End Of The Year Abc Quotes

As we grown-ups talked and speculated, my five-year-old daughter looked intently out of the window. Suddenly she turned around and shouted, "Mommy, Mommy, he is not dead! Women are still wearing their scarves." I always associate Khomeini's death with Negar's simple pronouncement - for she was right: the day women did not wear the scarf in public would be the real day of his death and the end of his revolution. Until then, we would continue to live with him. ~ Azar Nafisi

Well, birthdays are merely symbolic of how another year has gone by and how little we've grown. No matter how desperate we are that someday a better self will emerge, with each flicker of the candles on the cake, we know it's not to be, that for the rest of our sad, wretched pathetic lives, this is who we are to the bitter end. Inevitably, irrevocably; happy birthday? No such thing. ~ Jerry Seinfeld

I shrugged off his arm. "That's right. Fourteen-year-old boys have better taste than you. They think I'm hot." I licked my fingertip and stuck it on my butt. "Tsssss."
And with that, I propelled myself across the slope and skidded to a stop at one end of the trick rail. "Quick," I told the boys, "act like you think I'm hot."
Chloe cracked up. Josh stared blankly at me. His friends blushed deep red, but they weren't claiming it.
"Thanks for your support," I told them. "Look without looking like you're looking. Is Nick gone? ~ Jennifer Echols

When you hear on the radio and read in newspapers and magazines and books and speeches the words 'the Occupied Territories' year after year, and festival after festival, and summit conference after summit conference, you think it's somewhere at the end of the earth. You think there is absolutely no way you can get to it. Do you see how close it is? How touchable? How real? I can hold it in my hand, like a handkerchief.
Now here I am looking at it.

Who would dare make it into an abstraction now that it has declared its physical self to the senses? ~ Mourid Barghouti

What happened yesterday, or last week, or ten years ago … those things aren't important. What really matters is now, here, today, tomorrow, next year. Some people fall in love at first sight and stay together for ever, other people marry their childhood sweetheart and end up in the divorce courts. You can't predict life, Jonah, you can only truly try to make the best of whatever it throws at you.´ ~ Josie Silver

Oh what remorse we shall feel at the end of our lives, when we look back upon the great number of instructions and examples afforded by God and the Saints for our perfection, and so carelessly received by us! If this end were to come to you today, how would you be pleased with the life you have led this year? ~ Saint Francis De Sales

That's right.Forteen-year old boys have better taste than you.They think I'm hot." I licked my fingertip and stuck it on my butt. "Tsssss."
And with that,I propelled myself across the slope and skidded to a stop at one end of the trick rail. "Quick," I told the boys, "act like you think I'm hot."
Chloe cracked up.josh stared blankly at me.His friends blushed deep red,but they weren't claiming it.
"Thanks for your support," I told them. "Look without looking like your looking.Is Nick gone? ~ Jennifer Echols

The book is closed, the year is done, the pages full of tasks begun. A little joy, a little care, along with dreams, are written there. This new day brings another year, Renewing hope, dispelling fear. And we may find before the end, a deep content, another friend. ~ Arch Ward

It's only later that I'll see you're feeding me rehearsed lines and perfectly timed smiles and gasps and tears that come at precisely the right moment. A year from now I'll be screaming "Fuck you, FUCK YOU" into a pillow because I won't have the guts to say the words to your face.
But right now, a boy is staring at me from the end of the hall and even though he doesn't say a word, he's claimed me.
I'm new territory and you've planted your flag. ~ Heather Demetrios

His epitaph: This tomb hold Diophantus, Ah, what a marvel! And the tomb tells scientifically the measure of his life. God vouchsafed that he should be a boy for the sixth part of his life; when a twelfth was added, his cheeks acquired a beard; He kindled for him the light of marriage after a seventh, and in the fifth year after his marriage He granted him a son. Alas! late-begotten and miserable child, when he had reached the measure of half his father's life, the chill grave took him. After consoling his grief by this science of numbers for four years, he reached the end of his life. ~ Diophantus

New Rule: America must stop bragging it's the greatest country on earth, and start acting like it. I know this is uncomfortable for the "faith over facts" crowd, but the greatness of a country can, to a large degree, be measured. Here are some numbers. Infant mortality rate: America ranks forty-eighth in the world. Overall health: seventy-second. Freedom of the press: forty-fourth. Literacy: fifty-fifth. Do you realize there are twelve-year old kids in this country who can't spell the name of the teacher they're having sex with?

America has done many great things. Making the New World democratic. The Marshall Plan. Curing polio. Beating Hitler. The deep-fried Twinkie. But what have we done for us lately? We're not the freest country. That would be Holland, where you can smoke hash in church and Janet Jackson's nipple is on their flag.

And sadly, we're no longer a country that can get things done. Not big things. Like building a tunnel under Boston, or running a war with competence. We had six years to fix the voting machines; couldn't get that done. The FBI is just now getting e-mail.

Prop 87 out here in California is about lessening our dependence on oil by using alternative fuels, and Bill Clinton comes on at the end of the ad and says, "If Brazil can do it, America can, too!" Since when did America have to buck itself up by saying we could catch up to Brazil? We invented the airplane and the lightbulb, they invented the bikini wax, and now ~ Bill Maher

What I discovered in Auschwitz is the human condition, the end point of a great adventure, where the European traveler arrived after his two-thousand-year-old moral and cultural history. ~ Imre Kertesz

One of my most memorable Thanksgiving memories was probably the first year that me and my two brothers decided to start our annual eating contest. We ate throughout the whole day. We started that morning and weighed ourselves, and at the very end of the night, we weighed ourselves out. And all three of us equally gained five pounds. ~ Charles Kelley

The end of summer is slower. This time of year is precious to everyone. It belongs to the soft cotton pat of your heart that never ages past ten years old. You can smell it - fresh pencil shavings and cinnamon. ~ Mari Andrew

It always depresses me when people moan about how commercial Christmas is. I love everything about it. The tradition of having this great big feast, slap bang in the middle of winter, is an essential thing to look forward to at the end of the year. ~ Richard E. Grant

I heard a rapid alternation of notes,
a vibrating staccato of an ancient instrument,
nearly as old as nature herself,
a cricket singing
in my garden last night,
the first time this year.
When turning my garden's soil,
I often uncover crickets,
curmudgeons that scramble to find solitude
and cover from the light,
but I rarely hear their
ancient song 'till near
summer's end.

Although the wind is now lofting the branches
and rustling the leaves,
the evening sun
still warms my face.
And my garden still blooms full
with pink-papered hollyhocks
and blue, green spikes of lavender,
and roses,
bright pinks and yellows,
all glowing from sunshine-swelled canes,
and zinnias,
rainbow-shingled orbs,
and more.

And yet, I am already dreading
the coming of fall,
all dressed in small rags
of red, yellow, and orange.
I know that my summer garden
is nearing its end,
as hailed by the cricket's song. ~ Jeffrey A. White

Saying what you think and wading into the deep end don't always have a happy ending. Difficult conversations are something of a gamble and you have to be willing to be okay with the outcome. And you have to know going in, where you draw the line.
You have to know when in the conversation you are going to say no.
You have to know when you are going to say, "That doesn't work for me."
You have to know when to say, "I'm done."
You have to know when to say, "This isn't worth it."
"You are worth it."
The more I said what I thought , the more willing to dive into the difficult conversations, the more I was willing to say yes to me, the less I was willing to allow people in my life who left me emptier and unhappier and more insecure than before I saw them.
My friend who asked for all the money isn't the last person I walked away from during the Year of Yes.
No. No that friend was not.
No. ~ Shonda Rhimes

I have absorbed my life now. I am ready for my music to unfold. I know time flies, but before the end of this year, the album will be out. Even if it kills me. ~ Neneh Cherry

The man who has acquired the habit of study, though for only one hour every day in the year, and keeps to the one thing studied till it is mastered, will be startled to see the way he has made at the end of a twelvemonth. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

For reasons of electoral calculation - to preserve his Democratic majorities in a congressional midterm election - Roosevelt wanted American troops fighting Germans before the end of the year. "We failed to see," Marshall would write, "that the leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained. The people demand action. ~ James D Hornfischer

Every movie is a commitment of a year or a year and a half. Commercials are much faster than that because they're much more contained. You can get in and out really fast, and you do a piece of work the you see the end result very quickly. ~ Paul W. S. Anderson

I can only give you words. Nothing fancy. But this will have to do.
It doesn't matter if you're reading it a year from now or a hundred years from now. By the end of the chronicle you will know that humanity carried the flame of knowledge into the terrible blackness of the unknown, to the very brink of annihilation. And we carried it back. ~ Daniel H. Wilson

BY THE END OF MY JUNIOR YEAR, SCHOOL SHOOTINGS WERE MAKING their way into the news. The first one I heard about was in 1997, when Luke Woodham killed two students and wounded seven others in Pearl, Mississippi. Two months later, in West Paducah, Kentucky, Michael Carneal killed three students at a high school prayer service. In March of 1998, Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden of Jonesboro, Arkansas - one aged thirteen, the other eleven - set off a fire alarm to make their fellow students run outside, then opened fire from the trees. They killed four students and a teacher. Finally, Kip Kinkel went on a rampage in Springfield, Oregon in May of 1998. He murdered both of his parents at home, then went to school, killed two students, and wounded twenty-two others. ~ Brooks Brown

The biggest happiness is when at the end of the year you feel better than at the beginning ~ Henry David Thoreau

By the end of the first month of the 1995 session, each senator will have made more money than any person who works 40 hours a week at minimum wage for the entire year. ~ William J. Clinton

During the fiscal year ending in 1861, expenses of the federal government had been $67 million. After the first year of armed conflict they were $475 million and, by 1865, had risen to one billion, three-hundred million dollars. On the income side of the ledger, taxes covered only about eleven per cent of that figure. By the end of the war, the deficit had risen to $2.61 billion. That money had to come from somewhere. ~ G. Edward Griffin

But we would do well to meditate daily, rather as the religious do on their God, on the 9.5 trillion kilometres which comprise a single light year, or perhaps on the luminosity of the largest known star in our galaxy, Eta Carinae, 7,500 light years distant, 400 times the size of the sun and 4 million times as bright. We should punctuate our calendars with celebrations in honour of VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant in the constellation Canis Major, 5,000 light years from earth and 2,100 times bigger than our sun. Nightly – perhaps after the main news bulletin – we might observe a moment of silence in order to contemplate the 200 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy, the 100 billion galaxies and the 3 septillion stars in the universe. Whatever their value may be to science, the stars are in the end no less valuable to mankind as solutions to our megalomania, self-pity and anxiety. To answer our need to be repeatedly connected through our senses to ideas of transcendence, we should insist that a percentage of all prominently positioned television screens on public view be hooked up to live feeds from the transponders of our extraplanetary telescopes. We would then be able to ensure that our frustrations, our broken hearts, our hatred of those who haven't called us and our regrets over opportunities that have passed us by would continuously be rubbed up against, and salved by, images of galaxies such as Messier 101, a spiral structure which sits towards the bottom left corner of t ~ Alain De Botton

In 1857, Bizet departed for Rome and spent three years there. He studied the landscape, the culture, Italian literature and art. Musically he studied the scores of the great masters. At the end of the first year he was asked to submit a religious work as his required composition. As a self-described atheist, Bizet felt uneasy and hypocritical writing a religious piece. Instead, he submitted a comic opera. Publicly, the committee accepted, acknowledging his musical talent. Privately, the committee conveyed their displeasure. Thus, early in his career, Bizet displayed an independent spirit that would be reflected in innovative ideas in his opera composition.
[The Pearl Fishers - Georges Bizet, Virginia Opera] ~ Georges Bizet

At the end of each year I make a list of my mistakes and it's pretty friggin long. ~ Dean Lombardi

A man sentenced to death obtained a reprieve by assuring the king he would teach his majesty's horse to fly within the year - on the condition that if he didn't succeed, he would be put to death at the end of the year. "Within a year," the man explained later, "the king may die, or I may die, or the horse may die. Furthermore, in a year, who knows? Maybe the horse will learn to fly." My philosophy is like that man's. I take the long-range view. ~ Bernard Baruch

This is how it's done, you pile one thing on top of the next and you keep it up and keep it up - sometimes the galleon sinks in a typhoon, you don't get your slab of granite that year - but you stick with it and eventually you end up with something sooo big. ~ Neal Stephenson

I hate crowds of people pretending to be happy on one night of the year, where they get drunk and obnoxious by the end of the night. ~ Kenny Hickey

In science, all important ideas need names and stories to fix them in the memory. It occurred to me that the market's first wild trait, abrupt change or discontinuity, is prefigured in the Bible tale of Noah. As Genesis relates, in Noah's six hundredth year God ordered the Great Flood to purify a wicked world. Then "were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened." Noah survived, of course: He prepared against the coming flood by building a ship strong enough to withstand it. The flood came and went-catastrophic, but transient. Market crashes are like that. The 29.2 percent collapse of October 19, 1987, arrived without warning or convincing reason; and at the time, it seemed like the end of the financial world. Smaller squalls strike more often, with more localized effect. In fact, a hierarchy of turbulence, a pattern that scales up and down with time, governs this bad financial weather. At times, even a great bank or brokerage house can seem like a little boat in a big storm. ~ Benoit B Mandelbrot

The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges' Funhouse or Sly Stone's There's A Riot Goin' On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of 'nostalgia'. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.

It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher's neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the ~ Mark Fisher

Another year is ending, but something is pending ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

if you didn't make negative judgements on everyone, what would change. Not alot. But you would see the world with new eyes, eyes that were clouded by a wall; a wall of your own making. Built up with negative judgements and ignorant commets, not spoken aloud. So end today with a positive thought. No matter what happen yesterday or last year, tomorrow's a fresh start, donnt throw it away. ~ Georgette Tange

There is no less holiness at this time- as you are reading this- than there was on the day the Red Sea parted, or that day in the 30th year, in the 4th month, on the 5th day of the month as Ezekiel was a captive by the river Cheban, when the heavens opened and he saw visions of god. There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree at the end of your street than there was under Buddha's bo tree ... . In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger. In any instant the bush may flare, your feet may rise, or you may see a bunch of souls in trees. ~ Annie Dillard

My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. ~ Derek Parfit

I've often said in the past that I thought MTV was sort of evil incarnate and signified the beginning of the end. And I don't know if I'm entirely wrong about that, but they did sign my paychecks a year ago, so I guess I'm part of the problem. ~ Martha Plimpton

We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died. We wanted to dig deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to be overworked and reduced to our last wit. And if our bosses proved mean, why then we'd evoke their whole and genuine meanness afterward over vodka cranberries and small batch bourbons. And if our drinking companions proved to be sublime then we would stagger home at dawn over the Old City cobblestones, into hot showers and clean shirts, and press onward until dusk fell again. For the rest of the world, it seemed to us, had somewhat hastily concluded that it was the chief end of man to thank God it was Friday and pray that Netflix would never forsake them.

Still we lived frantically, like hummingbirds; though our HR departments told us that our commitments were valuable and our feedback was appreciated, our raises would be held back another year. Like gnats we pestered Management - who didn't know how to use the Internet, whose only use for us was to set up Facebook accounts so they could spy on their children, or to sync their iPhones to their Outlooks, or to explain what tweets were and more importantly, why - which even we didn't know. Retire! we wanted to shout. We ha Get out of the way with your big thumbs and your senior moments and your nostalgia for 1976! W ~ Kristopher Jansma

She shook her head. 'Look. We both know life is short, Macy. Too short to waste a single second with anyone who doesn't appreciate and value you.'
'You said the other day life was long,' I shot back. 'Which is it?'
' It's both,' she said, shrugging. 'IT all depends on how you choose to live it. It's like forever, always changing.'
'Nothing can be two opposite things at once,' I said. 'It's impossible.'
'No,' she replied, squeezing my hand,' what's impossible is that we actually think it could be anything other than that. Look, when I was in the hosptal, right after the accident, they thought I was going to die. I was really fucked up, big time.'
'Uh-huh,' Monica said, looking at her sister.
'Then,' Kristy continued, nodding at her, 'life was very short, literally. but now that I'm better it seems so long I have to squint to see even the edges of it. It's all in the view, Macy. That's what I mean about forever, too. For any one of us our forever could end in an hour, or a hundred years from now. You can never know for sure, so you'd better make every second count.'
Monica, lighting another cigarette, nodded. 'Mmm-hmm,' she said.
'What you have to decide,' Kristy said to me, leaning foreward, 'is how you want your life to be. If your forever was ending tomorrow, would this be how you'd want to have spent it? It seemed like it was a choice I had already made. I'd spent the last year and a half with Jason, shaping my life to fit his, doin ~ Sarah Dessen

Give me until the end of the year and I will be able to control the chaos in Gaza, ... Now that the Israeli pullout is completed, we will be able to better deal with the problem. ~ Mahmoud Abbas