Home > Topic > a million years
1 " If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the " Fuck you" signs in the world. It's impossible. "
2 " You should be spreading the good word. You should be etching the good word onto the glass scanning beds of library photocopiers. You should be scraping the truth onto old auto parts and throwing them off bridges so that people digging in the mud in a million years will question the world, too. You should be carving eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe soles so that your every trail speaks of thinking and faith and belief. You should be designing molecules that crystallize into poems of devotion. You should be making bar codes that print out truth, not lies. You shouldn't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has the truth stamped on it--a demand for people to reach a finer place! ...Your new life will be tinged with urgency, as though you're digging out the victims of an avalanche. If you're not spending every waking moment of your life living the truth, if you're not plotting every moment to boil the carcass of the old order, then you're wasting your day. "
― Douglas Coupland , Player One: What Is to Become of Us (CBC Massey Lectures)
3 " Never in a million years would he have imagined her to look at him like that - eyelids batting of their own volition and her lips puckering in expectation as she leaned slightly forward. Yet here she was doing precisely that - it was much too comical to stop the smile crossing his face.And that was when she hit him.It wasn't a faint slap on the cheek. No, Alexandra put all her weight behind the right hook that landed squarely across his jaw, throwing him completely off balance.Damnation! "
4 " Imagine for a moment that you are the proud owner of a large house which you have spent years of your life painting and decorating and filling with everything you love. It's your home. It's something you've made your own, something for you to be remembered by, something that, perhaps years later, your children and grandchildren can visit and get a view of your life in. It's part of your creativity, your hard work... it's your property.Now suppose you decide to go camping for a couple of weeks. You lock your door and assume that nobody is going to break in... but they do, and when you return home, to your horror you find that not only do these trespassers break in, but they also have quite uniquely imaginative ways of disrespecting, vandalizing and corrupting everything within your property. They light fires on your lawn, your topiary hedges are in heaps of black ashes. There's some blatantly obscene graffiti splattered across your front door, offensive images and rude words splashed on the walls and windows. Your television has been tipped over. Your photographs of family and friends have had the heads cut out of them. There's mold growing in the refrigerator, bottles of booze tipped over on the table, and cigarette smoke embedded into the carpeting. Your beloved houseplants are dead, your furniture has been stripped down and ruined. Basically, the thing you've spent years working for and creating within your lifetime has been tampered with to the point where it is just a grim joke.So, I feel terrible for poor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen and Lewis Carroll, who must be spinning in their graves since they have no rights to their own works of fiction anymore. I'm all for readers being able to read books for free once and only when the deceased author's copyright eventually ends. Still though, did Doyle ever think in a million years that his wonderful characters would be dragged through the mud of every pervy fanfiction that the sick internet geek can think of to create? Did Carroll ever suspect that Alice and the Hatter would become freakish clown-like goth caricatures in Tim Burton's CGI-infested films? Would Austen really want her writing to be sold as badly-formatted ebooks?The sharing of this Public Domain content isn't really an issue. Stories are meant to be told, meant to echo onward forever. That's what makes them magical. That being said, in the Information Age, there's a real lack of respect towards the creators of this original content. If, when I've been dead for 70 years and I then no longer have the rights to my novels, somebody gets the bright idea of doing anything funny with any of those novels, my ghost is going to rise from the grave and do some serious ass-kicking. "
5 " At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all. For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population has abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless. New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Without even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that ended only with the dawn of space exploration. "
― Carl Sagan , Contact
6 " The literal sense of the author was " creation is the orderly act of a loving Creator God." What the modern reader often hears, however, is " The universe was made in six 24-hour days." This is as wrong-headed as taking me to mean I actually stood in line a million years or that my cardiac tissue has been torn in half or that Christ had delusions of being a grape plant.-- Making Senses of Scripture "
7 " In God's scheme what is a few billion years here and there. Perhaps there have come and gone a dozen human civilizations in the past billion years that we know nothing about. And after this civilization we are living in destroys itself, it will all start up again in a million years when the planet has all its messes cleaned up. Then, finally, one of these civilizations, say five billion years from now, will last because people treat each other the way they ought to. "
― Leon Uris , QB VII
8 " There’s a power I only feel when I’m with Isaiah. A boldness I’ve never possessed in my life. Never in a million years would I have imagined I’d be the girl who’d say she was falling fast for a boy before he did. Never in a million years did I think I’d be lying in bed with a totally ripped guy that has his shirt off. But Isaiah has this effect on me. He makes me feel stronger than I really am. "
― Katie McGarry , Dare You To (Pushing the Limits, #2)
9 " This boy - his name was Eric - said he thought it disgusting the way all the girls at my college stood around on the porches under the porch lights and in the bushes in plain view, necking madly before the one o'clock curfew, so everybody passing by could see them. A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals. "
― Sylvia Plath , The Bell Jar
10 " In any nation but the USA, it is taken for granted that a man of distinction, ability, wealth or power will keep a mistress and a few girlfriends on the side. Only in America, still suffering from its grotesque, hypocritical Puritan heritage, do we persist in attempting to deny and repeal a million years of basic primate biology. "
― Edward Abbey , Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
11 " JAMIE'S SONG 'Million Years/Billion Deaths':Every beat of my heart says,‘Who’d wanna be a heart?’Every cell in my body,Wants to split apart.Though I know I have to be strong.And I’m sure I won’t have to wait long.But when each day lasts forever,And when every night lasts much longer,Tell me how am I supposed to go on?But if each moment with you,Lasts as long as these lonely nights do,Then I’d wait a million years for you.Yes, I’ll wait a million years for you.And I’ll die a billion deaths to get to you.To get to you…Every breath I take whispers,‘Who’d wanna be in love?’Every vein in my body,Has bled dry, my love.Though I know I have to be strong.And I’m sure I won’t have to wait long.But when each day lasts forever,And when every night lasts much longer,Tell me how am I supposed to go on?But if each moment with you,Lasts as long as these lonely nights do,Then I’d wait a million years for you.Yes, I’ll wait a million years for you.And I’ll die a billion deaths to get to you.To get to you… "
― Neha Yazmin , Every Little Piece of Us (Soulmates Saga, #3)
12 " And what does it amount to?" said Satan, with his evil chuckle. " Nothing at all. You gain nothing; you always come out where you went in. For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating itself and monotonously reperforming this dull nonsense--to what end? No wisdom can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel defiled if you touched them; would shut the door in your face if you proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight for, die for, and are not ashamed of it, but proud; whose existence is a perpetual insult to you and you are afraid to resent it; who are mendicants supported by your alms, yet assume toward you the airs of benefactor toward beggar; who address you in the language of master to slave, and are answered in the language of slave to master; who are worshiped by you with your mouth, while in your heart--if you have one--you despise yourselves for it. The first man was a hypocrite and a coward, qualities which have not yet failed in his line; it is the foundation upon which all civilizations have been built. "
13 " . . . distant views seemed to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest. "
― Virginia Woolf , To the Lighthouse
14 " The earth is over a million years old "
15 " She tapped out a beat on the edge of the piano as I tripped and plummeted through the refrain of “Spacebar,” trying to translate the synth chords into a piano bit on the fly. It had been a million years since I’d played it.But it was still catchy.Whoever had written this song had known what they were doing. "
― Maggie Stiefvater , Sinner (The Wolves of Mercy Falls, #3.5)
16 " The lass was no damsel. He’d prepared himself for a hard sell, one that might require a few extra knee-weakening smiles, perhaps so much as a seduction, but he’d never in a million years expected the disaster that landed his arms. The disaster named Alison Ross. "
― Kerrigan Byrne , The Scot Beds His Wife (Victorian Rebels, #5)
17 " Dallying? Dallying, mind you?" She marched up the last few steps. " As if I would ever min a million years dally with you." She wouldn't. Really, she wouldn't!His low chuckle behind her put the lie to her words. " Never say never, my lady. A vow like that is sure to come back to bit you in the arse. Which would be a shame, given that you have such a fine one. "
18 " Julie Seagle: I would never in a million years go skydiving.Finn is God: What if I took you? "
― Jessica Park , Flat-Out Love (Flat-Out Love, #1)
19 " You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us. "
― Michael Crichton , Jurassic Park and Congo
20 " Even though I can’t tell others whether they should chase their marathon dreams, I highly recommend they do something completely out of character, something they never in a million years thought they’d do, something they may fail miserably at. Because sometimes the places where you end up finding your true self are the places you never thought to look. That, and I don’t want to be the only one who sucks at something. "
― Dawn Dais , The Nonrunner's Marathon Guide for Women: Get Off Your Butt and On with Your Training
