Yearly Quotes (page 7)
Fifteen years of yes's had beaten Mrs. Gilbert. Fifteen further years of that incessant unaffirmative affirmative, accompanied by the perpetual flicking of ash-mushrooms from thirty-two thousand cigars, had broken her. To this husband of hers she made the last concession of married life, which is more complete, more irrevocable, than the first—she listened to him. She told herself that the years had brought her tolerance—actually they had slain what measure she had ever possessed of moral...
F. Scott Fitzgerald
We ate simply, we were healthy, and we were uninterested in those things that should be called possessions not because they are possessed but because they possess. Those ten years were the happiest of my life save the first ten, the years in which I had neither position nor success, and no one took notice of me. Those were the years of the parent holding the child in his arms, lifting him high in the air, and pulling him close. As I held my own son, when he was a baby, God was right there.
Mark Helprin
But if she'd come then, she would never have properly appreciated it. She'd have seen the happy crowds and the Union Jacks and the bonfires, but she'd have no idea of what it meant to see the lights on after years of navigating in the dark, what it meant to look up at an approaching plane without fear, to hear church bells after years of air-raid sirens. She'd have had no idea of the years of rationing and shabby clothes and fear which lay behind the smiles and the cheering, no idea of what...
Connie Willis
Doctor MacKenzie says "Sometimes I think the Victorians had the right idea. When you lost a family member back then you were suppose to be in full mourning, dress in nothing but black, for a whole year. Then you went into something they called 'half mourning' for another full year, adn during those two years, you were pretty much expected to have emotional breakdowns, you could do it whenever you felt you needed to, and everybody would support you. Now?, A month after a tragedy, maybe two,...
Mercedes Lackey
I don't understand how people canstand next to you one year, and next year, they cannot. They're going crazy, screaming. They can't take it that you're there. But last year I was in the same club, walking around, lonely like a motherfucker. Couldn't get a date or a dance. I was too skinny, too something, and now, "He's just adorable. He's just, oh!
Tupac Shakur
He had never liked October. Ever since he had first lay in the autumn leaves before his grandmother's house many years ago and heard the wind and saw the empty trees. It had made him cry, without a reason. And a little of that sadness returned each year to him. It always went away with spring. But, it was a little different tonight. There was a feeling of autumn coming to last a million years. There would be no spring. ("The October Game")
Ray Bradbury
Now they came back to him, on this night he was seventeen years old. All the years and places of his brief broken life came within mind's reach and made a whole again. He knew once more, at last, after this long, bitter, waisted time, who he was and where he was. But where he must go in the years to come, that he could not see; and he feared to see it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Was it just that? She was to be content to weave a steady life with him, all one fabric, but perhaps brocaded with the occasional flower of an adventure. But how could she know what she would feel next year? How could one ever know? How could one say Yes? for years and years? The little yes, gone on a breath! Why should one be pinned down by that butterfly word? Of course it had to flutter away and be gone, to be followed by other yes's and no's! Like the straying of butterflies.
David Herbert Lawrence
I am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that I catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what I said to myself about myself when I was sixteen and twenty-six and thirty-six but I am running into a new year and I beg what i love and I leave to forgive me.
Lucille Clifton
Oh, Will," she said, "what can we do? Whatever can we do? I want to live with you forever. I want to kiss you and lie down with you and wake up with you every day of my life till I die, years and years and years away. I don't want a memory, just a memor?"No," he said, "memory's a poor thing to have. It's your own real hair and mouth and arms and eyes and hands I want. I didn't know I could ever love anything so much. Oh, Lyra, I wish this night would never end! If only we could stay here like...
Philip Pullman
The guys in the saloons shoving free ones across the bar and saying happy new year and many more of them kid you been a good customer have one on the house happy new year and the hell with the prohibitionists some day the bastards are going to give us trouble. The girls from the hash houses and the girls from the hotels and the guys swarming out of dirty little apartment bedrooms and music and dancing and smoke and somebody with the ukulele and have another and the feeling of being lonesome...
Dalton Trumbo