Fifty Quotes - Page 39

• Madness to us means reversion; to such people as Una and Lena it meant progression. Now their uncle had entered into a land beyond them, the land of fancy. For fifty years he had been as they were, silent, hard-working, unimaginative. Then all of a sudden, like a scholar passing his degree, he had gone up into another form.

  Djuna Barnes

  Uncles, Hard Work, Mean

  Djuna Barnes (2016). “Vivid and Repulsive as the Truth: The Early Works of Djuna Barnes”, p.190, Courier Dover Publications

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• Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can't afford is habit.

  Carolyn Heilbrun

  Age, Becoming, Habit

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• At twenty your choices are almost unlimited. At fifty you're a prisoner of past decisions. At seventy you have no free will left at all.

  Helen McCloy

  Past, Choices, Decision

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• What would you be like if you had white hair and had not given up your principles? It might be wise as you deal with coalition efforts to think about the possibilities of going for fifty years.

  Bernice Johnson Reagon

  Wise, Thinking, Hair

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• I would have felt more comfortable on a girder fifty floors above the street, catching white-hot rivets in a pail.

  Margaret Halsey

  White, Anxiety, Hot

  Margaret Halsey (1960). “This Demi-paradise: A Westchester Diary”

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• people coming away from a session with Dr. S. usually looked as if they had had fifty minutes on the anvil with an apprentice blacksmith.

  Margaret Halsey

  Doctors, People, Anvils

  Margaret Halsey (1977). “No Laughing Matter: The Autobiography of a Wasp”, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

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• [On being asked how it felt to be the first female conductor of the Boston Symphony:] I've been a woman for a little more than fifty years, and I've gotten over my original astonishment.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Music, Women, Years

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• Fifty per cent of the public doesn't know what 'fifty per cent' means.

  Patricia Hewitt

  Ignorance, Mean, Cents

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• Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Two, People, Hundred

  Wislawa Szymborska (2002). “Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wislawa Szymborska”, p.99, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Romance is the truth of imagination and boyhood. Homer's horses clear the world at a bound. The child's eye needs no horizon to its prospect. The oriental tale is not too vast. Pearls dropping from trees are only falling leaves in autumn. The palace that grew up in a night merely awakens a wish to live in it. The impossibilities of fifty years are the commonplaces of five.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Horse, Children, Fall

  Robert Aris WILLMOTT (1851). “Pleasures,objects and advantages of literature”, p.60

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• For fifty years now, we have tried big government. Yet too many people remain trapped in despair. Now, we must try a new way.

  Marco Rubio

  Government, Years, People

  Marco Rubio’s speech on poverty, hotair.com. January 8, 2014.

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• Of the many species that have existed on earth - estimates run as high as fifty billion - more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Running, Errors, Light

  "The Sixth Extinction?" by Elizabeth Kolbert, www.newyorker.com. May 25, 2009.

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• I've told youngsters not to write their autobiographical novel at the age of twenty-one; to save it for the time when they're fifty-one or sixty-one. They should write other novels first, to learn their craft; they shouldn't cut their teeth on the valuable material of childhood because they'll never have better material, ever, to work with.

  Laura Z. Hobson

  Writing, Cutting, Childhood

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• For every individual who really is exceptional there are about fifty thousand who just imagine they are - until it's too late, and they find out they aren't after all.

  Gwethalyn Graham

  Too Late, Imagine, Individual

  Gwethalyn Graham (1944). “Earth and High Heaven”

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• When you're a fifty-year-old woman, no one really bothers to look at you anymore, much less value your opinion. It's hard on the old ego. But damn, it does make it easy to get away with a lot.

  Tess Gerritsen

  Years, Ego, Age

  Tess Gerritsen (2012). “The Rizzoli & Isles Series 9-Book Bundle: The Surgeon, The Apprentice, The Sinner, Body Double, Vanish, The Mephisto Club, The Keepsake, Ice Cold, The Silent Girl”, p.1858, Ballantine Books

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• There is more opportunity nowadays at easier and better prices than ever before. I have businesses in probably fifty countries throughout the world and it's never been easier to do business throughout the world. Never. I don't know what people are complaining about.

  Robert Kiyosaki

  Country, Opportunity, People

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• I am sick of war. Every woman of my generation is sick of war. Fifty years of war. Wars rumored, wars beginning, wars fought, wars ending, wars paid for, wars endured.

  Josephine Winslow Johnson

  War, Years, Sick

  Josephine Winslow Johnson (1996). “The Inland Island”, Writer's Digest Books

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• If I hear a conversation and somebody says something intriguing, my first thought is, Is that a song? I write all year long, and at the end of the year I pull these forty or fifty things out and say which of these things do I want to record.

  Toby Keith

  Song, Writing, Years

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• I keep telling people I'll make movies until I'm fifty and then I'll go and do something else. I'm going to be a professional gentleman of leisure.

  Eddie Murphy

  People, Gentleman, Leisure

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• It is frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions. They have all been invented over and over fifty times. Man is the arch machine, of which all these shifts drawn from himself are toy models. He helps himself on each emergency by copying or duplicating his own structure, just so far as then need is.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Copying, Needs

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.260, Penguin

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• Fifty-four years of love and tenderness and crossness and devotion and unswerving loyalty. Without her I could have achieved a quarter of what I have achieved, not only in terms of success and career, but in terms of personal happiness.

  Noel Coward

  Loyalty, Years, Careers

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• I'm one-hundred-fifty miles off Cape Horn, both autopilots are broken, and my boat is drifting toward one of the nastiest chunks of ocean on the face of the earth.

  Abby Sunderland

  Ocean, Broken, Capes

  "Unsinkable: A Young Woman's Courageous Battle on the High Seas". Book by Abby Sunderland and Lynn Vincent, 2011.

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• No Southern people ever seem to possess the energy of their Northern brothers, and in Sicily a dolce far niente life is much enjoyed. Time is no object. According to Pliny, Aristhomacus watched the life of the bee carefully for fifty-eight years, which is just the sort of work a Sicilian of to-day would like.

  Alec-Tweedie

  Brother, Eight, Years

  Mrs. Alec-Tweedie (Ethel) (1904). “Sunny Sicily: Its Rustics and Its Ruins”

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• the arts of Mexico are heavy with the weight of the past, of gods that demanded the sacrifice of a thousand beating hearts in a day, of a world that ended every fifty-two years, of warriors who rushed into battle wearing the heads of jaguars or clothed in the flayed skins of their human victims.

  Biloine W. Young

  Art, Warrior, Sacrifice

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• The town I grew up in was at least fifty percent Jewish, so every weekend in the 7th grade, we went to Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.

  Vanessa Bayer

  Weekend, Bats, Mitzvah

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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