Home > Topic > twenty-five years
1 " As Tim followed me up the narrow stairwell, he playfully pinched my butt with every step, a pleasant (and painful--in a black-and-blue sort of way) reminder that all I had yearned for as a student twenty-five years before had come true, even if I hadn't taken the time to notice it until now: I was happy. At twenty years old, had I articulated what I thought I needed in life, I would have probably said a big house, a successful husband, and a great career. Yet all I really needed for true happiness was the homeless, unemployed bus driver right behind me, pinching my butt every step of the way. "
― Doreen Orion , Queen of the Road: The True Tale of 47 States, 22,000 Miles, 200 Shoes, 2 Cats, 1 Poodle, a Husband, and a Bus with a Will of Its Own
2 " For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You've been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say! "
― Wilhelm Reich , Listen, Little Man!
3 " The conception of two people living together for twenty-five years without having a cross word suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep "
― A.P. Herbert
4 " …Mrs. Warren allowed her book to fall closed upon her lap, and her attractive face awakened to an expression of agreeable expectation, in itself denoting the existence of interesting and desirable qualities in the husband at the moment inserting his latch-key in the front door preparatory to mounting the stairs and joining her. The man who, after twenty-five years of marriage, can call, by his return to her side, this expression to the countenance of an intelligent woman is, without question or argument, an individual whose life and occupations are as interesting as his character and points of view. "
― Frances Hodgson Burnett , The Methods Of Lady Walderhurst
5 " Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of World Book and Childcraft. Think of checks written for family photos. Think of credit cards charged for vacations. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth. Think of your mother, who had no father. And your grandmother, who was abandoned by her father. And your grandfather, who was left behind by his father. And think of how Prince's daughter was now drafted into those solemn ranks and deprived of her birthright — that vessel which was her father, which brimmed with twenty-five years of love and was the investment of her grandparents and was to be her legacy. "
― Ta-Nehisi Coates
6 " Who can see twenty-five years into the future?” she had asked. “Your guess is as good as theirs. Confidence is everything. "
― John Perkins , The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
7 " People who reported having a terrible traumatic experience and who kept the experience a secret had far more health problems than people who openly talked about their traumas. Why would keeping a secret be so toxic? More importantly, if you asked people to disclose emotionally powerful secrets, would their health improve? The answer, my students and I soon discovered, was yes.We began running experiments where people were asked to write about traumatic experiences for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for three to four consecutive days. Compared to people who were told to write about nonemotional topics, those who wrote about trauma evidenced improved physical health. Later studies found that emotional writing boosted immune function, brought about drops in blood pressure, and reduced feelings of depression and elevated daily moods. Now, over twenty-five years after the first writing experiment, more than two hundred similar writing studies have been conducted all over the world. While the effects are often modest, the mere act of translating emotional upheavals into words is consistently associated with improvements in physical and mental health. "
― James W. Pennebaker , The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us
8 " Even sentenced to twenty-five years in prison Ted didn’t get what he deserved. Maybe his prison mates would give it to him. "
9 " He placed a pinch of snow on his tongue and thought of making snow ice cream with Frank and their mother when they were small boys - 'First you stir in the vanilla' - Frank standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together. "
― Emily St. John Mandel , Station Eleven
