New Years Toast Quotes

May your neighbors respect you, Trouble neglect you, The angels protect you, And heaven accept you. Irish blessing ~ Janice Thompson

About 4,400 years ago 8 people stepped off Noah's ark. According to the United Nations Population Growth Statistics, the world's population grows at about .47% per year. That is the growth rate for all civilizations who kept records. Suppose you put $8.00 in the bank 4,400 years ago and received .47% a year. How much money would you have? What a coincidence! It would be about $7,000,000,000. That's kind of odd, because 4,400 years ago 8 people stepped off the ark and now we have about 7,000,000,000 people on planet earth. God's math works!
Compound interest is something we teach to seventh-graders. You don't have to be a professor to figure this out. A twelve-year-old can do the calculation. Ask any seventh-grader, the algebraic equation looks like this: A=P (1+r/n)t . . . where "A " is the ending amount (about 7,000,000,000 in this case), "P " is the beginning amount (8 in this case), "r " is the interest rate (.47% in this case), "n " is the number of compoundings a year (1 in this case), and "t " is the total number of years (4,400 in this case).
pg 11 ~ Michael Ben Zehabe

Thirty- eight years old and he was finished. He sipped at the coffee and remembered where he had gone wrong
or right. He'd simply gotten tired
of the insurance game, of the small offices and high glass partitions, the clients; he'd simply gotten tired of cheating on his wife, of squeezing secretaries in the elevator and in the halls;
he'd gotten tired of Christmas parties and New Year's parties and birthdays, and payments on new cars and furniture payments
light, gas, water
the whole bleeding complex of necessities.
He'd gotten tired and quit, that's all. The divorce came soon enough and the drinking came soon enough, and suddenly he was out of it. He had nothing, and he found out that having nothing was difficult too. It was another type of burden. If only there were some gentler road in between. It seemed a man only had two choices
get in on the hustle or be a bum. ~ Charles Bukowski

Only about seventy years ago was chemistry, like a grain of seed from a ripe fruit, separated from the other physical sciences. With Black, Cavendish and Priestley, its new era began. Medicine, pharmacy, and the useful arts, had prepared the soil upon which this seed was to germinate and to flourish. ~ Justus Von Liebig

Disillusionment can come as fast as a gust, but building faith that the government won't inflate again is like building a new sailboat, a project of years. ~ Amity Shlaes

I went to New Zealand this year, and, whew man, I know a lot of people want to go there. But let me just tell you, it's 22 hours by plane. So, if you have the opportunity, don't. ~ Lewis Black

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. ~ T. S. Eliot

Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting "prison-industrial complex" - the business interests that capitalize on prison construction - made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. Incarceration became the answer to everything - health care problems like drug addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America's prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States. ~ Bryan Stevenson

Not long after I'd first met Doc, we were sitting on our rock on the hill behind the rose garden and I had asked him why I was a sinner and what I had done to be condemned to eternal hell fire unless I was born again.
He sat for a long time looking over the valley, and then he said, :Peekay, God is too busy making the sun come up and go down and watching so the moon floats just right in the sky to be concerned with such rubbish. Only man ants always God should be there to condemn this on and save that one. Always it is man who wants to make heaven and hell. God is too busy training the bees to make honey and every morning opening up all the new flowers for business."He paused and smiled "In Mexico there is a cactus that even sometimes you would think God forgets. But no, my friend, this is not so. On a full moon in the desert every one hundred years he remembers and he opens up a single flower to bloom. And if you should be there and you see this beautiful cactus blossom painted silver by the moon and laughing up at the stars, this, Peekay, is heaven.: He looked at me, his deep blue eyes sharp and penetrating. "This is the faith in God the cactus has". We had sat for a while before he spoke again. "it is better just to get on with the business living and minding your own business and maybe, if God likes the way you do things, he may just let you flower for a day or a night. But don't go pestering and begging and telling him all your stupid little sins, that way you will ~ Bruce Courtenay

O Lord God! What plans do you have for me this year? ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire. We stayed ten days, and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer any point in keeping the apartment we still kept in New York. There were years when I called Los Angeles "the Coast," but they seem a long time ago. ~ Joan Didion

After all, a kiss between real lovers is not some type of contract, a neatly defined moment of pleasure, something obtained by greedy conquest, or any kind of clear saying of how it is. It is a grief-drenched hatching of two hearts into some ecstatic never-before-seen bird whose new uncategorizable form, unrecognized by the status quo, gives the slip to Death's sure rational deal. For love is a delicious and always messy extension of life that unfrantically outgrows mortality's rigid insistence on precise and efficient definition. Having all the answers means you haven't really ecstatically kissed or lived, thereby declaring the world defined and already finished. Loving all the questions on the other hand is a vitality that makes any length of life worth living. Loving doesn't mean you know all the notes and that you have to play all the notes, it just means you have to play the few notes you have long and beautifully.
Like the sight of a truly beautiful young woman, smooth and gliding, melting hearts at even a distant glimpse, that no words, no matter how capable, can truly describe; a woman whose beauty is only really known by those who take a perch on the vista of time to watch the years of life speak out their long ornate sentences of grooves as they slowly stretch into her smoothness, wrinkling her as she glides struggling, decade by decade, her gait mitigated by a long trail of heavy loads, joys, losses, and suffering whose joint-aching years of traveling into a m ~ Martin Prechtel

It seems like only yesterday that savers were dorks. They kept piggy banks. They drove last year's cars. They fished in their change purses for nickels while the superstars flashed credit cards. Today, values have changed. The new object of veneration is not money on the hoof but money in the bank - and the dorks all have it. ~ Jane Bryant Quinn

When what you're doing doesn't work for 50 years, it's time to try something new. ~ Barack Obama

And there is an earlier Wilson cycle, too, a billion years old, entrapped alongside the Appalachians: the Grenville, which rises to the surface in Central Park, New York, to remind us that the human and urban is no more than foam on the sea of the past. ~ Richard Fortey

As someone who came to New York in the 1970s, I was, like so many of my friends, a certified member of what we now call the 99 percent - and I was a lot closer to the bottom than to the top of that 99 percent. At some point during the intervening years, I moved into the 1 percent. ~ Graydon Carter

If you were a kid in 1955, you would pick up a copy of 'Popular Science' and it would say, 'This is the kind of car you're going to be driving in five years or in 20 years you'll be able to take a jet plane from New York to London in four hours,' or something like that. We actually got used to the idea that the future's going to be different. ~ David Gerrold

Ego Tripping

I was born in the congo
I walked to the fertile crescent and built
the sphinx
I designed a pyramid so tough that a star
that only glows every one hundred years falls
into the center giving divine perfect light
I am bad

I sat on the throne
drinking nectar with allah
I got hot and sent an ice age to europe
to cool my thirst
My oldest daughter is nefertiti
the tears from my birth pains
created the nile
I am a beautiful woman

I gazed on the forest and burned
out the sahara desert
with a packet of goat's meat
and a change of clothes
I crossed it in two hours
I am a gazelle so swift
so swift you can't catch me

For a birthday present when he was three
I gave my son hannibal an elephant
He gave me rome for mother's day
My strength flows ever on

My son noah built new/ark and
I stood proudly at the helm
as we sailed on a soft summer day
I turned myself into myself and was
jesus
men intone my loving name
All praises All praises
I am the one who would save

I sowed diamonds in my back yard
My bowels deliver uranium
the filings from my fingernails are
semi-precious jewels
On a trip north
I caught a cold and blew
My nose giving oil to the arab world
I am so hip even my errors are correct
I sailed west to reach e ~ Nikki Giovanni

My son, Jett, is two, and when I was pregnant my nose got bigger, so I got a new one. Everything was bigger for a while after having Jet, but I knew I needed to be able to walk up my stairs without being winded. It took me two years to lose 60 lbs - lots of walking, bike-riding, kick-boxing and performing. ~ Jill Scott

I started when I was three years old, doing commercials and Modeling in New York, I liked it so much that I kept doing it. ~ Kirsten Dunst

Do what you do. This Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year's Eve, Twelfth Night, Valentine's Day, Mardi Gras, St. Paddy's Day, and every day henceforth. Just do what you do. Live out your life and your traditions on your own terms.
If it offends others, so be it. That's their problem. ~ Chris Rose

All New Years is to me is for taking down your dumb Christmas decorations. People who put up Christmas decorations, all they're saying is, 'Hey, we're not Jews.' ~ Rich Vos

I was a lawyer for 12 years in New York and Sweden. ~ Greg Poehler

Revelation, which is often associated with the end of things, also speaks of new beginnings - a new name (2:17); a new Jerusalem (3:12); a new heaven and a new earth (21:1); and all things new (21:5). It reads like a description of New Year's Eve. Ring out the old; ring in the new! ~ William J. Petersen

I work on holidays. I work on birthdays. I work on New Year's. I work. I keep my ears to the streets. ~ Juicy J

What remains of the dead? What remains of every one of us?

Tombstones sink in, moss covers them, and after a few centuries the name can no longer be read. Every forgotten grave is designated a new corpse.

As the generations passed, remembrance of the dead diminished until it was forgotten. What was called everlasting peace only lasted half a century. The bones were disturbed as the graveyards were mulched in to suburbs.

The earth had become too small, for the living and the dead. In half a century a funeral had become a luxury that only few could afford who had died before judgment day. But who cares about a single body when the whole planet is dying.

[...]

Earlier the remains of humanity had only had the right to be there as long as the living remembered them. A human being remembers their relatives, their friends and colleagues. But his conscience only reached back three generations before it faded away. Just more then fifty years.

With the same ease, you let the picture of our grandfather or your friend from school out of our conscience into absolute nothingness. The memories of a human can last longer than the bones, but as soon as the last one who remembered us has passed we dissolve with time.

[...]

Back then there was almost no more space in the thick family album for old and brown turned pictures, but almost nobody that looked through it could say for sure who was on the photos. ~ Dmitry Glukhovsky

Happy New Year, Julie."
"Happy New Year, Matty." She turned off the television and rolled onto her side. "Matty, I have another question for you."
"Uh-oh."
"Are you a skilled lover?"
"And that concludes our evening chat. ~ Jessica Park

You know what makes me feel old? When I see girls who are 20-something, or the new crop of actresses, and think, Aren't we kind of the same age? ~ Jennifer Aniston

In the future I would like to try other forms of racing, testing Formula cars or single seaters would be good, but again it is finding the time as I am incredibly busy. I don't think I have the time to try any other new sports. I have already cut skiing out of my routine in order to manage the racing and riding relationship. By the looks of things I am going to be busy for quite a few years. ~ Liz Halliday

The principle of fashion is ... the principle of the kaleidoscope. A new year can only bring us a new combination of the same elements; and about once in so often we go back and begin again. ~ Katharine Fullerton Gerould

New beginning accompanies new fears, new emotions and thus refine us…. ~ AuraOfThoughs

Alma Rene LaVoy was the most alive person Ling Chan has ever met. The pretty chorus girl was the light in the sky over Chinatown during a New Years celebration. ~ Libba Bray

And these years later, when I think of that essay, what I remember most is not the moment I saw my work in New Yorker font, not when I saw the illustration of my father, not the congratulatory phone calls and notes that followed, but that predawn morning in my bedroom, at my desk, the lights of cars below on Broadway, my computer screen glowing in the dark. ~ Dani Shapiro

I was extremely shy of approaching my hero but he, as I found out, was sorely in need of company. By then almost completely blind, he was claustrated and even a little confused and this may help explain the rather shocking attitude that he took to the blunt trauma that was being inflicted in the streets and squares around him. 'This was my country and it might be yet,' he intoned to me when the topic first came up, as it had to: 'But something came between it and the sun.' This couplet he claimed (I have never been able to locate it) was from Edmund Blunden, whose gnarled hand I had been so excited to shake all those years ago, but it was not the Videla junta that Borges meant by the allusion. It was the pre-existing rule of Juan Perón, which he felt had depraved and corrupted Argentine society. I didn't disagree with this at all - and Perón had victimized Borges's mother and sister as well as having Borges himself fired from his job at the National Library - but it was nonetheless sad to hear the old man saying that he heartily preferred the new uniformed regime, as being one of 'gentlemen' as opposed to 'pimps.' This was a touch like listening to Evelyn Waugh at his most liverish and bufferish. (It was also partly redeemed by a piece of learned philology or etymology concerning the Buenos Aires dockside slang for pimp: canfinflero. 'A canfinfla, you see,' said Borges with perfect composure, 'is a pussy or more exactly a cunt. So a canfinflero is a trafficker in cunt: in Ang ~ Christopher Hitchens

When we complain of having to do the same thing over and over, let us remember that God does not send new trees, strange flowers and different grasses every year. When the spring winds blow, they blow in the same way. In the same places the same dear blossoms lift up the same sweet faces, yet they never weary us. When it rains, it rains as it always has. Even so would the same tasks which fill our daily lives put on new meanings if we wrought them in the spirit of renewal from within
a spirit of growth and beauty. ~ Helen Keller

That wondrous instant of our meeting -
my mind's eye sees you standing there,
a vision transient and fleeting,
true beauty's spirit, pure and rare.

In toils of hopeless grief confounded,
amid life's noise and stress it seems
for long that tender voice resounded
and those sweet features came in dreams.

Years passed; the storms that life engenders
dispersed my former hopes of grace
and I forgot those accents tender,
the heavenly beauty of your face.

And in my dark incarceration
my days passed like the clouds above,
bereft alike of inspiration,
of tears, of life itself, of love.

My soul awoke to new existence,
again you stood before me there,
a vision lasting but an instant,
true beauty's spirit, pure and rare.

My heart relives the old sensation
and once more steal down from above,
God's benediction, inspiration,
and tears, and life itself and love. ~ Alexander Pushkin

My New Year's resolution is to stick to a good workout plan that will keep me healthy and happy. ~ James Lafferty