Years That Quotes & Sayings

You know what I was thinking about on my way home? How different my life would be if you'd made that gash a little deeper. Or how different yours would be if I'd vaulted myself off a roof nine years ago. Do you ever think
about things like that? Like, if either you or I wouldn't have made it, where would the other one be right now? It was something I thought about all the time: how death changes every remaining moment for those still living. — Tiffanie DeBartolo

It was with a homosexual, I was barely 14 years old. But let's be fair, I wasn't the only one who did it. He was a man in Bauru that all our team visited. — Pele

The growth of the American food industry will always bump up against this troublesome biological fact: Try as we might, each of us can only eat about fifteen hundred pounds of food a year. Unlike many other products - CDs, say, or shoes - there's a natural limit to how much food we each can consume without exploding. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1 percent per year - 1 percent being the annual growth rate of American population. The problem is that [the industry] won't tolerate such an anemic rate of growth. — Michael Pollan

You see, we were able to give you something, something which even now no one will ever take from you, and we were able to do that principally by sheltering you. Hailsham would not have been Hailsham if we hadn't. Very well, sometimes that meant we kept things from you, lied to you. Yes, in many ways we fooled you, I suppose you could even call it that. But we sheltered you during those years, and we gave you your childhoods. Lucy was well-meaning enough. But if she'd have her way, your happiness at Hailsham would have been shattered. Look at you both now! I'm so proud to see you both. You built your lives on what we gave you. You wouldn't be who you are today if we'd not protected you. You wouldn't have become absorbed in your lessons, you wouldn't have lost yourselves in your art and your writing. Why should you have done, knowing what lay in store for each of you? You would have told us it was all pointless, and how could we have argued with you? So she had to go. — Kazuo Ishiguro

Twenty years from now, I can look at this medal and say, 'I was the best quarter-miler in the world on that day.' If you don't think that's important, you don't know what's inside an athlete's soul. — Vincent Matthews

Under the rules of colonialism, everything goes to and comes from the mother country. In 1870, the colony of Turks and Caicos was asked to send a crest to England so that a flag for the colony could be designed. A Turks and Caicos designer drew a crest that included Salt Cay saltworks with salt rakers in the foreground and piles of salt. Back in England, it was the era of Arctic exploration, and, not knowing where the Turks and Caicos was, the English designer assumed the little white domes were igloos. And so he drew doors on each one. And this scene of salt piles with doors remained the official crest of the colony for almost 100 years, until replaced in 1968 by a crest featuring a flamingo. — Mark Kurlansky

I love what movies and television and all that kind of stuff has done to me through the years. I love that it can bring up all these different emotions in me - whether it's anger or happiness or sadness ... whatever it may be. — Kevin Sorbo

I'm not really worried about my numbers now as a 36-year-old. I'm not trying to be the first, experimental case of a 36-year-older trying to maintain his numbers, especially when I'm on a team like this. Can I do the same stuff I could do when I was Amare's age? Of course not. I'm not going to even try. However, I feel that I'm the baddest 36-year-old out there. — Shaquille O'Neal

In his Dialogue "Timaeus" Plato had a demiurge to create the globe-shaped world according to musical laws, including the human soul. Fifteen hundred years later, that still found an echo in the Renaissance. And in those days the architects realized that the musical harmonies had spatial expressions
namely, the relationships of the length of strings, and spatial relationships were precisely their only concerns. Because both the world and the body and soul were composed according to musical harmonies by the demiurge architect, both the macrocosm and the microcosm, they must therefore be guided in their own architectural designs by the laws of music. — Harry Mulisch

I won't waste your time with the injuries of my childhood, with my loneliness, or the fear and sadness of the years I spent inside the bitter capsule of my parents' marriage, under the reign of my father's rage, after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of a childhood? I have no desire to describe mine; I only want to say that in order to survive the dark and often terrifying passage of my life I came to believe certain things about myself. — Nicole Krauss

People often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is - just be a little kinder. — Aldous Huxley

The person that always comes to mind, and it's odd now because we've become pals, is Ben Folds. I've always considered him like a musical older brother, from afar, in the sense that I always felt I had a much better understanding of what he was singing about five years after I was listening to it. — Jason Sudeikis

The Theology of The Holy Trinity has been well established for 1700 years. In my opinion, it is hyper-evident by the New Testament manuscripts in conjunction with the writings and ensuing Theologies of The Early & Later Church fathers that The Father,The Son, and The Holy Spirit are Objectively Real and True".

~R. Alan Woods [2012] — R. Alan Woods

Somehow, the pain and rage and confusion of the past eighteen years dissolves until all that is left is this one perfect moment; unscripted, unedited, it's ours and ours alone. — Heather Demetrios

We have been marching for the last one hundred and fifty years. We sacrifice our individual liberties, and sometimes we fail and suffer. Sometimes we divide into separate groups and our methods conflict, though we all aim at one common goal. The significant thing is that we march on without turning back. What we want is peace not violence, We know that we thrive and prosper only in peace. — Carlos Bulosan

What we also have to recognize is that the deficit levels that I'm inheriting, over a trillion dollars, coming out of last year, that that is unsustainable. At a certain point, other countries stop buying our debt, at a certain point, we'd end up having to raise interest rates, and it would end up creating more economic chaos and potentially inflation. — Barack Obama

Did anybody ever come back from the dead any single one of the millions who got killed did any one of them ever come back and say by god i'm glad i'm dead because death is always better than dishonor? did they say i'm glad i died to make the world safe for democracy? did they say i like death better than losing liberty? did any of them ever say it's good to think i got my guts blown out for the honor of my country? did any of them ever say look at me i'm dead but i died for decency and that's better than being alive? did any of them ever say here i am i've been rotting for two years in a foreign grave but it's wonderful to die for your native land? did any of them say hurray i died for womanhood and i'm happy see how i sing even though my mouth is choked with worms? — Dalton Trumbo

I want to improve my bunker, fairway and putting status because that's been my weakness over the last three years. If I can just focus on this, then everything else will come. — Yani Tseng

Something's still wrong
the same thing that was wrong forty years ago. A malignancy, a tumor, slowly growing in someone's heart. A conscience that's seared. — Heather Day Gilbert

I've been able to read people my entire life, because I've interviewed people now for 20-some-odd years. So you can read people that way. — Sean Hannity

It's important to remember there is a 20 year US. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. That represents a major transition in the history of the country and kind of reshaping partly in terms of just their direction of their attention. — Laurent Dubois

Also, unless you critique moralism, many irreligious people won't know the difference between moralism and what you're offering. The way to get antinomians to move away from lawlessness is to distinguish the gospel from legalism. Why? Because modern and post-modern people have been rejecting Christianity for years thinking that it was indistinguishable from moralism. Non-Christians will always automatically hear gospel presentations as appeals to become moral and religious, unless in your preaching you use the good news of grace to deconstruct legalism. Only if you show them there's a difference - that what they really rejected wasn't real Christianity at all - will they even begin to consider Christianity.2 — Tullian Tchividjian

In the Eroica and other pieces of his middle years, Beethoven hailed the enlightened leader, the benevolent despot, the military spirit. Now for him the military spirit is nothing but destruction. By the end of this section the bugles are raging, the drums roaring, the choir crying Dona pacem! in terror. Now we understand what Beethoven meant by "prayer for inner and outer peace." The inner peace is that of the spirit. The outer peace is in the world. The fear and trembling in the Missa solemnis is not the fear of losing salvation in eternity; it is the human, secular fear of violence and chaos. — Jan Swafford

Look, I don't know who has been telling you over the years that you aren't worthy of love and happiness, but they're idiots. We all deserve it. And if people get hurt along the way, that's life. We've all been hurt. Doesn't that make love more crucial to our lives? — Karina Halle

Lots of old guys wore beige trench coats and those flat caps that made them look like boys who sold newspapers a hundred years ago. — A.J. Cattapan

After two years of hard work and debate, Congress has passed a highway bill that will help fuel our economy by creating roughly 500,000 new jobs, as well as address many critical transportation needs in Ohio and the 18th Congressional District. — Bob Ney

His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion. — F Scott Fitzgerald

To me, writing is remembering something funny that happened, or maybe something I said seven years ago. — Matthew Perry

Were you raised in a barn? You don't just walk into someone's house." Ash laughed. "I have an open invitation to enter whenever I'm here." "Yeah, but what if he's naked or something?" Ash led him into the foyer. "I've known Kyrian for over two thousand years, and I can honesty say that I have never once caught him naked in his living room." The door closed behind them without Ash or Nick touching it- something that always unnerved Nick when Ash did it. "Besides, Rosa's still here. I know he's not walking around bare-assed with her on duty. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

It occurred to her, sadly, and not for the first time, that as you grew older you became busier, and time went faster and faster, the months pushing each other rudely out of the way, and the years slipping off the calendar and into the past. Once, there had been time. Time to stand, or sit, and just look at daffodils. Or to abandon housekeeping, on the spur of the moment, walk out of the back door and up the hill, into the lark-song emptiness of a summer morning. — Rosamunde Pilcher

You've got nothing that lasts, you know. That's not the first town that ever stood there. There was one before that, and one before that, and one before that one, on back for 900 years. But this tree has stood here all along. What do you make of that, boy? — Natalie Babbitt

Oh maturity's a wrapped up package deal so it seems
And ditching teenage fantasy means ditching all your dreams
All your friends and peers and family solemnly tell you you will
Have to grow up be an adult yeah be bored and unfulfilled
Oh when no ones yet explained to me exactly what's so great
About slaving 50 years away on something that you hate, about meekly shuffling down the path of mediocrity
Well if that's your road then take it but it's not the road for me. — Frank Turner

There are two kinds of businesses: The first earns 12%, and you can take it out at the end of the year. The second earns 12%, but all the excess cash must be reinvested - there's never any cash. It reminds me of the guy who looks at all of his equipment and says, 'There's all of my profit.' We hate that kind of business. — Charlie Munger

I was there when Sam Raimi showed Stan Lee the first cut of the first Spider-Man movie. I was on a couch next to Stan, watching how special effects had finally caught up to his imagination. It was insane. And I'm thinking, "He had to wait until he was 80 years old for that to happen." When they announced Powers and Jessica Jones, I thought, "Oh, that's nice!" — Brian Michael Bendis

She struggled. She became uncomfortable. She longed for more freedom and began to sense that the world she inhabited was not where she ultimately belonged. She did not know what was on the other side of her struggle, but she was getting ready to experience something new and wonderful that in her wildest imaginings could not be described. Darrel ... she was getting ready to breathe. "And when she finally drew that first breath, it was clean and fresh and like nothing she had ever felt. She took another breath and another - and all around her, loved ones and friends cheered in a joyous celebration of her arrival." Jones looked closely at the woman's face. "Look at her now, Darrel," he said. "For many years this dear child was happy and content in — Andy Andrews

Warren Buffett has said many times that people either get value investing in five minutes or they won't get it in five years. So, there is something in the human brain, that for some of us, makes all the difference in the world right away and the patience it requires is part of the wiring process. — Mohnish Pabrai

{Y}ou make do with what you're given, and I've spent a good many years learning to write fine-sounding sentences so that I can hide behind them. It's the way of the hermit crab, with nothing to recommend it but the pretty shell it annexes for its own. — Norman Lock

The most challenging work is producing. The physical act of getting a production up and running is extremely taxing, and you never have any guarantee that your years of work on any given project will ever bear fruit. — David Hayter

While Diana finds the monarchy as presently organized a crumbling institution, she has a deep respect for the manner in which the Queen has conducted herself for the last forty years. Indeed, much as she would like to leave her husband, Diana has emphasized to her: "I will never let you down." Before she attended a garden party on a stifling July afternoon last year, a friend offered Diana a fan to take with her. She refused saying: "I can't do that. My mother-in-law is going to be standing there with her handbag, gloves, stockings and shoes." It was a sentiment expressed in admiring tones for the Sovereign's complete self-control in every circumstance, however trying. — Andrew Morton

They're just the little people. Unknown all their lives and forgotten as soon as they die. If anyone talks about them, they're simply called the victim. But the killers, that's something else! They don't work or pay taxes or obey the law or live quiet lives of frustration. That's not news. Instead they kill. That makes them special. Charles Manson will be remembered and written about a hundred years from now, just as Jack the Ripper is remembered a hundred years after his crimes. Everybody wants a little recognition. More things are done for sheer recognition than for money or sex, as far as I can see. But the only ones who get it are the killers. Who knows all the names of Manson's victims? Or Jack the Ripper's victims? Or Charles Starkweather's victims? Or Caryl Chessman's victims? Who cares? They were just people. — Shane Stevens

Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of the world. Today he is the thing he understands least. — B.F. Skinner

I have been fortunate to get some really good scripts over the years and I haven't turned down anything that I regretted so far. And my manager who I've been with for over 25 years is very good at knowing what I should and shouldn't do a lot of times. — Billy Bob Thornton

Do you know that when one who has influence with youth- be he teacher, leader or parent- seriously weakens the foundations upon which a young person has built, by faith-destroying challenges the youngster is not yet equipped to meet, he fashions a disciple who has been effectively cut loose from fundamentals at a time when he needs most to rely on them? The challenger may himself be a moral, educated, well-meaning person of integrity, doing what he does in the name of honesty and truth. His own character may have been formed in an atmosphere of faith and conviction which, through his influence, he may now help to destroy in his young follower. "Disenchanted" himself in his mature years, he turns his powers on an immature mind and leaves it ready prey for nostrums and superstitions and behavior he himself would disdain. — Marion D. Hanks

It's not just a matter of poor willpower on the part of the consumer and a give-the-people-what-they-want attitude on the part of the food manufacturers. What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort ... to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive. — Michael Moss

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

Jesse [James]was known as a kind of Robin Hood character and also it was known that his exploits were somewhat dubious - however, he perpetuated this myth. Our film [The Assassination of Jesse James ] really takes place at the end of all that, the last year of his life, at the end of all that celebrity. — Brad Pitt

Most women, when they ask me for beauty tips aren't really prepared for my answer, which is, there is no magic beauty wand that can transform you and make you beautiful. It takes practice and what you see on Rupaul's Drag Race is years and years of practice. — RuPaul

I don't know that I've ever bought anything online. I'm about 10 years behind the technological curve, I think. — Sam Hunt

Came Honker's trip to Slice City along about then: our sax-man got a neck all full of the sharpest kind of steel. So we were out one horn. And you could tell: we played a little bit too rough, and the head-arrangements Collins and His Crew grew up to, they needed Honker's grease in the worst way. But we'd been together for five years or more, and a new man just didn't play somehow. We were this one solid thing, like a unit, and somebody had cut off a piece of us and we couldn't grow the piece back so we just tried to get along anyway, bleeding every night, bleeding from that wound. ("Black Country") — Charles Beaumont

He sat in the living room in the dark, an expert at waiting, a nineteen-year veteran of it, waiting for people who failed to appear, missed court dates because they forgot or didn't care, and took off. Nineteen years of losers, repeat offenders in and out of the system. Another one, that's all Louis was, slipping back into the life. — Elmore Leonard

For if humanity has a future on this planet of a hundred million years, it is unthinkable that it should spend those aeons in a ferment of national self-satisfaction and chauvinistic idiocies. — William Golding

We are falling back into allegory," said the Captain, interrupting him. "If you mean by all that that the body is the most solid of realities, then say so."
"No, not exactly," Zeno explained. "This body, our kingdom, sometimes seems to me to be made of a fabric as loosely woven and as evanescent as a shadow. I should hardly be more astonished to see my mother again (who is dead) than to come upon you around a corner as I did, your face grown older and its substance recomposed more than once in twenty years' time, with its color altered by the seasons and its form somewhat changed, but your mouth still knowing my name. Think of the grain that has grown and the creatures that have lived and died in order to sustain that Henry who is and is not the one I knew twenty years ago. — Marguerite Yourcenar

I'm appalled at how many people my age, or even five or ten years younger, have no tangible memories of important history that happened when we were growing up. — Jello Biafra

When we read of the great Biblical leaders, we see that it was not uncommon for God to ask them to wait, not just a day or two, but for years, until God was ready for them to act. — Gloria Gaither

Forty years does not bear testimony to the success of a marriage; it's a testimony to friendship. Their children are also a testament to that friendship. You can raise your fist clenched tight in anger, or you can open your hand and wait for a butterfly, a ladybird, some morning dew, a zephyr, or a friend. — Christopher Rees

I started the first drafts of the book during my sophomore year of college. I wasn't thinking at all about kids at the time. But I was thinking. A lot. About everything. I wish I could capture that head-space again; everything meant something to me in college. Every leaf, every sound, every lecture, every textbook. It's like I was on drugs, 24/7. I am glad I was able to pair that ceaseless pondering with plenty of time to write. What came of that time was the first draft of the novel, a lengthy, unnecessarily angst-driven pile of crap. Years later, with Zoloft, I approached the novel with a more level head, and came away with a much, much better novel. My advice to writers, I suppose, is write your novel when you feel like shit; edit when you feel great. — Caleb J. Ross

So let those people go on weeping and wailing whose self-indulgent minds have been weakened by long prosperity, let them collapse at the threat of the most trivial injuries; but let those who have spent all their years suffering disasters endure the worst afflictions with a brave and resolute staunchness. Everlasting misfortune does have one blessing, that it ends up by toughening those whom it constantly afflicts. — Seneca.

The burdens of childhood are as hard to bear as the crosses that weigh us down later in life, while the happinesses of childhood are tame compared with those of our maturer years. — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The style of ancient Egyptian art is transcendently clear, something 8-year-olds can recognize in an instant. Its consistency and codification is one of the most epic visual journeys in all art, one that lasts 30 dynasties spread over 3,000 years. — Jerry Saltz

Only buy something that you'd be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years. — Warren Buffett

And I have to credit David Jacobs with the opportunities he gave me. He was totally into sharing the creation of characters. David put together a show that told the story of people over many years' time and that was greatly enjoyable. Though nowadays that is frowned upon. — William Devane

The money has always been wasted on me. I don't care for beautiful things, funnily enough. I am my father's daughter. The things that excite me are the smell of a wood-burning stove, uncultivated fields. My house is decaying and falling to pieces. It's not had the love it deserves over twenty years. — Alison Moyet

Above all never forget that a marriage is in one way very much like a newspaper. It has to be made fresh every damn day of every damn year. — Raymond Chandler

As I look back on my fondness for the outdoors, and specifically the elements in nature that I find visually stimulating, I am surprised at how often the theme of dead trees arise. I guess it's that each one seems to have a story of its own, representing many years of living through everything that nature could throw at them. — Cory Trepanier

I never knew anything other than wanting to be an entrepreneur. I tried my first business when I was 6 years old, and I started another business when I was 8. I don't think I knew anything besides that. — Daymond John

For all my years in public life, I have believed that America must sail toward the shores of liberty and justice for all. There is no end to that journey, only the next great voyage. We know the future will outlast all of us, but I believe that all of us will live on in the future we make. — Edward Kennedy

Thomas Jefferson had rather serious concerns about the fate of the democratic experiment.28 He feared the rise of a new form of absolutism that was more ominous than the British rule overthrown in the American Revolution. He distinguished in his later years between what he called "aristocrats and democrats."29 And then he went on to say, "I hope we shall ... crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial and bid defiance to the laws of our country."30 He also wrote, "I sincerely believe ... that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies."31 That's the kind of quote from a Founding Father you don't see too much. — Noam Chomsky

They had studied law, information technology and art history as part of their beauty treatment, they had let Norwegian taxpayers finance years at university just so that they could end up as overqualified, stay-at-home playthings and sit here exchanging confidences about how to keep their sugar daddies suitably happy, suitably jealous and suitably on their toes. — Jo Nesbo

The distance that the dead have gone Does not at first appear- Their coming back seems possible For many an ardent year. — Emily Dickinson

I think no-one was surprised to hear that Janis Joplin was dead. She seemed to be living up all of her energy that she had to give in just a few years. Now you listen to covers of her songs by various women, and it's pale in comparison. — Michael Wadleigh

China's economy became more complex. By now there is a large number of small- and medium-sized companies that work quite differently from big, state-owned enterprises. They don't follow any long-term business plan and don't rent office space for years to come. They start out and need an office right away, for a week, a month or half a year, and they want to be among other entrepreneurs like themselves. — Zhang Xin

Saturn takes twenty-nine years to return to the point in the sky where it was at the moment we were born. Until that happens, everything seems possible, our dreams can come true, and any walls hemming us in can still be broken down. When Saturn completes this cycle, it puts an end to any romanticism. Choices become definitive and it's nearly impossible to change direction. — Paulo Coelho

This is a living planet. Look around. Mars, Venus, Jupiter. Look beyond our solar system. Where else is there a place that works, that is just right for the likes of us? It has not happened just instantly. It is vulnerable to our actions. But it's the result of four and a half billion years of evolution, of change over time. And it changes every day, all the time. It would be in our interest to try to maintain a certain level of stability that has enabled us to prosper, to not wreck the very systems that give us life. — Sylvia Earle

If I stayed a football player, my career would have been over 20 years ago. As it is, my knees are shot. I found I got the same good feeling in acting that I had in sports, but I found I could have a more profound impact on people. — William Petersen

...Americans didn't stick to cities, which makes us different from the people in other industrialized countries. We no sooner arrived in town, turning those towns into great mid-century metropolises, than we decided to take off for the green world beyond, so that by the 1970 Census, we had become the first suburban nation in the history of the world. And Detroit led the way, with a population curve up and down just like everywhere else, but with its urban decline a lot steeper over the past sixty years - so typical a place that it only looks like an exception. — Jerry Herron

Moved on ... " he said. "Rusted nuts! You can do that?"
"Certainly."
"Huh. You think ... I should ... you know ... Ranette ... "
"Wayne, if ever someone should have taken a hint, it was you. Yes. Move on. Really."
"Oh, I took the hint," he said, taking a swig of sherry. "Just can't remember which jacket I left it in." He looked down at the jug. "You sure?"
"She has a girlfriend, Wayne."
"'S only a phase," he mumbled. "One what lasted fifteen years. ... — Brandon Sanderson

All of that will be gone by morning. Instead, they will dissect this last evening for years to come. What had they missed that they should have seen? What small gesture, forgotten, might have changed everything? They will pick it down to the bones, wondering how this had all gone so wrong, and they will never be sure. — Celeste Ng

For 180 years, we voted in English. That is the true American tradition, and this amendment is true to our heritage, not what has existed unnaturally for the last 20 years. — Spencer Bachus

I played eight years without really being hurt seriously and hadn't had to deal with that part of the game. So, to get hurt and to have to miss games, that part of it was very hard. And so when I came back and somebody else had my job and I couldn't get it back. You know that was hard. — Drew Bledsoe

Robots can now milk cows. Oil prices have fallen globally, meaning both the petro-states and those indirectly propped up by them are weakened. At the same time, slower growth in China has lately shrunk its voracious appetite for African, Australian, and Latin American commodities. China accounted for more than a third of global growth in recent years, and its growth engine multiplied the growth of many of the countries that exported raw materials to Beijing. That has slowed. China's total debt has grown from roughly 150 percent of its GDP in 2007 to around 240 percent today - a massive increase in one decade that is dampening its growth and its imports and shrinking China's wallet for foreign aid and investment in African and Latin American commodity-exporting countries. In — Thomas L. Friedman

The people of Lancre wouldn't dream of living in anything other than a monarchy. They'd done so for thousands of years and knew that it worked. But they'd also found that it didn't do to pay too much attention to what the King wanted, because there was bound to be another king along in forty years or so and he'd be certain to want something different and so they'd have gone to all that trouble for nothing. In the meantime, his job as they saw it was to mostly stay in the palace, practise the waving, have enough sense to face the right way on coins and let them get on with the ploughing, sowing, growing and harvesting. It was, as they saw it, a social contract. They did what they always did, and he let them. — Terry Pratchett

When you get quick fame and success and exposure, it makes you feel dizzy, and I didn't want to lose my balance 'cause that's something I've been struggling with for so many years. I'm not fond of the idea of making it in Hollywood. That's not my aim; otherwise, I would have settled down in Los Angeles. — Ludivine Sagnier

Prominent exploration experts have recently predicted that total world production of liquid oil will peak by about the end of this decade-or a few years later if production does not rise much-and will decline thereafter. — Amory Lovins

Much of what I have learned, as well as much of my intellectual enjoyment, has come through problem solving. Through the years, I've found it more and more difficult to tell when I was working and when playing, for it has so often turned out that what I have learned playing with problems has been useful in my serious work. — Frederick Mosteller

It has been demonstrated through years of workshops that the Artist Within tends to make the same mistakes as the artist within everybody else. — Howard Mittelmark

The Saudis and Emiratis blame all of this on Iran. I think they'd have to grant, that as has been said, that the Houthis are an internally generated movement in Yemen and the Saudis were supposed to be dealing with the Houthis, who started out in essence along their border. So one of the things that we're seeing is a complete failure of Saudi policy toward Yemen over the past 10 years, but the Saudis totally believe that the reason the Houthis are able to succeed militarily is the amount of money, advice, and guns they are receiving from Iran. — Elliott Abrams

According to current birthrate projections, France will be a majority Muslim country anyway in about 50 years ... I get a lot of e-mails from Americans who think that Europeans are spineless. And I think they're right. — Pat Condell

Dogmatic religion has been used to fantastic effect over thousands of years to fuel and exploit emotions like fear and guilt, and the feeling of being 'unworthy'. This has encouraged people to hand over their right to think and feel to a Bible and a priest because they have not had the confidence or self-belief to realize that they have a right, and an infinite gift, to make their own decisions — David Icke

Travel is similar to therapy. You can go to the best psychologist in the world for ten years. If you don't feel like actively shifting anything in your life, there is nothing that person can do to change you. — Elizabeth Gilbert

I've always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with the leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water 100 years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in. — David Foster Wallace

Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them. — Virginia Woolf

I'm not suffering Trisha, I've never suffered all these years, someone long back taught me by example that its very easy to be content with one's solitude. I've enjoyed mine all these years. — Dixy Gandhi

I think that ties into our name and the meaning behind our name, going Against the Current. We don't really want to fit in to one section. If we're able to be grouped into one category then we've become something that already exists, probably. We want all of those kids that would come out to that pizza shop to come to our show and all of those kids who know us from the radio to come to that show. We have kids that come to our show that have been coming to concerts for years, and ones that it's their first concert and they just wanted to see it. I think that's the best way to do it. — Chrissy Costanza

Years ago I went into my laboratory and said, 'Dear Mr. Creator, please tell me what the universe was made for?' The Great Creator answered, 'You want to know too much for that little mind of yours. Ask for something more your size, little man.' — George Washington Carver

It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjointed fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another, as if I were waiting for trains that never came. And, like one of those ghosts who are said to linger around depots late at night, asking passersby for the timetable of the Midnight Express that derailed twenty years before, I wandered from light to light until that dreaded hour when all the doors closed and, stepping from the world of warmth and people and conversation overhead, I felt the old familiar cold twist through my bones again and then it was all forgotten, the warmth, the lights; I had never been warm in the life, ever. — Donna Tartt

NAEP data show beyond question that test scores in reading and math have improved for almost every group of students over the past two decades; slowly and steadily in the case of reading, dramatically in the case of mathematics. Students know more and can do more in these two basic skills subjects now than they could twenty or forty years ago... So the next time you hear someone say that the system is "broken," that American students aren't as well educated as they used to be, that our schools are failing, tell that person the facts. — Diane Ravitch

I am coming back to New York after five years, and it seems that psychics are taking over the city. — Aravind Adiga

Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars. — Robert E. Howard

The history of the past fifty years, and longer, indicates that a diversified holding of representative common stocks will prove more profitable over a stretch of years than a bond portfolio, with one important provisio that the shares must be purchased at reasonable market levels, that is, levels that are reasonable in the light of fairly well-defined standards derived from past experience. — Benjamin Graham

There's a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it's really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can't ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it's quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia's the sane realisation you just can't be doing with all that anymore. — Glen Duncan