Fifty Quotes

Nobody can tell you about that sword all that there is to be told of it; for those that know of those paths of Space on which its metals once floated, till Earth caught them one by one as she sailed past on her orbit, have little time to waste on such things as magic and so cannot tell you how the sword was made, and those who know whence poetry is, and the need that man has for song, or know any one of the fifty branches of magic, have little time to waste on such things as science, and so cannot tell you whence its ingredients came. Enough that it was once beyond our Earth and was now here amongst our mundane stones; that it was once but as those stones, and now had something in it such as soft music has; let those that can define it. ~ Lord Dunsany

I was standing amid floor-to-ceiling shelves of books in wonder and awe when my view of stories suddenly and forever changed. There were enormous piles of books lying in corners. Books covered the walls. Books even lined the staircases as you went up from one floor to the next. It was as if this used bookstore was not just a place for selling used books; it was like the infrastructure itself was made up of books. There were books to hold more books, stories built out of stories.

I was standing in Daedalus Books in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I had recently read Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book. I was alive with the desire to read. But at that particular moment, my glee turned to horror. For whatever reason, the truth of the numbers suddenly hit me. The year before, I had read about thirty books. For me, that was a new record. But then I started counting. I was in my early twenties, and with any luck I'd live at least fifty more years. At that rate, I'd have about 1,500 books in me, give or take.

There were more books than that on the single wall I was staring at.

That's when I had a realization of my mortality. My desire outpaced reality. I simply didn't have the life to read what I wanted to read.

Suddenly my choices in that bookstore became a profound act of deciding. The Latin root of the word decide - cise or cide - is to "cut off' or "kill." The idea is that to choose anything means to kill off other options you m ~ Justin Whitmel Earley

You're not Corbin," he mutters.
"No. I'm not. But I am your new neighbour, and from the looks of it, you're about to owe me at least fifty cups of sugar. ~ Colleen Hoover

It was becoming more and more evident that Salem was a town that celebrated individuality, a real live-and-let-live kind of place. Melody felt a gut punch of regret. Her old nose would have fit in here.
"Look!" She pointed at the multicolored car whizzing by. Its black door were from a Mercedes coupe, the white hood from a BMW; the silver trunk was Jaguar, the red convertible top was Lexus, the whitewall tires were Bentley, the sound system was Bose, and the music was classical. A hood ornament from each model dangled from the rear view mirror. Its license plate appropriately read MUTT.
"That car looks like a moving Benton ad."
"Or a pileup on Rodeo drive." Candace snapped a picture with her iPhone and e-mailed to her friends back home. They responded instantly with a shot of what they were doing. It must have involved the mall because Candace picked up her pace and began asking anyone under the age of fifty where the cool people hung out. ~ Lisi Harrison

It is a part of our office to stand uncloaked, masked, sword bared, upon the scaffold for a long time before the client is brought out. Some say this is to symbolize the unsleeping omnipresence of justice, but I believe the real reason is to give the crowd a focus, and the feeling that something is about to take place. A crowd is not the sum of the individuals who compose it. Rather it is a species of animal, without language or real consciousness, born when they gather, dying when they depart. Before the Hall of Justice, a ring of dimarchi surrounded the scaffold with their lances, and the pistol their officer carried could, I suppose, have killed fifty or sixty before someone could snatch it from him and knock him to the cobblestones to die. Still it is better to have a focus, and some open symbol of power.
Wolfe, Gene (1994-10-15). Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun' (p. 184). Tom Doherty Associates. Kindle Edition. ~ Gene Wolfe

For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled up passions were exploded on Saturday night, and the effect of a week's monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill. You followed the motto of 'be drunk and be happy,' kept your crafty arms around female waists, and felt the beer going beneficially down into the elastic capacity of your guts. ~ Alan Sillitoe

We're just like you,' the other tiger said. 'We speak the same language you do. We think the same thought. But we're tigers.'
'You could help me with arithmetic,' I said.
'What's that?' one of the tigers said.
'My arithmetic.'
'Oh, your arithmetic.'
'Yeah.'
'What do you want to know?' one of the tigers said.
'What's nine times nine?'
'Eighty-one,' a tiger said.
'What's eight times eight?'
'Fifty-six,' a tiger said.
I asked them half of dozen other questions: six times six, seven times four, etc. I was having a lot of trouble with arithmetic. Finally the tigers got bored with my questions and told me to go away.
'OK,' I said. 'I'll go outside.'
'Don't go too far,' one of the tigers said. 'We don't want anyone to come up here and kill us.'
'OK.'
They both went back to eating my parents. I went outside and sat down by the river. 'I'm an orphan,' I said. ~ Richard Brautigan

For, if after fifty you don't live the aspirations of the young, go away. Who needs needs spectacled snails, salivating on the Soma of youth. ~ Aporva Kala

Your stepfather? I'd like to meet him."
Oh no ... why?
"I'm not sure that's a good idea."
Christian unlocks the door, his mouth in a grim line.
"Are you ashamed of me?"
"No!" It's my turn to sound exasperated. "Introduce you to my dad as what? 'This is the man who deflowered me and wants to start a BDSM relationship'. You're not wearing running shoes. ~ E.L. James

I knew that cockroaches could go more than a month without food or water. And they could even survive on wood for food. And even after you step on them they come apart slowly and keep on walking all the while. Even when they freeze, after they thaw out they keep on going. For three hundred and fifty million years, they have reproduced with no change. When the world was practically naked, they walked slowly across it. ~ Clarice Lispector

It is somewhat difficult for the mind, which is accustomed to weighing the odds, to make a decision where probability is not, as it is in a coin toss, fifty-fifty, but where it is irrelevant. ~ Jake Yaniak

Don't live life hiding behind your past. Live for the moment. When you find someone you want to spend forever with, you don't let them go, whether forever turns out to be a day, a year or fifty years ~ Nicole Williams

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

FACE THE NATION is the second oldest program on television. It began in 1954, fifty-eight years ago. I've been here at the table for the last twenty-one. ~ Rodney Erickson

It's just as sure a recipe for failure to have the right idea fifty years too soon as five years too late. ~ John R. Platt

She cried because she'd had such high, high hopes about the Wheelers tonight and now she was terribly, terribly, terribly disappointed. She cried because she was fifty six years old and her feet were ugly and swollen and horrible; she cried because none of the girls had liked her at school and none of the boys had liked her later; she cried because Howard Givings was the only man who'd ever asked her to marry him, and because she'd done it, and because her only child was insane. ~ Richard Yates

Loved me. How over the top and dramatic can one person get? I mean, hell. Lust at seventeen, sure. Sex buddies at eighteen, shit yeah. But love? Love doesn't enter anyone's life until you turn forty-two, add fifty pounds to your body, and start complaining about the younger generations. Once someone can put up with your forty-two-year-old annoying ass and nasty farts, you know that's real love. ~ Brittainy C. Cherry

See that guy over there?" I nod toward a man in jean shorts and a Budweiser T-shirt. "Am I that obvious?"
St. Clair squints at him. "Obviously what? Balding? Overweight? Tasteless?"
"American."
He sighs melodramtically. "Honestly, Anna. You must get over this."
"I just don't want to offend anyone. I hear they offend easily."
"You're not offending anyone except me right now."
"What about her?" I point to a middle-aged woman in khaki shorts and a knit top with stars and stripes on it.She has a camera strapped to her belt and is arguing with a man in a bucket hat. Her husband,I suppose.
"Completely offensive."
"I mean,am I as obvious as her?"
"Considering she's wearing the American flag, I'd venture a no on that one." He bites his thumbnail. "Listen.I think I have a solution to your problem, but you'll have to wait for it. Just promise you'll stop asking me to compare you to fifty-year-old women,and I'll take care of everything."
"How? With what? A French passport?"
He snorts. "I didn't say I'd make you French." I open my mouth to protest, but he cuts me off. "Deal?"
"Deal," I say uncomfortably. I don't care for surprises. "But it better be good."
"Oh,it's good." And St. Clair looks so smug that I'm about to call him on it, when I realize I can't see our school anymore.
I don't believe it.He's completely distracted me. ~ Stephanie Perkins

Large-caps were safe in 1996, '97, '98. Everybody was buying index funds and Nifty Fifty funds. As long as money was pouring in, it was great. ~ Louis Navellier

You're not celibate, then?" I breathe.
Amusement lights up his eyes.
"No, Anastasia, I'm not celibate. ~ E.L. James

The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel. ~ Douglas Adams

Any woman who still thinks marriage is a fifty-fifty proposition is only proving that she doesn't understand either men or percentages. ~ Florynce Kennedy

If the world turned Fascist, if Cummings had his century, there was a little thing he could do. There was always terrorism. But a neat terrorism with nothing sloppy about it, no machine guns, no grenades, no bombs, nothing messy, no indiscriminate killing. Merely the knife and the garrote, a few trained men, and a list of fifty bastards to be knocked off, and then another fifty. ~ Norman Mailer

It is ironic that Keynesianism originated as a weapon to combat depression, but became universally accepted and "successful" only during (and because of!) the postwar expansion. At the first sign of renewed world recession, Keynesian theory has proved itself to be a snare and a delusion that has gone into immediate bankruptcy. The resulting "post-Keynesian synthesis" is also the theoretical reason for the reactionary exhumation of the simplistic, neoclassical, and monetarist economic theory of the 1920s. This revival of old theory is highlighted by the award of Nobel prizes in economics to Friedrich von Hayek, whose theoretical work was done before the Great Depression, and Milton Friedman, whose lone voice echoed in the wilderness until the new world economic crisis put his unpopular and antipopulist theories on the agenda of business board rooms and government cabinet rooms in one capitalist country after another. The real reason for the recent interest in fifty-year-old theories is that capital now wants them to legitimize its attack on the welfare state and "unproductive" expenditures on social services, which capital claims to need for "productive" investment in industry, including armaments. ~ Andre Gunder Frank

It was the quartets of Beethoven (numbers 12,13,14, and 15) which over fifty years, created and expanded the the audience of listeners to the quartets of Beethoven, thus achieving, as all masterpieces do, progress if not in the quality of artists, at least in the company of minds, which is largely composed these days of what was missing when the work appeared: people capable of liking it. ~ Marcel Proust

I'd never beat you black and blue. I aim for pink.
Christian Grey ~ E.L. James

At the age of fifty-six Eleanor Stoddard was still a beautiful woman. She owned three hotels in France and another two in England. From nothing at all, she had built an empire. Eleanor had it all. Her one weakness was the young man sleeping beside her. ~ Barbara Taylor Bradford

Education is our basic right. Not just in the West; Islam too has given us this right. Islam says every girl and every boy should go to school. In the Quran it is written, God wants us to have knowledge. He wants us to know why the sky is blue and about oceans and stars. I know it's a big struggle - around the world there are fifty-seven million children who are not in primary school, thirty-two million of them girls. ~ Malala Yousafzai

Dwight would later learn that being Lyon's friend would cost him opportunities to make more of them, but he was content with that. He had learned the school year before that having a close friend was like having fifty not so close ones. ** ~ Michael Kroft

I don't know whether to worship at your feet or spank the living shit out of you. ~ E.L. James

Darona's face bore the pinched, taut look and shadowed eyes of someone constantly in pain, but the lack of lines suggested she was younger than Jesral had first thought; middle-aged, fifty at the very most.
'You make an uncommonly fine looking noblewoman, for a Mhrydaineg commoner.'
'Thank you.' Jesral was careful to keep all tone out of her voice. Darona gave her a shrewd stare, then a slight smile.
'Self-control. Good. You must ignore me when I offend you unintentionally. They say that pain can make one waspish, but my brothers and son tell me there's been no change in my manner. I was acid-tongued long before this set in,' she held up a knotted hand, 'and taking devil's claw root has no effect on that. Rest assured, young woman, when I intend offence people are in no doubt about it. ~ Helen Bell

Some people will like it [Fifty Shades of Grey] and some won't. I have other movies coming up, this is not what my whole life turns around. ~ Dakota Johnson

You may consider me presumptuous, gentlemen, but I claim to be a citizen of the United States, with all the qualifications of a voter. I can read the Constitution, I am possessed of two hundred and fifty dollars, and the last time I looked in the old family Bible I found I was over twenty-one years of age. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

It is the first shower that wets."
"Marriage is like picking the place where you're going to live for the next fifty years by using a wall map, a blind fold, and what you really, truly, deeply believe is your lucky dart."
"Our marriage, like all marriages, was happy until it wasn't ~ Tom McNeal

Across from the famous jewelry store on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-Seventh Street, we sat in the back of a graffiti-covered white box truck watching the world go by on the surveillance vehicle's hidden high-def camera. So far there had been no sign of the thieves. Or even Audrey Hepburn. ~ James Patterson

Anything that just adds information you can't use is plain dangerous. Anyway, there's too much of everything of this kind, that's come home to me, too much history and culture to keep track of, too many details, too much news, too much example, too much influence, too many guys who tell you to be as they are, and all this hugeness, abundance, turbulence, Niagara Falls torrent. Which who is supposed to interpret? Me? I haven't got that much head to master it all. I get carried away. It doesn't give my feelings enough of a chance if I have to store up and become like an encyclopedia. Why, just as a question of time spent in getting prepared for life, look! a man could spent forty, fifty, sixty years like that inside the walls of his own being. And all high conversation would take place within those walls. And all achievement would stay within those walls. And all glamour too. And even hate, monstrousness, enviousness, murder, would be inside them. This would be only a terrible, hideous dream about existing. It's better to dig ditches and hit other guys with your shovel than die in the walls. ~ Saul Bellow

She [Mrs. Badger] was surrounded in the drawing-room by various objects, indicative of her painting a little, playing the piano a little, playing the guitar a little, playing the harp a little, singing a little, working a little, reading a little, writing poetry a little, and botanizing a little. She was a lady of about fifty, I should think, youthfully dressed, and of a very fine complexion. If I add to the little list of her accomplishments that she rouged a little, I do not mean that there was any harm in it. ~ Charles Dickens

And there's never a law of God or man runs north of Fifty-three. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Christianity's growth, especially in the developing world, has been explosive. There are now six times more Anglicans in Nigeria alone than there are in all of the United States. There are more Presbyterians in Ghana than in the United States and Scotland combined. Korea has gone from 1 percent to 40 percent Christian in a hundred years, and experts believe the same thing is going to happen in China. If there are half a billion Chinese Christians fifty years from now, that will change the course of human history.6 ~ Timothy J. Keller

A. T. Stewart started life with a dollar and fifty cents. This merchant prince began by calling at the doors of houses in order to sell needles, thread and buttons. He soon found the people did not want them, and his small stock was thrown back on his hands. Then he said wisely, "I'll not buy any more of these goods, but I'll go and ask people what they do want." Thereafter he studied the needs and desires of people, found out just what they most wanted, endeavored to meet those wants, and became the greatest business man of his time. ~ Grenville Kleiser

When Salter was fifty-five, his twenty-five-year-old daughter, Allan, died in an electrical accident. She was in the shower in a cabin next door to his in Aspen. He walked in and found her lying naked on the floor, the water running. He carried her dead body in his arms. He took her outside and tried to resuscitate her, somehow thinking she was drowning. We do not talk about this. He says only, There was the wreckage of that. ~ Katie Roiphe

Look, if you say that science will eventually prove there is no God, on that I must differ. No matter how small they take it back, to a tadpole, to an atom, there is always something they can't explain, something that created it all at the end of the search.

"And no matter how far they try to go the other way – to extend life, play around with the genes, clone this, clone that, live to one hundred and fifty – at some point, life is over. And then what happens? When the life comes to an end?"

I shrugged.

"You see?"

He leaned back. He smiled.

"When you come to the end, that's where God begins. ~ Mitch Albom

She reminded herself bitterly that this was what curiosity had bought her: fifty keystones for a singer who refused to sing, a friend who wasn't her friend, some one who was hers and yet would never be hers. ~ Marie Rutkoski

question. On the 20th of July, 1866, the steamer Governor Higginson, of the Calcutta and Burnach Steam Navigation Company, had met this moving mass five miles off the east coast of Australia. Captain Baker thought at first that he was in the presence of an unknown sandbank; he even prepared to determine its exact position when two columns of water, projected by the mysterious object, shot with a hissing noise a hundred and fifty feet up into the air. Now, unless the sandbank had been submitted to the intermittent eruption of a geyser, the Governor Higginson had to do neither more nor less than with an aquatic mammal, unknown till then, which threw up from ~ Jules Verne

As ever, it was fifty percent fashion show, forty percent club, ten percent sex party, and one hundred percent annoying. ~ Alexis Hall

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou.
When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare,
There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.
He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse,
Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.
There was none could place the stranger's face, though we searched ourselves for a clue;
But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew. ~ Robert W. Service

For every letter of creditors, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you'll be saved. ~ Charles Baudelaire

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

The hey-day of a woman's life is on the shady side of fifty, when the vital forces heretofore expended in other ways are garnered in the brain, when their thoughts and sentiments flow out in broader channels, when philanthropy takes the place of family selfishness, and when from the depths of poverty and suffering the wail of humanity grows as pathetic to their ears as once was the cry of their own children. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

I'm not really sure what makes a book a 'classic' to begin with, but I think it has to be at least fifty years old and some person or animal has to die at the end. ~ Jeff Kinney

Jonny has a theory that South Africa are doomed to choke in every major tournament for the next fifty years as payment for apartheid. He also believes that England will spend centuries working off their colonial sins by performing miserably at sport. I then ask him why Australia, who wiped out generations of Aborigines, win everything in every sport, and he shuts up. ~ Shehan Karunatilaka

A Conference Board survey released in January of 2010 found that only 45 percent of workers surveyed were happy at their jobs, the lowest in 22 years of polling.2 Depression rates today are ten times higher than they were in 1960.3 Every year the age threshold of unhappiness sinks lower, not just at universities but across the nation. Fifty years ago, the mean onset age of depression was 29.5 years old. Today, it is almost exactly half that: 14.5 years old. ~ Shawn Achor

Let no one read my principles who is not a mathematician," he famously declared (less famous is the fact that the principles he was referring to were his theories of how the aortic pulmonary valve worked). Ironically, he himself was a poor mathematician, often making simple mistakes. In one of his notes he counted up his growing library: "25 small books, 2 larger books, 16 still larger, 6 bound in vellum, 1 book with green chamois cover." This reckoning (with its charmingly haphazard system of classification) adds up to fifty, but Leonardo reached a different sum: "Total: 48," he confidently declared. ~ Ross King

By the age of fifty, you have made yourself what you are, and if it is good, it is better than your youth. ~ Marya Mannes

it required a crazy Ukrainian guy. ... "Svoboda" I said. "Condoms only cost fifty slugs. Why would anyone buy this?" He grinned. "It's reusable!"

A disturbing thought popped into my head. "Wait. Have you used this one?" "No, but it wouldn't matter if I had. The cleaning process renders it sterile." "Are you kidd - " I stopped myself and took a breath. Then, as calmly as I could, I said, "It would matter, Svoboda. Maybe not biologically, but psychologically. ~ Andy Weir

Suddenly William loomed over him, scowling, snarling and bloody, his suit dirt-stained and ripped. "Do you know. How many strands. Of hair I lost. On my way down?"
Whatever. "Math was never my thing, but I'm gonna say you lost…a lot."
Electric-blues glittered with menace. "You are a cruel, sadistic bastard. My hair needs TLC and you…you… Damn you! I've gutted men for less."
"I know. I've watched you." Paris lumbered to his feet and scanned the rocky bank they stood upon, the crimson ocean lapping and bubbling in every direction. The drawbridge was only a fifty-yard dash away. "Don't kill the messenger, but I'm thinking you should change your dating profile to balding."
Masculine cheeks went scarlet as the big bad warrior struggled for a comeback.
…
"One of these days you're going to wake up," William finally said, "and I will have shaved you. Everywhere."
"Won't make a difference. Women will still want me. But you know what else? What I did to you wasn't cruel, Willy." He offered the warrior a white-flag grin. A trick. A lie. "This, however, is."
He grabbed William by the wrist, swung the man around and around before at last releasing him and hurling his body directly onto the bridge. ~ Gena Showalter

Fifty thousand dollars' worth of cabinets isn't going to make you a better cook; cooking is going to make you a better cook. At the end of the day, you can slice a mushroom in about three inches of space, and you can carve a chicken in a foot and a half. So it doesn't matter how big the kitchen is. ~ Tyler Florence

Listen to me, you bastard."
"No," Gabriel said.
This simple response left Ash nonplussed. But fuming.
"I'm listening to exactly one person in this room," Gabriel said evenly. "It isn't you. The lady can speak for herself."
Oh. Penny's heart fluttered in her chest.
If by chance, he did mean to seduce her, repeating that sentence fifty times over might do the trick. ~ Tessa Dare

All these polo-necked wankers from grammar schools were going out and buying songs like 'San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)'. Flowers in your hair? Do me a f**king favour.
[...]
Who gave a dog's arse about what people were doing in San Francisco, anyway? The only flowers anyone saw in Aston were the ones they threw in the hole after you when you croaked it at the age of fifty-three 'cos you'd worked yourself to death.
I hated those hippy-dippy songs, man.
Really hated them. ~ Ozzy Osbourne

In the Philippines, formalizing home ownership was until recently a 168-step process involving fifty-three public and private agencies and taking between thirteen and twenty-five years. ~ Niall Ferguson

A pig whose diet is fifty to seventy percent peanuts grows a ham of incredibly sweet and delicate succulence which, well-cured, well-kept and well-cooked, will take precedence over any other ham the world affords. ~ Rex Stout

Well, there were, of course, people to call. A good fifty names in my telephone book, which I had acquired only a month ago. But there was no one I wanted to talk to, much less see. Maybe I was just depressed. In that case, long live depression! That hypothetical malady made it very easy for me to take the most important decision in my life. ~ Max Frei

Our mission is, in truth, historic and world changing - to build, over the next fifty years and beyond, a global low carbon economy. And it is not overdramatic to say that the character and course of the coming century will be set by how we measure up to this challenge ~ Gordon Brown

Fifty per cent of rock is having a good time. ~ Roger Daltrey

in October 2014, the United States was inundated with more than fifty thousand unaccompanied children from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. "They're fleeing from threats and violence in their home countries," noted Vox.com, "where things have gotten so bad that many families believe that they have no choice but to send their children on the long, dangerous journey north." Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador are among the most environmentally degraded and deforested regions in Central America. They cut their forests; we got their kids. It ~ Thomas L. Friedman

JACK
That is nonsense. If I marry a charming girl like Gwendolen, and she is the only girl I ever saw in my life that I would marry, I certainly won't want to know Bunbury.
ALGERNON
Then your wife will. You don't seem to realize, that in married life three is company and two is none.
JACK
That, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years.
ALGERNON
Yes; and that the happy English home has proved in half the time. ~ Oscar Wilde

You are one brave woman," he whispers, "I am in awe of you. ~ E.L. James

On the hearth, in front of a back-brand to give substance, blazed a fire of thorns, that crackled 'like the laughter of the fool.'

Nineteen persons were gathered here. Of these, five women, wearing gowns of various bright hues, sat in chairs along the wall; girls shy and not shy filled the window-bench; four men, including Charley Jake the hedge-carpenter, Elijah New the parish-clerk, and John Pitcher, a neighboring dairyman, the shepherd's father-in-law, lolled in the settle; a young man and maid, who were blushing over tentative pourparlers on a life companionship, sat beneath the corner-cupboard; and an elderly engaged man of fifty or upward moved restlessly about from spots where his betrothed was not to the spot where she was. Enjoyment was pretty general, and so much the more prevailed in being unhampered by conventional restrictions. Absolute confidence in each other's good opinion begat perfect ease, while the finishing stroke of manner, amounting to a truly princely serenity, was lent to the majority by the absence of any expression or trait denoting that they wished to get on in the world, enlarge their minds, or do any eclipsing thing whatever - which nowadays so generally nips the bloom and bonhomie of all except the two extremes of the social scale.

("The Three Strangers") ~ Thomas Hardy

That's something you'll have to decide for yourself.. I think you have a right to live however you want. Whether you're fifteen or fifty-one, what does it matter? But unfortunately society doesn't agree.
~Oshima, page 198 ~ Haruki Murakami

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it. ~ George Bernard Shaw

When Mr. William Faraday sat down to write his memoirs after fifty-eight years of blameless inactivity he found the work of inscribing the history of his life almost as tedious as living it had been, and so, possessing a natural invention coupled with a gift for locating the easier path, he began to prevaricate a little upon the second page, working his way up to downright lying on the sixth and subsequent folios. ~ Margery Allingham

You are fifty different kinds of twisted."
"Only fifty? Val, you wound me. ~ Nenia Campbell

People need to understand. If they go to a show on Broadway and find seventy people working but only fifty spectators, how much would the ticket cost? That's what El Bulli's about. There are seventy actors who are playing for just fifty spectators. Is the price expensive? It's relative. How much does a normal dinner at a five-star hotel restaurant cost? Four hundred dollars. It's the same as El Bulli. But you can also think of it this way: How much would it cost to eat something that nobody else is eating? ~ Ferran Adria

First of all ... I have standards. I've never been with an ugly woman.
Ever. Second of all, I wanted to sleep with you. I thought about throwing you over my couch fifty different ways, but I haven't because I don't see you that way anymore. It's not that I'm not attracted to you, I just think you're better than that. ~ Jamie McGuire

You know", Grandma says, "you could learn a lot from Dr.Quinn. She knows how to make soap from a sheep's guts. And she had twins when she was fifty. Fifty! ~ Meg Cabot

Statin drugs are meant to lower cholesterol in your blood. But there is an asymmetry, and a severe one. One needs to treat fifty high risk persons for five years to avoid a single cardiovascular event. Statins can potentially harm people who are not very sick, for whom the benefits are either minimal or totally nonexistent. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Madame Thenardier was approaching her forties, which is equivalent to fifty in a woman ... ~ Victor Hugo

Then Er Lang was looking at me ruefully. "You have taken at least fifty years of my life!"
I was stricken. "Take it back!"
"I can't. But fortunately, my life span is many times yours."
"How long can a dragon live?"
"A thousand years, if he is lucky. Not all of us are, of course." He raised an eyebrow.
"I'm sorry." I couldn't look him in the eye. Instead, my gaze was drawn to the strong line of his throat. If he had given me blood, I would surely have killed him. But Er Lang was struggling to sit up.
"I should have stopped you sooner. Though I now understand why men succumb to ghosts." He spoke lightly, but my ears blazed with mortification.
"You were the one who put your tongue in my mouth!" I blurted out, regretting it instantly. To talk about other people's tongues was the worst, revealing the depths of my inexperience. And yet, the memory of his made me shiver and burn, as though I had a fever. It hadn't been like this with Tian Bai; it was easy to understand where I stood with him. But he had been courting me, whereas Er Lang was an entirely different commodity. We did not have that sort of relationship, I reminded myself.
But he merely gave me a wry glance. "I was a little carried away."
"Thank you," I said at last. I realized it was the first time I had thanked him formally. ~ Yangsze Choo

The storage capacity of the average human brain is two-hundred and fifty-six exabytes. However, the average adult human only uses approximately one billionth of that storage space effectively. This means my knowledge capacity is approximately three thousand trillion times that of your average human. ~ Michael Monroe

I'm not a fool; I know Ellie's crushing on me hard. I'm aware of how she looks at me when she thinks I'm not looking: so idolizing it feels like I'm on a pedestal fifty-feet tall. Other times, her stare is so naked with desire it hits me like a punch to the gut. Because as alluring as Ellie is…she's also young and way fucking off limits. ~ Emma Chase

Fifty Aristotle's equals one King Solomon. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

We have built a total of about 1250 of this aircraft, but only fifty were allowed to be used as fighters - as interceptors. And out of this fifty, there were never more than 25 operational. So we had only a very, very few. ~ Adolf Galland

"Are we alone in the universe?" This is a question which goes back to the dawn of history, but for most of human history it has been in the province of religion and philosophy. Fifty or something years ago, however, it became part of science. ~ Paul Davies

I had them running for two months once, so about one-fifty billion miles a second - those big numbers, sometimes they seem to stare right back at you, don't they? ~ Tom Melly

Palpatine, she has only just turned thirteen!" Palpatine spread his hands. "Naboo has elected younger Queens, m'lady. And hers could be a reign that will last fifty years. ~ James Luceno

When i was 9 I didn't go to Narnia, when i grew 11 my Hogwarts letter didn't come, again when i was twelve my satyr didn't come and now I'll wait till I'm fifty maybe the hunger games will come ~ Javeria My Own Quote

What havoc has been made of books through every century of the Christian era? Where are fifty gospels, condemned as spurious by the bull of Pope Gelasius? Where are the forty wagon-loads of Hebrew manuscripts burned in France, by order of another pope, because suspected of heresy? Remember the 'index expurgatorius', the inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter and the guillotine. ~ John Adams

What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour - landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard ... ~ Virginia Woolf

Five hundred and fifty generations have lived here. Only the stories we tell each other will create us as a true Canadian people. ~ Rudy Wiebe

Tomorrow, I am fifty-two years old. And I want to say unequivocally that I am very happy to be alive, that being alive is better than being dead. And if I have just one wish it is this: that you work with all your might and love with all your heart and never lose hope and never give up. ~ Betsy Lerner

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

The ideal of having a real job that you risk your soul in and make good or be damned, belongs to the heroic age of capitalist enterprise, imbued with self-righteous beliefs about hard work, thrift, and public morals. Such an ideal might still have been mentioned in public fifty years ago; in our era of risk-insured semimonopolies and advertised vices it would be met with a ghastly stillness. ~ Paul Goodman

Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I've shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I'll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that's a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful. ~ Maggie Smith

Do you know what you mean to me?" he murmurs, "If something happened to you, because of me ... " His voice trails off, his brow creasing, and the pain that flashes across his face is almost palpable. He looks so vulnerable - his fear very much apparent. ~ E.L. James

The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love. ~ Margaret Atwood

Political leaders and presidents were shot at or assassinated about as often as rap artists are today. An unpopular war cost fifty-eight thousand American lives. Those who bravely served our country returned home to be treated with unwarranted scorn. Promiscuous sex and hallucinatory drugs were celebrated as the path to enlightenment. Race riots set major cities aflame. Police were called pigs. And no one over the age of thirty was to be trusted. Worse, some people wore leisure suits - in public - and they were proud of it. ~ Larry Osborne

After a moment, he shook his head. "Quickly and mercifully is best. Clay? Go out and ask her into the alley."
Clay looked at Jeremy as if he'd just been told to dance the rumba on a public thoroughfare.
I bit back a laugh. "Just walk over to her and point at the alley. Maybe say…I don't know…something like 'fifty bucks.' " I looked at Jeremy. "Does that sound right? Fifty?"
His brows shot up. "Why are you asking me?"
"I wasn't - I just meant, as a general…" I threw up my hands. "How am I supposed to know how much a hooker costs?"
"Your guess is as good as mine."
I sighed. "Fine, fifty bucks sounds good. It's not like she knows what the going rate is anyway. Just say
that and nod at the alley. She'll follow."
Clay continued to stare at us in silent horror.
"Oh, for God's sake, you're ready to break her neck but you can't - "
"I'll do it," Jeremy said, then shot a look my way. "Not that I have any more experience soliciting prostitutes than Clay does."
"Never crossed my mind."
A mock glare, then he headed out. ~ Kelley Armstrong

I think the picture in Jet magazine showing Emmett Till's mutilation was probably the greatest media product in the last forty or fifty years because that picture stimulated a lot of interest and anger on the part of blacks all over the country. ~ Charles Diggs

I will gladly lecture for fifty dollars, but I'll not be a guest for less than a hundred. ~ Elbert Hubbard

breath,
life after seven decades plus three years
is a lot of breathing. seventy three years on this
earth is a lot of taking in and giving out, is a
life of coming from somewhere and for many a bunch
of going nowhere.

how do we celebrate a poet who has created
music with words for over fifty years, who has
showered magic on her people, who has redefined
poetry into a black world exactness
thereby giving the universe an insight into
darkroads?

just say she interprets beauty and wants to
give life, say she is patient with phoniness
and doesn't mind people calling her gwen or sister.
say she sees the genius in our children, is visionary
about possibilities, sees as clearly as ray charles and
stevie wonder, hears like determined elephants looking
for food. say that her touch is fine wood, her memory
is like an african roadmap detailing adventure and
clarity, yet returning to chicago's south evans
to record the journey. say her voice is majestic
and magnetic as she speaks in poetry, rhythms, song
and spirited trumpets, say she is dark skinned,
melanin rich, small-boned, hurricane-willed,
with a mind like a tornado redefining the landscape.

life after seven decades plus three years
is a lot of breathing.
gwendolyn, gwen, sister g has
not disappointed our expectations.
in the middle
Haki R. Madhubuti