Year Ahead Quotes & Sayings

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, my parents, like the rest of America, were terrified. The Soviets had nuclear weapons and now were ahead of us in space. So my parents marched me and Owen into our living room, sat us down, and said, " You boys are going to study math and Science so we can beat the Soviets!"
I thought that was a lot of pressure to put on a six-year old. But own and I were obedient sons, so we studied math and science. And we were good at it.. Owen was the first in our family to go to college. He went to MIT, graduating with a degree in physics, and then became a photographer.
I went to Harvard, and became a comedian. My poor parents.
But we still beat the Soviets. You're welcome. — Al Franken

Cyclists thus found their hobby not as pleasant as it could be, to say the least, and the League of American Wheelmen committed to doing something about it. A year after Fisher opened his store, the league launched a magazine, Good Roads, that became an influential mouthpiece for road improvement. Its articles were widely reprinted, which attracted members who didn't even own bikes; at the group's peak, Fisher and more than 102,000 others were on the rolls, and the Good Roads Movement was too big for politicians to ignore. Yes, the demand for roads was pedal-powered, and a national cause even before the first practical American car rolled out of a Chicopee, Massachusetts, shop in 1893. A few months ahead of the Duryea Motor Wagon's debut, Congress authorized the secretary of agriculture to "make inquiry regarding public roads" and to investigate how they might be improved. — Earl Swift

The Obama administration's attempted short-term fixes, even with unprecedented monetary easing by the Federal Reserve, produced average GDP growth of just 2.2% over the past three years, and the consensus outlook appears no better for the year ahead. — Glenn Hubbard

And in another year everything will be different yet again. It is always like that, and always will be; you are forever standing on the brink, in a place where you cannot see ahead; there is nothing of which to be certain except what lies behind. This should be terrifying, but somehow it is not. — Penelope Lively

The Coventry School Committee has been ahead of the curve in addressing the nutrition needs of our students. This committee is an extension of a process begun more than a year ago to ensure the foods we offer had high nutritional value. — Michael Reeves

He had been a reform member of the city council, he had been a Greenbacker, a Labor Unionist, a Populist, a Bryanite - and after thirty years of fighting, the year 1896 had served to convince him that the power of concentrated wealth could never be controlled, but could only be destroyed. He had published a pamphlet about it, and set out to organize a party of his own, when a stray Socialist leaflet had revealed to him that others had been ahead of him. Now — Upton Sinclair

If I could have seen a year ahead, would I love the girl I am now or hate her ? — Jolene Perry

Maps. I was less clueless about the basics of English, though I didn't realise at the time that I was assuming that English grammar was the same as the Latin grammar I had been taught so well. (I remember that the first week I was there, a boy asked me during prep whether ager was second or third declension and I was able to tell him without pausing for thought that ager - a field - was second declension, so it went like annus, but that it dropped the "e," as opposed to agger - a rampart - which was third declension, and retained the "e." "My God," I thought as he walked away, "Captain Lancaster did a good job." My next thought was, "Lucky the boy didn't ask me what a rampart was. ... ") But given that I was teaching ten-year-olds, Geoffrey Tolson's advice to "stay a page ahead" seemed perfectly sound. So I had no reason to believe, as I strode purposefully into the classroom to teach Form III their first history — John Cleese

Spend the next few days preparing for the year ahead: Forgive everyone, let go of everything, let God take charge.
Amen. — Marianne Williamson

Some of these guys will go on walking long after the laws of biochemistry and handicapping have gone by the boards. There was a guy last year that crawled for two miles at four miles an hour after both of his feet cramped up at the same time, you remember reading about that? Look at Olson, he's worn out but he keeps going. That goddam Barkovitch is running on high-octane hate and he just keeps going and he's as fresh as a daisy. I don't think I can do that. I'm not tired -not really tired- yet. But I will be." The scar stood out on the side of his haggard face as he looked ahead into the darkness "And I think ... when I get tired enough ... I think I'll just sit down — Stephen King

If I ran into a 19-year-old version of myself, I'd just tell her to live, full out. I might also tell her to go ahead and have a few babies and not worry about the timing of it. — Queen Latifah

The surprising thing is that so many teenage cancer novels are very good. John Green's 'The Fault in Our Stars,' recently published by Penguin, was voted 'Time Magazine's book of the year in 2012 ahead of Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith. — Mal Peet

I lived at Star City for more than a year ahead of my trip to Mir on May 18, 1991 in Soyuz TM-12. My life at Star City was so remote that learning Russian became my greatest priority. — Helen Sharman

The last year of her college career was wheeling slowly round. She could see ahead her examination and her departure. She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would the next move turn out the same? Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon approach, always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead. Always the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven: and then, from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of amorphous, squalid activity. — D.H. Lawrence

If I have any attribute that serves me well, it's I don't have a long-range plan in life. I have no idea. I just don't look ahead, I really don't. You know when people get out of college and they're talking about their five-year plan. Five-year plan? I got a plan to get to Friday. — Michael Wilbon

Still, most people don't have much money. So finding ways to come out a couple of thousand dollars ahead every year still matters. — Andrew Tobias

I'm 17 years old and there are many great things ahead. If I don't win the U.S. Open this year, it's not going to be a disaster in my life. — Maria Sharapova

When I turn on the TV in Russia I see a general calmly claiming that our missiles are ahead of the latest American models by three five-year plans. It's a nightmare. We are creating a concept of the enemy, just as they did in the Soviet era. This is a giant step backward. — Vladimir Sorokin

When I talked to him earlier, he said he had to work tonight," Peter explained, "but that we should go ahead and draw for him."
"Draw?" I asked uneasily. "Oh Lord. Tell me it's not Pictionary night too."
Peter sighed wearily. "Draw for secret Santas. Do you even read the e-mails I send?"
"Secret Santas? Seems like we just did that," I said.
"Yeah, a year ago," said Peter. "Just like we do very Christmas. — Richelle Mead

The carbon fee would raise the cost of the things you buy (since right now there is some carbon emitted in the production and distribution of pretty much everything). That's a little less money in your pocket. But at the end of the year, the government would take all of the money collected by the carbon fee, divide it up, and give it back to you as a dividend check. By you, of course, I mean all of you. The government wouldn't keep any of the money. All the fee would do is put a realistic price on the carbon we dump into the environment. Every factory, every company would have an incentive to reduce emissions, because then they could sell things at a lower price. Consumers, given a choice between a low-carbon pair of jeans and a high-carbon pair of jeans, would see a cost advantage in choosing the former. If you live a low-carbon lifestyle all year, when your dividend check arrives you will find that you came out ahead. — Bill Nye

In most countries, attending some kind of early childhood program (i.e., preschool or prekindergarten) led to real and lasting benefits. On average, kids who did so for more than a year scored much higher in math by age fifteen (more than a year ahead of other students). But in the United States, kids' economic backgrounds overwhelmed this advantage. The quality of the early childhood program seemed to matter more than the quantity. — Amanda Ripley

It's fun to think about what kind of car you want to have. You compare specifications and customize everything your way. More importantly than the type of vehicle you want to get, is where you want to go with it. Where will this car take you if you were to have it today. Perhaps it's already yours. Now where will you drive tomorrow, next month, next year, for the rest of your life? Make your journey memorable by looking ahead into the distance. The distance is where we find our ultimate destination. — J.R. Rim

How to Stay Christian in Seminary should be placed in the hands of every first-year seminarian. It provides a much-needed balance as they navigate the beautiful but treacherous waters of a seminary education. I plan to use this powerful little book with great profit for my students in the years ahead. — Daniel L. Akin

It's been just a year since the RNC committed to revamp the way they help our candidates with its 'Growth and Opportunity Project,' and already there are signs of improvement. From new leadership and initiatives in the digital arena, to improving the GOP ground game (as we just saw with David Jolly's victory in FL-13), to the historic decision to restructure the primary calendar and primary debates, the RNC's steps will help keep the House and to take the Senate in 2014, win the White House in 2016, and build for the future. Looking forward to more progress in the months ahead. — Karl Rove

Access to supercomputers. The science is well ahead of our ability to implement it. It's quite clear that if we could run our models at a higher resolution we could do a much better job-tomorrow-in terms of our seasonal and decadal predictions. It's so frustrating. We keep saying we need four times the computing power. We're talking just 10 or 20 million a year-dollars or pounds-which is tiny compared to the damage done by disasters. Yet it's a difficult argument to win. — Julia Slingo

Has using that time-travel drug scrambled your wits, you don't know you've got only one tiny life and that lies ahead of you, not sideways or back? Are you waiting for last year to come by again or something? — Philip K. Dick

The master always keeps a piece of learning
that is to say, a piece of the student's ignorance
up his sleeve. I understood that, says the satisfied student. You think so, corrects the master. in fact, there's a difficulty here that I've been sparing you until now. We will explain it when we get to the corresponding lesson. What does this mean? asks the curious student. I could tell you, responds the master, but it would be premature: you wouldn't understand at all. It will be explained to you next year. The master is always a length ahead of the student, who always feels that in order to go farther he must have another master, supplementary explications. Thus does the triumphant Achilles drag Hector's corpse, attached to his chariot, around the city of Troy. — Jacques Ranciere

Inej placed her hands on Nina's shoulders. "We'll see each other again."
"Of course we will. You've saved my life. I've saved yours."
"I think you're ahead on that count."
"No, I don't mean in the big ways." Nina's eyes took them all in. "I mean the little rescues. Laughing at my jokes. Forgiving me when I was foolish. Never trying to make me feel small. It doesn't matter if it's next month, or next year, or ten years from now, those will be the things I remember when I see you again."
Kaz offered his gloved hand to Nina. "Until then, Zenik."
"Count on it, Brekker." They shook. — Leigh Bardugo

The rest of the journey passed pleasantly enough; Harry wished it could have gone on all summer, in fact, and that he would never arrive at King's Cross... but as he had learned the hard way that year, time will not slow down when something unpleasant lies ahead, and all too soon, the Hogwarts Express was pulling in at platform nine and three-quarters. — J.K. Rowling

Death is the truth of the 21st century and we know that it was the truth of the older centuries as well but it may not be the truth of the next day or the next year or the next centuries ahead! Why? Because we have created the idea of immortality and once we think of something, once an idea is created, it will appear in reality sooner or later! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

He's very knowledgeable. That's the one advantage that I see in Kobe Bryant's career compared to Michael Jordan. Ten years into Kobe Bryant's career, we're seeing a very polished 27-year-old player who's probably got another seven or eight great years ahead of him. — Scottie Pippen

I knew then that life was no respecter of circumstance. The force that flings disasters at us doesn't say " Well, I won't give her that lump in her breast for another year. Best to let her recover from the death of her mother first." It just goes right on ahead and does whatever it feels like, whenever it feels like it. — Marian Keyes

If he told me something about the glories ahead for the Prince of Arrow I would have trouble restraining myself. If he suggested I might be born in the year of the goat then there would be no restraint! — Mark Lawrence

When I was a kid in Indiana, we thought it would be fun to get a turkey a year ahead of time and feed it and so on for the following Thanksgiving. But by the time Thanksgiving came around, we sort of thought of the turkey as a pet, so we ate the dog. Only kidding. It was the cat! — David Letterman

A boy in my house was strange enough. But a guy who was that comfortable in someone else's house, around a parent? A boy who knew how to chop vegetables? A boy who voluntarily helped with everything? Was he one of those adults masqerading as a teenager! Was he a narc or something? Maybe there was a big drug problem at my school and twenty-five-year-old Robbie had been sent in to fix it.
Except that he'd been around since kindergarten, so unless the cops planned way ahead, that was out of the question. — Kieran Scott

I'm 27 and guys are pitching into their 40s now. For unfortunate reasons, I haven't been healthy since 2005. But I feel that I have a lot of great years ahead of me. — Mark Prior

My TV show had been cancelled; nothing else had gone anywhere; some alliances I had made petered out and nothing came of them and I was looking at a long, long year ahead of me in which there was no work on the horizon, the phone wasn't ringing. I had two kids, one of them a brand-new baby, and I didn't know if I would be able to keep my house. — Tom Hanks

I did tons of theater in school, and then when I was 16 and got my driver's license, I started driving to Los Angeles, along with my friend Eric Stoltz, who was a year ahead of me and was doing the same thing. So we had the same manager, and we started auditioning for things and doing commercials when we were 16. — Anthony Edwards

Sixteen is the key and crucial and natural age for a human being to be, and people of all other ages are ranged in an orderly manner ahead of and behind you as a harmonious setting for the sixteen-year-olds of this world. — John Knowles

When they [visitors to his studio:] learn about the six-week daily-strip deadline and the 12-week Sunday-page deadline, a visitor almost never fails to remark: "Gee, you could work real hard, couldn't you, and get several months ahead and then take the time off?"
Being, as I said, a slow learner, it took me until last year to realize what an odd statement that really is. You don't work all of your life to do something so you don't have to do it. — Charles M. Schulz

After a while the business end of writing takes too much of the writing time. Better to pay someone ten percent and find that you're still more than ten percent ahead in the end. Which is true. My present agent says that he always feels that a good agent during the course of a year should earn back for his client at least the ten percent he takes by way of commission, so the client's really nothing out. And what he should ideally do is make him more money than the ten percent. — Roger Zelazny

I never plan ahead, with the exception of the Amber books which had to proceed in sequence. But I don't really like to know what I'm going to be working on a year in advance. So I just sign blank contracts for books and whatever strikes me as a good idea is what I write about. — Roger Zelazny

I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next day had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue. — Sylvia Plath

1970 - A YEAR with a whole new sound to it - came along, and that put an end to my teen years. Now I could step ahead into a whole new swamp. — Haruki Murakami

I think three-to-five years ahead minimum. I have a short-term plan, a five-year plan and a decade plan. — Steve Garvey

Prospects for growth in the year ahead are solid at the national level, and of course, this can only be good news for the Bay Area and California as well. The U. S. economy has shown remarkable resilience in the face of some severe shocks - in particular, the surge in energy prices that began a couple of years ago and the devastation wrought by the twin hurricanes last summer. — Janet Yellen

There would be people answering to names they did not deserve. It would hurt to say their names. I would head upstairs and crack the seal on a jar of tomorrow's water, next week's water, next year's thin, sweet water
going as far ahead into the future as I could, until the water was barely there, clear and weak and airy
and I would commence a fine, hard drinking spell, until this whole day, and the days before it, and then the people in those days and myself entirely, and my hard, dead name turned into a slick wire that pulled farther and farther away from me, slipping finally from view as I filled myself, as I took in enough water to make myself forever new to the small world that held me. — Ben Marcus

Of course we will. You've saved my life. I've saved yours."

"I think you're ahead on that count."

"No, I don't mean in the big ways." Nina's eyes took them all in. "I mean the little rescues. Laughing at my jokes. Forgiving me when I was foolish. Never trying to make me feel small. It doesn't matter if it's next month, or next year, or ten years from now, those will be the things I remember when I see you again. — Leigh Bardugo

I never feel lonely when I'm alone because I always think ahead and prepare everything I do. It's easy for me to make a daily plan, weekly plan, a monthly plan, a yearly plan, a five year plan - you name it. My beloved daughter thinks I'm anti social, I love her to bits though. — Euginia Herlihy

The road ahead may be rather upsetting for a sixteen-year-old girl. I'm afraid your delicate female eyes and ears will experience some ugliness."
"Oh, you silly, naive men." I shook my weary head and genuinely pitied their ignorance. "You've clearly never been a sixteen-year-old girl in the fall of 1918. — Cat Winters

The way to get ahead is to start now. If you start now, you will know a lot next year that you don't know now and that you would not have known next year if you had waited. — William Feather

I keep thinking about the fragmented quality of human awareness: You take your blindness for granted most of the time then suddenly it stuns you: how little you see as you plunge ahead from minute to minute, day to day, year to year - vision cut down to the arc of a flickering flashlight, never sure how your words and acts are affecting someone else because you never really see that someone as he is. I know we should find even the most serene life unendurable were we to possess to any real degree those extrasensory perceptions which our grandmothers believed in... — Lillian E. Smith

Nigerians don't buy houses because they're old. A renovated two-hundred-year-old mill granary, you know, the kind of thing Europeans like. It doesn't work here at all. But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It wasn't like I was expecting Senior year to be some amazing experience. If anything, I was prepared for it to be pretty much a letdown. Everyone would be looking ahead to college and getting sick of seeing the same faces we've been looking at for the last three years. — Jenny O'Connell

It is a shoe designer's job to be a year ahead of our collective unconscious. — Cynthia Heimel

John Cassavetes was a year ahead of me but we met there. What you do when you are at a school for drama, you do a play as opposed to a final. Anyone who wanted to come could just come. So he came, and I can't remember the name of the play, of course, it was a long time ago. — Gena Rowlands

Many of us begin this art with little to no understanding of what we are getting ourselves into. Then, maybe a year or a black belt later, we realize this odyssey we have embarked upon and rest happily in knowing we have chosen a noble struggle.

I think we owe most of our successes to our initial ignorance. When we begin, we cannot see the obstacles ahead, and so we march on optimistically. In hindsight, when we look back and connect the dots, we see just how green we were at the start, and it was only our ignorance that upheld us from the crushing despair of the task at hand. — Chris Matakas

I'm not a kid!" she told Shane hotly. "I'm only, like, a year younger than Eve!"
"And girls are much more mature." Eve nodded wisely. "So you're about ten years older than Shane, then."
"Seriously," Claire insisted. "I'm not a kid!"
"Whatever you say, kid," Shane said blandly. "Cheer up. Just means you don't have to put up with me telling you how much sex I didn't get."
"I'm telling Michael," Eve warned.
"About how much sex I didn't get? Go ahead. — Rachel Caine

When I was in high school in St. Louis my best friend was Marsha Mason. Marsha was a year ahead of me. — Mary Frann

We are at the very point in time when a 400-year old age is dying and another is struggling to be born - a shifting of culture, science, society, and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced. Ahead, the possibility of the regeneration of individuality, liberty, community and ethics such as the world has never know, and a harmony with nature, with one another, and with the divine intelligence such as the world has never dreamed. — Dee Hock

Some people appear to thrive after trauma. Loss emboldens them, they form great ambitions and stride forward as if nothing, now, could hurt them. They are exhibits in those old stories about disaster being character-building, strength in adversity. My experience, to my shame, was nothing like this. I couldn't find it in me to do much more than reel from one day and year to the next, with little optimism about what lay ahead... I had no idea how to grieve. — Catriona Menzies-Pike

A very difficult year is ahead of us. We must continue our efforts with decisiveness, to stay in the euro, to make sure we do not waste the sacrifices and do not turn the crisis into an uncontrolled and disastrous bankruptcy. — Lucas Papademos

The Kenyans beat up on the American runners in every road race every weekend of the year, but we're way ahead of them in the number and quality of our Elvis impersonators. We get our X-Men and gorillas. — Don Kardong

The market always, in theory at least, looks ahead. And it's always trying to take in every bit of information that it can as quickly as it can. You don't really care so much if the company made a dollar last year; you want to know what it's going to make this year. — Alex Berenson

Gu was a worrier, a neurotic curmudgeon. If he had a headache, it was a brain tumor; if it looked like rain, this year's harvest was ruined. This was his way of controlling the situation, his lifelong strategy for always coming out ahead. Now, when reality looked more dire than any of his fatalisitic predictions, he had no choice but to turn tail and charge in the opposite direction. — Max Brooks

The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined. Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year. The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases. The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information- ... That is closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Let us avoid debt as we would avoid a plague ... Let every head of every household see to it that he has on hand enough food and clothing, and, where possible, fuel also, for at least a year ahead ... Let every head of household aim to own his own home, free from mortgage. Let us again clothe ourselves with these proved and sterling virtues-honesty, truthfulness, chastity, sobriety, temperance, industry, and thrift; let us discard all covetousness and greed. — J. Reuben Clark

You don't seduce in the same way at my age. You seduce with brains, with talent. Yesterday for lunch I met the most incredible 90-year-old woman. She survived Auschwitz, she was beautiful, she didn't have white hair, she didn't wear glasses. She was totally seductive. I just thought, Oh, my God, I still have time ahead of me. — Diane Von Furstenberg

[But the constricted light,
the year closing down on itself with all
the vacancies of January ahead, leave me
unreconciled even to beauty.]
When will you be coming back? — Linda Pastan

The seasons, like greater tides, ebb and flow across the continents. Spring advances up the United States at the average rate of about fifteen miles a day. It ascends mountainsides at the rate of about a hundred feet a day. It sweeps ahead like a flood of water, racing down the long valleys, creeping up hillsides in a rising tide. Most of us, like the man who lives on the bank of a river and watches the stream flow by, see only one phase of the movement of spring. Each year the season advances toward us out of the south, sweeps around us, goes flooding away to the north. — Edwin Way Teale

Year after year, we have had to explain from mid-year onwards why the global growth rate has been lower than predicted as little as two quarters back. This pattern of disappointment and downward revision sets up the first, and the basic, challenge on the list of issues policymakers face in moving ahead: restoring growth, if that is possible. — Stanley Fischer

New Year, new month, new day, new moment, all places we have never been before. Enjoy each experience with relish & spice... tasty times ahead. — Michael Levy

Praying, we usually ask too much. I know I do. Sometimes we even demand. I think I am learning to ask enough for the moment
not for the whole year, utterly veiled in mystery; not even for the week, the month ahead; but just for today.
Jesus said it all when He told us to pray: 'Give us this day our daily bread.'
That bread is not only material, it is spiritual; in asking for it, we ask for a sufficiency of strength, courage, hope and light. Enough courage for the step ahead
not for the further miles. Enough strength for the immediate task or ordeal. Enough material gain to enable us to meet our daily obligations. Enough light to see the path
right before our feet. — Faith Baldwin

The reason I hadn't washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly. I saw the day of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue. It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be done with it. — Sylvia Plath

I feel that the year ahead for me will be full of two of my favorite things: dance and acting. — William Kempe

The thing about politics is to plan 10 years ahead, and assume every year is your last. — Ed Balls

Let every head of household see to it that he has on hand enough food and clothing and, where possible, fuel also for at least a year ahead. — J. Reuben Clark

You should look ahead now and decide what you want to do with your lives. Fix clearly in your mind what you want to be one year from now, five years, ten years, and beyond. Write your goals and review them regularly. Keep them before you constantly, record your progress, and revise them as circumstances dictate. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

An older child, one who possesses a conscience, will be troubled with self-reproaches and feelings of shame for his naughtiness, even if he is not discovered. But our two-year-olds and our three-year- olds experience guilt feelings only when they feel or anticipate disapproval from the outside. In doing this, they have taken the first steps toward the goal of conscience, but there is a long way ahead before the policeman outside becomes the policeman inside. — Selma Fraiberg

If you are a 5-year-old, you just go ahead and try something. You don't think about it. You are just a little kid. — Quvenzhane Wallis

We think the future lies ahead, but its seed is contained in the present. There is no sharp break between the two: the lie we tell today can send us sprawling a year from now; the way we treat our infant determines the way he treats us when he reaches adolescence. — Sydney J. Harris

Don't think of 60 as ten years older than 50.
Think of it as only 1 year older than 59
Go ahead, as it's your birthday
Delusion, today, is just fine — John Walter Bratton

As we enter our centennial year we are still a young nation, very much in the formative stages. Our national condition is still flexible enough that we can make almost anything we wish of our nation. No other country is in a better position than Canada to go ahead with the evolution of a national purpose devoted to all that is good and noble and excellent in the human spirit. — Lester B. Pearson

Close your eyes, think of the year ahead. This is your chance. This can be the day it all changes. — Gayle Forman

Within a year, possibly by next fall," he was saying, "something that has never before been done, will be done. NASA will be sending men to the moon. Think of that. Men who were once in classrooms like this one will leave their footprints on the lunar surface." He paused. I leaned in close against the wall so I could hear him. "That is why you are sitting here tonight, and why you will be coming here in the months ahead. You come to dream dreams. You come to build fantastic castles up in the air. And you come to learn how to build the foundations that make those castles real. When the men who will command that mission were boys your age, no one knew. But in a few months, that's what will happen. So, twenty years from now, what will people say of you? 'No one knew then that this kid Washington Irving High School would grow up to do' ... what? What castle will you build? — Gary D. Schmidt

Christmas gives us the opportunity to pause and reflect on the important things around us - a time when we can look back on the year that has passed and prepare for the year ahead. — David Cameron

In the 1990s, economists predicted only 2 of the 60 recessions around the world a year ahead of time. — Nate Silver

Well, I spent six or seven years after high school trying to work myself up. Shipping clerk, salesman, business of one kind or another. And it's a measly manner of existence. To get on that subway on the hot mornings in summer. To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying. To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off. And always to have to get ahead of the next fella. And still - that's how you build a future. — Arthur Miller

THE UNIVERSE PROCEEDS out of what it has been and into what it will be, inexorably, unstoppably, at the rate of one second per second, one year per year, forever. At right angles to its forward progress lie the past and the future. The future, that is to say, does not lie "ahead" of the present in the stream of time, but at a right angle to it: the future of any present moment can be projected as far as you like outward from it, infinitely in fact, but when the universe has proceeded further, and a new present moment has succeeded this one, the future of this one retreats with it into the what-has-been, forever outdated. It is similar but more complicated with the past. — John Crowley

If we make the tough decisions now, we will be one year ahead of 80 percent of the states in the race to economic growth. If we fail to act, we will fall even further behind ... by going first, we can become first. — Chris Christie

Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined. Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year. The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases. The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information - — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

You go ahead. I'd rather not be shot out of a tube into a pool filled with a bunch of nine-year-olds' urine. — Justin Halpern

The road ahead is not some predetermined path that I am forced to trod, but it is a rich byway that I can help create. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

If at the end of May we don't, we'll reform, regroup, decide how we're going to go about it, but if the task force can't come up with the bill, I'm going to push mine, and go ahead and make the changes in it that we've been working on now for a year or two and just go for it. — Charlie Norwood

I'm 28 now and they say you peak at 28 - so my best years are still ahead of me. — Kieron Dyer

Always plan ahead, Lini used to say, but worry too hard over next year, and you can trip over tomorrow. — Robert Jordan

One of the most painful parts of teaching mathematics is seeing students damaged by the cult of the genius. The genius cult tells students it's not worth doing mathematics unless you're the best at mathematics, because those special few are the only ones whose contributions matter. We don't treat any other subject that way! I've never heard a student say, "I like Hamlet, but I don't really belong in AP English - that kid who sits in the front row knows all the plays, and he started reading Shakespeare when he was nine!" Athletes don't quit their sport just because one of their teammates outshines them. And yet I see promising young mathematicians quit every year, even though they love mathematics, because someone in their range of vision was "ahead" of them. — Jordan Ellenberg

But it wasn't for him to judge whether the artists were good or not - other people, plenty of other people, did that already. He was there only to offer the sort of practical help that so few of them had, as so many of them lived in a world that was deaf to practicalities. He knew it was romantic, but he admired them: he admired anyone who could live for year after year on only their fastburning hopes, even as they grew older and more obscure with every day. And, just as romantically, he thought of his time with the organization as his salute to his friends, all of whom were living the sorts of lives he marveled at: he considered them such successes, and he was proud of them. Unlike him, they had had no clear path to follow, and yet they had plowed stubbornly ahead. They spent their days making beautiful things. — Hanya Yanagihara

His hand closed automatically around the fake Horcrux but in spite of everything, in spite of the dark and twisting path he saw stretching ahead for himself, in spite of the final meeting with Voldemort he knew must come whether in a month in a year or in ten, he felt his heart lift at the thought that there was still one last golden day of peace left to enjoy with Ron and Hermione. — J.K. Rowling

How to Win a Fight - Step 1: Always make eye contact. Step 2: Go ahead and use henchmen - these days it's unnecessary and frowned upon to fight your own battles, especially with so many henchmen out of work. Step 3: Run lots of attack ads - I have run about 500 attack ads this year, and I expect that I will buy even more air time next year, because my enemies are getting stronger. — John Hodgman