This Year Has Been The Best Quotes & Sayings

and THE TIGER One day, Dragon was out lounging in the shade with his best friend Tiger. The pair had been best friends ever since they were baby animals. They were the most popular animals in the entire forest and they knew it. Each year during the annual talent show, both Dragon and Tiger would perform a routine together. They performed magic tricks, balancing tricks and juggling tricks. The pair was unstoppable and each year took home the top awards. This year would not be any different, both Dragon and Tiger expected to win big at the next talent show. They had to upstage all the other animals, and this would be quite tough because most of the animals had been practicing their routines for months in order to have a chance at beating the Dragon and Tiger. — Martin Aaron

She had barely talked to Jamie about his school days, and she wondered whether this was another area of experience that was for some reason out of bounds. Had he been happy? Who had his school friends been? She had no idea. There must be a reason why he had decided not to attend his ten-year class reunion; normally Jamie's instincts were social. If invited to a party, he went, and usually enjoyed himself; perhaps this did not apply to reunions. — Alexander McCall Smith

Neil had been doing one stupid thing after another all year long and this has turned into one of the best years of his life. — Nora Sakavic

Growing up, you always dream of winning a gold medal. But coming into these Games, it wasn't something I was focused on. I'm just enjoying skating. This is the best season ever. I think that this year, my 3,000 meters has been stronger than the 1,500. The 1,500 has been anybody's race this year. When I was first, I still didn't know if that was enough. — Cindy Klassen

There is a bus station in Henry, but it isn't on Main Street. It's one block north - the town fathers hadn't wanted all the additional traffic. The station lost one-third of its roof to a tornado fifteen years ago. In the same summer, a bottle rocket brought the gift of fire to its restrooms. The damage has never been repaired, but the town council makes sure that the building is painted fresh every other year, and always the color of a swimming pool. There is never graffiti. Vandals would have to drive more than twenty miles to buy the spray paint.

Every once in a long while, a bus creeps into town and eases to a stop beside the mostly roofed, bright aqua station with the charred bathrooms. Henry is always glad to see a bus. Such treats are rare. — N.D. Wilson

The physical fabric of the world had to be such as to enable that ten billion year preliminary evolution to produce the raw materials of life. Without it there would not have been the chemical materials to allow life to evolve here on earth. — John Polkinghorne

Dogs come to quantum physics in a better position than most humans. They approach the world with fewer preconceptions than humans, and always expect the unexpected. A dog can walk down the same street every day for a year, and it will be a new experience every day. Every rock, every bush, every tree will be sniffed as if it had never been sniffed before. If dog treats appeared out of empty space in the middle of a kitchen, a human would freak out, but a dog would take it in stride. Indeed, for most dogs, the spontaneous generation of treats would be vindication - they always expect treats to appear at any moment, for no obvious reason. — Chad Orzel

One keeps looking out for innovation in IPL, but of late it hasn't been all that obvious. Lionel Richie as an opening act? Johnny Mathis must have been busy. Matthew Hayden's Mongoose? Looks a bit like Bob Willis' bat with the "flow-through holes"; Saint Peter batting mitts are surely overdue a revival. The only genuinely intriguing step this year, bringing the IPL to YouTube, was forced on Modi by the collapse of Setanta; otherwise what Modi presents as 'innovation' is merely expansion by another name, in the number of franchises and the number of games. — Gideon Haigh

Still, he could feel a fine cord stretched between them, a thin luminous fiber that ran from his chest all the way across the continent and forked into theirs. Never before had he lived through a fever without his mother; when he'd been sick in Debrecen she'd taken the train to be with him. Never had he finished a year at school without knowing that soon he'd be home with his father, working beside him in the lumberyard and walking through the fields with him in the evening. Now there was another filament, one that linked him to Klara. And Paris was her home, this place thousands of kilometers from his own. He felt the stirring of a new ache, something like homesickness but located deeper in his mind; it was an ache for the tie when his heart had been a simple and satisfied thing, small as the green apples that grew in his father's orchard. — Julie Orringer

Lots of people committed crimes during the year who would not have done so if they had been fishing. The increase of crime is among those deprived of the regenerations that impregnate the mind and character of the fisherman. — Herbert Hoover

By that point, it'll have been more than year since I met Lulu. Any sane person would say it's too late. It already felt too late that first day, when I woke up in the hospital.
But even so, I've kept looking.
I'm still looking. — Gayle Forman

And it wasn't just because Oprah was awesome. Oprah is without a doubt, the best talk show host on the planet and incredibly smart, insightful and kind. And she was awesome. But we have established that she has always been awesome and still, before the Year of Yes, the old Shonda would have suffered some kind of nuclear panic attack, resulting in total amnesia. Oprah will always be amazing in this scenario. The difference was me. I had no armor on. I had nothing to hide. I was worried about nothing. I was . . . fearless. And so we had a conversation. We had a chat. We talked. What had I always been so afraid of? What had I been guarding? What was I so nervous about? — Shonda Rhimes

When they'd met, Anakin had been a warmhearted nine-year-old boy with an open nature. He was twelve and a half now, and the years had changed him. He had grown to be a boy who hid his heart. — Jude Watson

If the age of the Earth were a calendar year and today were a breath before midnight on New Year's Eve, we showed up a scant fifteen minutes ago, and all of recorded history has blinked by in the last sixty seconds. Luckily for us, our planet-mates
the fantastic meshwork of plants, animals, and microbes
have been patiently perfecting their wares since March, an incredible 3.8 billion years since the first bacteria ... After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival. — Janine Benyus

I always wanted to try the Turkish Delight in Narnia. When I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a boy, I used to think that Turkish Delight must be incredibly delicious if it made Edmund betray his family," A.J. says. "I guess I must have told my wife this, because one year Nic gets a box for me for the holidays. And it turned out to be this powdery, gummy candy. I don't think I've ever been so disappointed in my entire life. — Gabrielle Zevin

It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year. — Tom Lehrer

I've been going to China every year now for more than a decade. — Paul Oakenfold

He was disorganized, forgetful, perpetually dissolute, and famous for his tremendous benders. One year he missed fifty straight weekly meetings at the Office of Works. His supervision of the office was so poor that one man was discovered to have been on holiday for three years. When sober, however, he was much liked and widely praised for his charm, good nature, and architectural vision. A bust of him in the National Portrait Gallery in London shows him clean shaven (and indeed clean, a slightly unusual condition for him), with a very full head of hair and a face that seems curiously mournful or perhaps just slightly hungover. Despite — Bill Bryson

The truth is, part of me is every age. I'm a three-year-old, I'm a five-year-old, I'm a thirty-seven-year-old, I'm a fifty-year-old. I've been through all of them, and I know what it's like. I delight in being a child when it's appropriate to be a child. I delight in being a wise old man when it's appropriate to be a wise old man. Think of all I can be! I am every age, up to my own. — Mitch Albom

Well it has been very exciting and very changing as well. Celebrating the 40th year and having the album out and the Channel 4 documentary and I resigned from Blind Date. — Cilla Black

Records subpoenaed from the state Liquor Authority proved that the bar was owned by someone else, not by the witness who had testified to be the owner. The real owner testified that he had closed the bar before the alleged kidnapping, that he had visited it every day during the period of time it has hosted the "kidnapping," and had locked the door as he left and had given no one permission to use it. The bar had been closed for one year before the alleged crime. The irrefutable and obvious conclusion was that, in fact, there was no bar, no "scene" of the alleged crime, and, therefore, no crime. — Assata Shakur

James Thompson, a twenty-six-year-old cafeteria worker, eloquently articulated the Negro dilemma in a letter he wrote to the Pittsburgh Courier: "Being an American of dark complexion," wrote Thompson, "these questions flash through my mind: 'Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?' ... 'Will colored Americans suffer still the indignities that have been heaped upon them in the past?' These and other questions need answering; I want to know, and I believed every colored American, who is thinking, wants to know. — Margot Lee Shetterly

Yes, Manchester United are the best team in England, but you have to ask how good has the Premier League been since I left? If I was at a top club in England I think the title race might have been a lot closer this year. — Jose Mourinho

He had already been so long in the world: he had seen it change and seem to spin faster with every passing year, and he felt like a remnant from some long-buried time, a thorny weed still stretching up, for as long as it possibly could, towards the sun. — Robert Seethaler

I played as a 17-year-old with Walter Smith, who must have been about 32. So I've known Walter for 21 years. — Richard Gough

I was in the gym working on my triceps, and I was thinking, just as I did the 50-pound pulldown, I am going to be in better shape by the end of the year [2016] than I've ever been in my life. I really just smiled at the notion: Wow, what a thing. — Oprah Winfrey

He considered the hard times in his life. All the things he had been afraid of. All those years wasted, he told himself, because I was terrified of being different. That's why all us fifty-four-year-olds end up looking so much alike. All of us are terrified of being different. — Stuart McLean

I thought that deserved a book and feel like the door needs to be open so people can say, "Ok, here we go, let's deal with this" because we're not dealing with it. I'm waiting for somebody to write another book but it hasn't happened yet, though I guess mine's only been out for a year and a half. — Brad Warner

I've been a foodie most of my life. I started when I lived for a year in Germany in my early 20s, and here was this new food environment, and I decided I needed to make sense of it. And I found it was the rules of economics that do the best job. Food is a capitalist product of supply and demand. — Tyler Cowen

You fight them, his father had said.
You don't trust them. His father had been right. And his father had been ready. Rabatians were cowards and deceivers, they should have scattered when their duplicitous attack met the full force of the Akielon army. But for some reason they hadn't fallen at the first sign of a real fight, they had stood firm, and shown metal, and, for hour upon hour, they had fought, until the Akielon lines had begun to slip and falter.
And their general wasn't the king, it was the twenty-five year old prince, holding the field.
Father, I can take him, he'd said.
Then go, his father had said, and bring
us back victory. — C.S. Pacat

What is your collective GPA for this year?"
"Not as high as I'd like it to be."
Freud steepled his fingers in front of his mouth. "What about your parents?"
"I don't know. They haven't been in school for a while. — Nenia Campbell

As I have been saying for more than a year now, turning this vital mission over to the Iraqi people as soon as possible should remain a topic of debate for Congress while relying on our military commanders to set up the timetable. — Howard Coble

You may have heard that America doesn't have enough scientists and is in danger of "falling behind" (whatever that means) because of it. Tell this to an academic scientist and watch her laugh. For the last thirty years, the amount of the U.S. annual budget that goes to non-defense related research has been frozen. From a purely budgetary perspective, we don't have too few scientists, we've got far too many, and we keep graduating more each year. America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn't want to pay for it. Within environmental science in particular, we see the crippling effects that come from having been resource-hobbled for decades: degrading farmland, species extinction, progressive deforestation... The list goes on and on. — Hope Jahren

I had this story that had been banging around in my head and I thought, 'I'll just see if there's anything there.' So I wrote a few chapters of the book that became 'Year of Wonders,' and lucky for me it found its readers. — Geraldine Brooks

The most money we have ever been able to get appropriated for the juvenile justice bills was $55 million a year, about one-tenth of what was necessary. — Bobby Scott

Fifteen-year-old Sam had seen twenty-year-old Ryan for the first time and had immediately run upstairs and jerked off. It had been a revolutionary and enlightening experience that essentially answered the question that yes, I was indeed very, very gay. — T.J. Klune

Despite their common reputation as agents of God's will, forces of good, and the gold standard for morality, all the angels Dean had met over the last year had been shifty, manipulative dicks. Except Cas, of course. — Rebecca Dessertine

Contrary to popular wisdom, bullies are rarely cowards.
Bullies come in various shapes and sizes. Observe yours. Gather intelligence.
Shunning one hopeless battle is not an act of cowardice.
Hankering for security or popularity makes you weak and vulnerable.
Which is worse: Scorn earned by informers? Misery endured by victims?
The brutal May have been molded by a brutality you cannot exceed.
Let guile be your ally.
Respect earned by integrity cannot be lost without your consent.
Don't laugh at what you don't find funny.
Don't support an opinion you don't hold.
The independent befriend the independent.
Adolescence dies in its fourth year. You live to be eighty. — David Mitchell