Forty Quotes - Page 21

• It is sound judgment to put on a bold face and play your hand for a hundred times what it is worth; forty-nine times out of fifty nobody dares to call it, and you roll in the chips.

  Mark Twain

  Hands, Play, Sound

  Mark Twain (1961). “Twain: Wit and Wisecracks”

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• A hip-looking teen watches an elderly woman hobble across the street on a walker. "Grammy's here!" he shouts. He puts some MacAttack Mac&Cheese in the microwave and dons headphones and takes out a video game so he won't be bored during the forty seconds it takes his lunch to cook. A truck comes around the corner and hits Grammy, sending her flying over the roof into the backyard, where luckily she lands on a trampoline. Unluckily, she bounces back over the roof, into the front yard, landing on a rosebush.

  George Saunders

  Elderly, Land, Games

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• You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.

  Jodi Picoult

  Love, Inspirational, Marriage

  Jodi Picoult (2014). “Mercy”, p.84, Simon and Schuster

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• There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Reading, Doors

  Doris Lessing (2012). “The Golden Notebook”, p.18, HarperCollins UK

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• Ordinarily my mom just sunk deeper into her corner of the couch and ignored it. She had succesfully ignored a quarter of a century of entropy and decay, had sat peacefully crunching popcorn and drinking soda while the house fell down around us. If I had to guess the number of books she read during that time, I would place the number at somewhere in the neighborhood of forty thousand.

  Haven Kimmel

  Mom, Drinking, Book

  Haven Kimmel (2002). “A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland Indiana”, p.163, Broadway Books

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• To tell a woman who is forty, "You look like sixteen," is boloney. The blarney way of saying it is "Tell me how old you are, I should like to know at what age women are the most beautiful.

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Beautiful, Age, Looks

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• I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum.

  William Shakespeare

  Brother, Hamlet And Ophelia, Tempest

  'Hamlet' (1601) act 5, sc. 1, l. [291]

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• What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

  Aldo Leopold

  Maps, Wilderness, Blank

  Aldo Leopold (1968). “A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There”, p.135, Oxford University Press

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• Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court.

  Lewis Carroll

  Two, Alice In Wonderland Book, Miles

  Lewis Carroll (2011). “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Second Edition”, p.154, Broadview Press

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• If you were to give me forty such men, I never could be so happy as you. Till I have your disposition, your goodness, I never can have your happiness. No, no, let me shift for myself; and, perhaps, if I have very good luck, I may meet with another Mr. Collins in time.

  Jane Austen

  Good Luck, Men, Mr Collins

  Jane Austen (2006). “The Complete Novels: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.497, Penguin

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• He was one of those guys that think they're being a pansy if they don't break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you. God I hate that stuff.

  J. D. Salinger

  Hate, Thinking, Hands

  J.D. Salinger (1951). “The Catcher in the Rye”

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• The Answer to the Great Question... Of Life, the Universe and Everything... Is... Forty-two,' said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

  Douglas Adams

  Two, Deep Thought, Answers

  Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) ch. 27

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• At forty-two, I had never done anything that took my own breath away, and I suppose now that was part of the problem--my chronic inability to astonish myself. I promise you, no one judges me more harshly than I do myself; I caused a brilliant wreckage. Some say I fell from grace; they're being kind. I didn't fall. I dove.

  Sue Monk Kidd

  Fall, Two, Judging

  Sue Monk Kidd (2006). “The Mermaid Chair”, p.23, Penguin

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• But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.

  Jane Austen

  Love, Sister, Wedding

  Jane Austen (2009). “Northanger Abbey”, p.8, Wild Jot Press

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• All this to say: I am forty-three years old. I may yet live another forty. What do I do with those years? How do I fill them without Lexy? When I come to tell the story of my life, there will be a line, creased and blurred and soft with age, where she stops. If I win the lottery, if I father a child, if I lose the use of my legs, it will be after she has finished knowing me. "When I get to Heaven", my grandmother used to say, widowed at thirty-nine, "your grandfather won't even recognize me.

  Carolyn Parkhurst

  Children, Father, Grandmother

  Carolyn Parkhurst (2003). “The Dogs of Babel”, Large Print Press

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• It has been said that Ernest Hemingway would rewrite scenes until they pleased him, often thirty or forty times. Hemingway, critics claimed, was a genius. Was it his genius that drove him to work hard, or was it hard work that resulted in works of genius?

  James N. Frey

  Hard Work, Genius, Scene

  James N. Frey (2010). “How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling”, p.160, Macmillan

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• Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Relationship, Death, Special You

  "Survivor". Book by Chuck Palahniuk, February 17, 1999.

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• I was born lazy. I am no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that is because I reached the limit forty years ago. You can't go beyond possibility.

  Mark Twain

  Years, Lazy, Limits

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.231, Courier Corporation

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• Millions of American women, and some men, commit that outrage every summer day. They are turning a superb treat into mere provender. Shucked and boiled in water, sweet corn is edible and nutritious; roasted in the husk in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes, shucked at the table, and buttered and salted, nothing else, it is ambrosia. No chef’s ingenuity and imagination have ever created a finer dish. American women should themselves be boiled in water.

  Rex Stout

  Summer, Sweet, Men

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• For the first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Dream, Children, Past

  FaceBook post by Michael Ondaatje from Jul 03, 2011

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• A week in the hospital she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female - a breast, a womb, a child, a man.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Men, Long

  Anna Quindlen (2003). “Object Lessons: One True Thing ; Black and Blue”

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• There's a reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don't look the way they used to, and it's not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It's because of hair dye. In the 1950's only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair; today there are parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles where there are no gray-haired women at all.

  Nora Ephron

  Exercise, Hair, Feminism

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• But I know what I like.' She smiled, and et the cat drop to the floor. 'It's like Tiffany's,'she said. 'Not that I give a hoot about jewellery. Diamonds, yes. But it's tacky to wear diamonds before you're forty; and even that's risky.

  Truman Capote

  Cat, Giving, Tacky

  Truman Capote (2012). “Breakfast at Tiffany's”, p.33, Vintage

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• Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules — and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Science, Space, Progress

  The Sirens of Titan epigraph (1959)

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• I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.

  Harry S. Truman

  Freedom, Agency, Historical

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