to render a reasonably fair evaluation of a program's impact (Kirst and Jung 1982; Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993). A number of studies suggest that periods of twenty to forty years may be required to obtain a reasonable — Paul A. Sabatier

It has been known, for forty years now, that the difference between a noble, upright man and a maniacal degenerate can be pinpointed at the sight of a few clumps of white matter in the brain, and that the movement of the lancet in the supraorbital area of the brain, if it damages those clumps , can transform a splendid soul into a loathsome creature. Yet what and enormous portion of anthropology - not to mention the philosophy of man - refuses to take cognizance of this circumstance! But I am no exception here; whether scientist or laymen, we agree finally that our bodies detoriate with age - but the mind?! We would like to see it different from any earthly mechanism subject to defect. We crave an ideal - even one carrying a minus sign, even one shameful, sinful, so as it delivers us from an explanation worse than the Satanic: that what is taking place is a certain play of forces perfectly indifferent to man. — Stanislaw Lem

Three forty-five-pound plates on each side of what Kenji told me is an Olympic bar, which weighs an additional forty-five pounds. I can't stop staring. I don't think that I've ever been more attracted to him in all the time I've known him."
"So this gets you going, huh?"
...
"I've never seen him in sweatpants before ... "
...
"I bet you've seen him in a lot less. — Tahereh Mafi

You can't cure people of their character,' she read.
After this he had crossed something out then gone on, 'You can't even change yourself. Experiments in that direction soon deteriorate into bitter, infuriated struggles. You haul yourself over the wall and glimpse new country. Good! You can never again be what you were! But even as you are congratulating yourself you discover tied to one leg the string of Christmas cards, gas bills, air letters and family snaps which will never allow you to be anyone else. A forty-year-old woman holds up a doll she has kept in a cardboard box under a bed since she was a child. She touches its clothes, which are falling to pieces; works tenderly its loose arm. The expression that trembles on the edge of realizing itself in the slackening muscles of her lips and jaw is indescribably sad. How are you to explain to her that she has lost nothing by living the intervening years of her life? How is she to explain that to you? — M. John Harrison

From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie. — Hokusai Katsushika

Somewhere forest fires rage and somewhere else something moves beneath dark waters and somewhere blood appears in the hallway of the home of some old couple who aren't bleeding and somewhere someone else spontaneously self-combusts and somehow all the mysteries of this world as I know it offer me comfort and I don't know beans about heaven and hell and somehow all that stuff is no longer an issue and at the moment I'm a sixteen-foot-tall five-hundred-and-forty-eight-pound man inside this six-foot body and all i can feel is the pressure all I can feel is the pressure and the need for release. — David Wojnarowicz

Or consider how we citizens of rich countries obtain our oil and minerals. Teodoro Obiang, the dictator of tiny Equatorial Guinea, sells most of his country's oil to American corporations, among them Exxon Mobil, Marathon, and Hess. Although his official salary is a modest $60,000, this ruler of a country of 550,000 people is richer than Queen Elizabeth II. He owns six private jets and a $35 million house in Malibu, as well as other houses in Maryland and Cape Town and a fleet of Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and Bentleys. Most of the people over whom he rules live in extreme poverty, with a life expectancy of forty-nine and an infant mortality of eighty-seven per one thousand (this means that more than one child in twelve dies before its first birthday). — Peter Singer

Tom," said Douglas, "just promise me one thing, okay?"
"It's a promise. What?"
"You may be my brother and maybe I hate you sometimes, but stick around, all right?"
"You mean you'll let me follow you and the older guys when you go on hikes?"
"Well ... sure ... even that. What I mean is, don't go away, huh? Don't let any cars run over you or fall of a cliff."
"I should say not! Whatta you think I am, anyway?"
"'Cause if worst comes to worst, and both of us are real old
say forty or forty-five some day
we can own a gold mine out West and sit there smoking corn silk and growing bears."
"Growing beards! Boy!"
"Like I say, you stick around and don't let nothing happen."
"You can depend on me," said Tom.
"It's not you I worry about," said Douglas. "It's the way God runs the world."
Tom thought about this for a moment.
"He's all right, Doug," said Tom. "He tries. — Ray Bradbury

A boy gets to be a man when a man is needed. Remember this thing. I have known boys forty years old because there was no need for a man: — John Steinbeck

How often should a woman be pregnant? Continually, or hardly ever? Or must there be a certain number of pregnancy anniversaries established by fashion? What do you, at the age of forty-three, have to say on the subject? Is it a fact that the laws of nature, or of the country, or of propriety, have ordained this time of life for sterility? — Lord Chesterfield

I recently discovered that a friend who was re-reading Bleak House had done no other Dickens apart from Barnaby Ridge. That's just weird. I shamed and nagged him into picking up Great Expectations instead. But when I tried to recall anything about it other than its excellence, I failed. Maybe there was something about a peculiar stepfather? Or was that This Boy's Life? And I realized that, as this is true of just about every book I consumed between the ages of, say fifteen to forty, I havent even read the books I think I've read. I can't tell you how depressing this is. What's the fucking point? — Nick Hornby

M. and I have plagued each other with our differences for more than forty years. But it is also a tonic.
Along with the differences that abide in each of us, there is also in each of us the maverick, the darling stubborn one who won't listen, who insists, who chooses preference or the spirited guess over yardsticks or even history. I suspect this maverick is somewhat what the soul is, or at least that the soul lives close by and companionably with its agitating and inquiring force. And of course all of it, the differences and the maverick uprisings, are part of the richness of life. If you are too much like myself, what shall I learn of you, or you of me? I bring home sassafras leaves and M. looks and admires. She tells me how it feels to float in the air above the town and the harbor, and my world is sweetened by her description of those blue miles. The touch of our separate excitements is another of the gifts of our life together. — Mary Oliver

On the eighth day, the forty-year-old hobo said to Billy: "This ain't bad. I can be comfortable anywhere."
"You can?" said Billy.
On the ninth day the hobo died. So it goes. His last words were: "You think this is bad? This ain't bad. — Kurt Vonnegut

Your essays spoke of beauty, of love, of light and darkness, of joy and sorrow, and of the goodness of life. They were wonderful compositions. I have seldom read any that have touched me more.
To thank you and your teacher Mrs. Ellis, I am sending you what I think is one of the most beautiful and miraculous things in the world - an egg. I have a goose named Felicity and she lays about forty eggs every spring. It takes her almost three months to accomplish this. Each egg is a perfect thing. I am mailing you one of Felicity's eggs. The insides have been removed - blown out - so the egg should last forever. I hope you will enjoy seeing this great egg and loving it. Thank you for sending me your essays about being somebody. I was pleased that so many of you felt the beauty and goodness of the world. If we feel that when we are young, then there is great hope for us when we grow older. — E.B. White

And this is another spell against which the shedder of blood for ever strives in vain. There are fifty doors by which discovery may enter. With infinite pains and cunning, he double locks and bars forty-nine of them, and cannot see the fiftieth standing wide open. — Charles Dickens

When you're sixteen a body like this is free; when you're forty it's a full-time occupation. — Junot Diaz

There are some forty thousand children in California, according to the red brief, that live with same-sex parents, and they want their parents to have full recognition and full status. The voice of those children is important in this case, don't you think? — Anthony Kennedy

And the difference was this, she mused: those who are twenty don't know what it is like to be forty, whereas those who are forty know what it is like to be twenty. It was a bit like discussing a foreign country with somebody who has never been there. They are prepared to listen, but it's not quite real for them. — Alexander McCall Smith

At least forty million Americans can't read and write, according to this morning's New York Times. That is six times as many illiterates as there are people of Armenian descent anywhere! So many of them and so few of us! — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

On a trip to Germany, Lange and his entourage were climbing the tower of an ancient castle when they stopped to catch their breath. "How old is this ruin?" someone asked a guide. "Forty-two years," said Lange. — David Lange

This is what forty looks like. We've been lying so long, who would know? — Gloria Steinem

Deep listening, compassionate listening is not listening with the purpose of analyzing or even uncovering what has happened in the past. You listen first of all in order to give the other person relief, a chance to speak out, to feel that someone finally understands him or her. Deep listening is the kind of listening that helps us to keep compassion alive while the other speaks, which may be for half an hour or forty-five minutes. During this time you have in mind only one idea, one desire: to listen in order to give the other person the chance to speak out and suffer less. This is your only purpose. Other things like analyzing, understanding the past, can be a by-product of this work. But first of all listen with compassion. Compassion — Thich Nhat Hanh

Pardon me, is this some kind of social experiment? You want me to get a hundred and forty-four Samoans and cram them into your cabin with a case of whiskey? — Kevin Hearne

The Surprise Attack. This is when you think someone scaring you will frighten the hiccups away. Of course, popping a paper bag behind you or clapping in your ear isn't going to cut it. No, this only works when somebody shoves you off a tall skyscraper ledge into a properly rigged-up safety net forty stories below. — Neil Pasricha

Hutte, for instance, used to quote the case of a fellow he called "the beach man." This man had spent forty years of his life on beaches or by the sides of swimming pools, chatting pleasantly with summer visitors and rich idlers. He is to be seen, in his bathing costume, in the corners and backgrounds of thousands of holiday snaps, among groups of happy people, but no one knew his name and why he was there. And no one noticed when one day he vanished from the photographs. I did not dare tell Hutte, but I felt that "the beach man" was myself. Though it would not have surprised him if I had confessed it. Hutte was always saying that, in the end, we were all "beach men" and that "the sand" - I am quoting his own words - "keeps the traces of our footsteps only a few moments. — Patrick Modiano

The polite thing would be to go back inside, give you privacy when you read it. But, I'm just not that mature.'
'It's nothing. Fine.' Feeling foolish, Laurel opened the envelope.
You might think this is over, but you'd be wrong. I've taken your shoes hostage. Contact me within forty-eight hours, or the Pradas get it. — Nora Roberts

This is Glesca ... Any time you're confused, take a wee minute to remind yourself of that inescapable fact: this is Glesca. We don't do subtle, we don't do nuanced, we don't do conspiracy. We do pish-heid bampot bludgeoning his girlfriend to death in a fit of paranoid rage induced by forty-eight hours straight on the batter. We do coked-up neds jumping on a guy's heid outside a nightclub because he looked at them funny. We do drug-dealing gangster rockets shooting other drug-dealing gangster rockets as comeback for something almost identical a fortnight ago. We do bam-on-bam. We do tit-for-tat, score-settling, feuds, jealousy, petty revenge. We do straightforward. We do obvious. We do cannaemisswhodunit. When you hear hoofbeats on Sauchiehall Street, it's gaunny be a horse, no' a zebra ... '. — Christopher Brookmyre

One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim "You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself" made clear sense. And I add, "Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself. — Bell Hooks

W. H. Auden articulated this tension beautifully: Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. — Gretchen Rubin

And now I am eking out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the bitter and entirely useless consolations that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything; that only a fool can become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent nineteenth-century man must be, is morally bound to be, an essentially characterless creature; and a man of character, a man of action - an essentially limited creature. This is my conviction at the age of forty. I am forty now, and forty years - why, it is all of a lifetime, it is the deepest of old age. Living past forty is indecent, vulgar, immoral! — Fyodor Dostoevsky

I am a divorced child, of divided, uncertain background. Within this division I - supposed fruit of their love - no longer exist. It happened nearly forty years ago, yet to me, nothing is sadder than my parents' divorce. — Sylvia Kristel

In the four years I've been doing this stuff for money, I've had less than forty-eight hours of downtime. Did you know that? And now I'm a ghost in the machine. By next week all the hacks and geeks and hats I call my friends will have forgotten who I am. That is the nature of this business. That is the Internet. — G. Willow Wilson

In order to approximate those shapes and attitudes which are considered normal and desirable, both sexes deform themselves, justifying the process by referring to the primary, genetic difference between the sexes. But of forty-eight chromosomes only one is different: on this difference we base a complete separation of male and female, pretending as it were that all forty-eight were different. — Germaine Greer

Luke grabs my hand. I turn to see a look of pure horror on his face. "This," he says, "is a dance?" "You were expecting what?" I say. "Why are they not dancing?" I look around the gym again. "Well, most people are dancing." I nod at the freshman boys, who have resorted to doing the robot. "They're dancing." Luke looks completely unconvinced. "And the music," he says, "is it always this.....loud?" I laugh. "You sound like you're forty. You have been to a dance before, right?" Luke looks offended. "Yes. Of course. But it was more..." he surveys the gyrating bodies around us "....civilised that this." He turns to me accusatory. "And you. Have you been to a dance? — Laura Bradley Rede

There is always something wrong with redheads. The hair is kinky, or it's the wrong color, too dark and tough, or too pale and sickly. And the skin - it rejects the elements: wind, sun, everything discolors it. A really beautiful redhead is rarer than a flawless forty-carat pigeon-blood ruby - or a flawed one, for that matter. But none of this was true of Kate. Her hair was like a winter sunset, lighted with the last of the pale afterglow. And the only redhead I've ever seen with a complexion to compare with hers was Pamela Churchill's. But then, Pam is English, she grew up saturated with dewy English mists, something every dermatologist ought to bottle. — Truman Capote

Is it no imputation to be arraigned before this House, in which I have sat forty years, and to have my name transmitted to posterity with disgrace and infamy? — Robert Walpole

We are now beyond nature's normal variation in terms of how the atmosphere is composed. Nature did something for a million years. It actually goes back a lot further than that, but the ice core records show a million years. So, nature has this normal oscillation within this zone, and all of a sudden, we're forty percent outside that zone. — James Balog

His boss, Isaac (Robert Guillaume), agrees but tells him to do it anyway "because it's television and this is how it's done." Dan replies, "Yeah, well, sitting in the back of the bus was how it was done until a forty-two-year-old lady moved up front." A few minutes later Isaac looks Dan in the eye and tells him, "Because I love you I can say this. No rich young white guy has ever gotten anywhere with me comparing himself to Rosa Parks." Finally, the voice of reason, which of course was heard on a canceled network TV series on cable. — Sarah Vowell

If you're like most people, you'll do one thing for two to three years, then something else for two to three years, and then - somewhere in that five- to seven-year distance from Yale - you'll see a need to fully commit to something that's a longer-term project: graduate school, for example, or a job you need to stick with for some real time. The question is: where do you need to be with yourself such that when the time comes to 'cast your whole vote,' you're reasonably confident you're not being either fear-based or ego-driven in your choice . . . that the journey you're on is really yours, and not someone else's? If you think of your first few jobs after Yale in this way - holistically and in terms of your growth as a person rather than as ladder rungs to a specific material outcome - you're less likely to wake up at age forty-five married to a stranger." Yikes! — Marina Keegan

For forty years did unbelief, murmuring, and rebellion shut out ancient Israel from the land of Canaan. The same sins have delayed the entrance of modern Israel into the heavenly Canaan. In neither case were the promises of God at fault. It is the unbelief, the worldliness, unconsecration, and strife among the Lord's professed people that have kept us in this world of sin and sorrow so many years — Ellen G. White

More than forty years of Communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe resulted in an unhappy and artificial division of Europe. It is this dark chapter of European history that we now have the opportunity to close. — Anders Fogh Rasmussen

There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick. — Anne Enright

I don't know if this is a true statistic, but I heard somewhere that there are three times as many single women over forty as single men. That's what we got from the women's movement. The chickens have come home to roost. — Jack Nicholson

I'm on this planet for another forty years at the most and I got a baby and a wife and I'm worried about their future and that kind of fear, that anger is spilling into my lyrics, I can't just sit back and talk about myself until I'm dead. — Richard Patrick

Looking around today, I see a lot of young people who act as if they have all the time in the world, and older persons who think this attitude is alright. It is unfortunate that there are young citizens who still believe life begins at forty and that life before forty is non-scoring, and older citizens who still insist that unless you are old, you have nothing to offer, equating age with wisdom. — Nana Awere Damoah

But I wanted less. I wanted so very much less. And while there were tiny bubbles of "is this what you really want?" all along, I was in denial about it until about forty-five minutes ago. Pretty led to bicker, bicker led to divorce, and divorce led to bitter. I didn't want pretty, then separated. I didn't want bitter; I wanted forever. I wanted swoony, sparky, maddening, sexy love. And if we were going to fight, we'd fight, not bicker. Bickering's the worst. — Alice Clayton

The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that is dominated by a single species: Zea mays, a giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn ...
Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical name it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn ... There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well ...
And us? — Michael Pollan

This is not exactly what I had in mind when I agreed to miss lunch," Alex said grumpily forty minutes later. He shifted uncomfortably and tried to see what I was doing.
I stared him back into submission. "Wait."
The art room is usually empty Thursday afternoons except for me. Ms. Evers leaves early to teach her UArts class and looks up.Of course, I am one of the few entrusted with the Secret Location of the Key.
A few feet away from where I sat perched on a stool,Alex was posed on the anchient chaise we use for figure drawing. It's a relic, probably from the Palladinetti years: chipped mahogany and dusty velvet, what little remaining stuffing pokes out from a century of holes. I was probably luxurious once. Now it's like sitting on a slightly smelly board. But I'd wanted to sketch Alex as I so often saw him, reclining with his head propped on one hand,listening or talking or coaxing me to put down the glass, already,Ella,and come here. — Melissa Jensen

As I'm heading back to the ER, my hands shaking from both nerves and anticipation, it occurs to me how much I'm aching to hear his voice again. To brush my thumbs across his cheek and feel the sexy stubble that always seems to be there. I'm dying to tell him about the man with no one to call and make sure he knows that no matter what, when he's forty and injured in the ER, he can call me. He can always call me.
Is this what love is? — Julie Cross

I can't get excited about a man until he's forty-two. I know this idiot girl who keeps telling me I ought to go to a head-shrinker; she says I have a father complex. Which is so merde. I simply trained myself to like older men, and it was the smartest thing I ever did. — Truman Capote

I marveled at how mixed up people got when it came to love. I myself, for instance. It seemed like I was now thinking of Zach forty minutes out of every hour, Zach, who was an impossibility. That's what I told myself five hundred times: impossibility. I can tell you this much: the word is a great big log throw on the fires of love. — Sue Monk Kidd

This was puzzling, as the standard textbook of psychiatry at the time stated that incest was extremely rare in the United States, occurring about once in every million women.8 Given that there were then only about one hundred million women living in the United States, I wondered how forty seven, almost half of them, had found their way to my office in the basement of the hospital. Furthermore, the textbook said, "There is little agreement about the role of father-daughter incest as a source of serious subsequent psychopathology." My patients with incest histories were hardly free of "subsequent psychopathology" - they were profoundly depressed, confused, and often engaged in bizarrely self-harmful behaviors, such as cutting themselves with razor blades. The textbook went on to practically endorse incest, explaining that "such incestuous activity diminishes the subject's chance of psychosis and allows for a better adjustment to the external world."9 — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

And, now, come to this spot
Where the spotlight is hot
And you'll see in the spotlight
A Juggling Jott
Who can juggle some stuff
You might think he could not ...
Such as twenty-two question marks,
Which is a lot.
Also forty-four commas
And, also, one dot!
That's the kind of Circus McGurkus I've got! — Dr. Seuss

Forty of Paracelsus's theological manuscripts still survive, as well as sixteen Bible commentaries, twenty sermons, twenty works on the Eucharist, and seven on the Virgin Mary. Half of these have never been properly edited, let alone printed in modern form. There is no question that Paracelsus thought long and hard about Christianity, and by styling himself a professor of theology (without, it seems, any official academic sanction) he implies that he regarded this component of his output to be the equal of his medical and chemical theories. That his role in the history of science and medicine has received far more attention than his theological oeuvre is, however, understandable and probably apt, for it cannot be said that he had much influence even on the religious debates of his day. In theology he never aspired to be a Luther, and that would in any case have been a futile aspiration for one so lacking in political acumen or the ability to foster disciples. — Philip Ball

My life in this pit will soon enter its fifth year. For more than forty-two months, I have thought hate, have lain down with hate in my heart, have dreamed hate and awakened with hate. I suffocate in the knowledge that I am the prisoner of a horde of vicious apes, and I rack my brain over the perpetual riddle of how this same people which so jealously watched over its rights a few years ago can have sunk into this stupor, in which it not only allows itself to be dominated by the street-corner idlers of yesterday, but actually, height of shame, is incapable any longer of perceiving its shame for the shame that it is. — Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen

The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. — Michael Crichton

I went to school with this fellow, Lawrence Boythorn," said Mr. Jarndyce, tapping the letter as he laid it on the table, "more than five and forty years ago. He was then the most impetuous boy in the world, and he is now the most impetuous man. He was then the loudest boy in the world, and he is now the loudest man. He was then the heartiest and sturdiest boy in the world, and he is now the heartiest and sturdiest man. He is a tremendous fellow. — Charles Dickens

Bullock, Sam, died at the age of one-twelve. They'd been married five years. She was forty-six."
"Isn't that romantic?"
"Heart-tugging. First husband was younger, a callow seventy-three to her twenty-two."
"Wealthy?"
"Was - not Sam Bullock wealthy, but well-stocked. Got eaten by a shark."
"Step off."
"Seriously. Scuba diving out in the Great Barrier Reef. He was eighty-eight. And this shark cruises along and chomp, chomp."
She gave Eve a thoughtful look. "Ending as shark snacks is in my top-ten list of ways I don't want to go out. How about you?"
"It may rank as number one, now that I've considered it a possibility. Any hint of foul play?"
"They weren't able to interview the shark, but it was put down as death by misadventure. — J.D. Robb

Although Pulcheria Alexandrovna was forty-three, her face still retained traces of her former beauty; she looked much younger than her age, indeed, which is almost always the case with women who retain serenity of spirit, sensitiveness and pure sincere warmth of heart to old age. We may add in parenthesis that to preserve all this is the only means of retaining beauty to old age. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In order to save the forty million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, our colonial statesmen must acquire new lands for settling the surplus population of this country, to provide new markets ... The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. — Cecil Rhodes

Maybe. Maybe not. Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They're six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I'm getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What's to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be? — Peter Benchley

Everyone is always whining. 'Why me?' 'Why did this happen to me?' They think it's the end of the world when their forty-thousand-dollar car won't start, and they can't make it to that cushy desk job to pay off that family vacation to Hawaii. But they don't even know the meaning of the word pain. Don't whine to me, Jim. Why — Ethan Cross

I read somewhere that a man should tell the story of his life at the age of forty, and this deadline is fast approaching as I write these lines, only a few short weeks remain before this ominous birthday arrives. — Juan Gabriel Vasquez

Whenever someone brings up the traits associated with being a functional human otherwise known as an "adult," I think, is this even possible for me? Probably not, is what I conclude. I mean, I'll eventually pay off my college loans at the age of forty-five by selling what's left of my liver, and I'll probably manage to find sustenance and remember to breathe oxygen constantly. I'll survive. However, for people like me ... There will be years of struggle to keep myself afloat. — Alida Nugent

I used the phrase 'a certain age.' What I mean by this is the age people are in their heads. It's usually thirty to thirty-four. Nobody is forty in their head. When it comes to your internal age, chin wattles and relentless liver spots mean nothing. — Douglas Coupland

Happy hour?" Jason says. "It's barely noon, Grams"
"Oh, shush, you. You'll have some, yes?'
"Well"-he smiles slyly and wiggles his eyebrows-"if you insist". Every time, it's the same thing. Leaning in, he rubs his hands together expectantly. The drinking age in New York State was raised last year, so technically, I suppose, this is still illegal for my grandson. But the Jews didn't spend forty years wandering the desert so that I could forfeit a gin and tonic with my progeny ... — Susan Jane Gilman

Ho, pretty page, with the dimpled chin That never has known the barber's shear, All your wish is woman to win, This is the way that boys begin. Wait till you come to Forty Year. — William Makepeace Thackeray

I suppose it is because I have lived rather a restricted life myself that I have found so much enjoyment in remembering what I have learned in these last years about brave people and strange scenes. I have sat here day after day this winter, sleeping a good deal in my chair, hardly knowing if I was in London or the Gulf country, dreaming of the blazing sunshine, of poddy-dodging and black stockmen, of Cairns and of Green Island. Of a girl that I met forty years too late, and of her life in that small town that I shall never see again, that holds so much of my affection. — Nevil Shute

It's happening everywhere; commercial and housing development, along with the road network needed to support it, is the single greatest pressure on natural landscapes in the United States, and by its very pervasiveness the hardest to control. Between 1982 and 1997, developed land in the forty-eight contiguous states increased by 25 million acres - meaning a quarter of all the open land lost since European settlement disappeared in just those fifteen years. This isn't a trend, it's a juggernaut, and the worst may be yet to come. At this pace, by 2025 there will be 68 million more rural acres in development, an area about the size of Wyoming, and the total developed land in the United States will stand at a Texas-sized 174 million acres. Already, just the impervious covering we put on the land, the things like roads, sidewalks, and buildings we pave with asphalt or concrete, adds up to an area the size of Ohio.3 — Scott Weidensaul

Matt huffs. "Can you do me a favor, Ryke? These two owe my uncle forty grand." He points to me. "This girl says her checkbook is in the car. Follow them and get the money from her." "Yeah, no problem." My stomach drops further. Now we're going to be tailed by Matt's superhero friend who looks fit enough to tackle me and pin me to the grass. — Krista Ritchie

This morning arrives a letter from my ancient silver-mining comrade, Calvin H. Higbie, a man whom I have not seen nor had communication with for forty-four years ... [Footnote: Roughing It is dedicated to Higbie.] ... I shall allow myself the privilege of copying his punctuation and his spelling, for to me they are a part of the man. He is as honest as the day is long. He is utterly simple-minded and straightforward, and his spelling and his punctuation are as simple and honest as he is himself. He makes no apology for them, and no apology is needed. — Mark Twain

It is true that we Russians have sent only four doctors into space in forty years of flight, but still I might have had chance to fly to Mir or International Space Station except for one fact. This is that I cannot urinate - is this the right word, Mr. Roth? - I cannot urinate on wheel of bus. — Dan Simmons