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1 " You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more." ) "
2 " The red firelight glowed on their two bonny heads and revealed their faces, animated with the eager interest of children; for, though he was twenty-three and she eighteen, each had so much of novelty to feel, and learn, that neither experienced nor evinced the sentiments of sober disenchanted maturity. "
― Emily Brontë , Wuthering Heights
3 " But while my inner voice was clearly telling me I was at my core an entrepreneur, it's inconvenient to decide at twenty-three that you can't really work for other people. "
― , If You Have to Cry, Go Outside: And Other Things Your Mother Never Told You
4 " My name is Nathan, just twenty-three and given to the curation of stories. I listen, retain, then polish and release them over the fire at night, when the others hush and lean forward in their desire to hear of the past. They crave romance, particularly when autumn sets in and cold nights await them, and so I speak of Alice, and Bethany, and Sarah, and Val, and other dead women who all once had lustrous hair and never a bad word on their plump lips. I can remember this is not how they were; I knew them, I knew them! Only six years have passed and yet I mythologize them as if it is six thousand. I am not culpable. Language is changing, like the earth, like the sea. We live in lonely, fateful flux, outnumbered and outgrown. "
― , The Beauty
5 " I remember at the reception you said to me, 'I'm the daughter of a father who's been married five times. Mother killed herself. My sister killed herself. My brother has been in a mental institution. I'm twenty-three and divorced with two kids.' I said, 'Brooke, either you've got to open the window right now'--we were on the tenth floor--'either you've got to open the window right now and jump out, or say " I'm going to live," because you're right, it's the worst family history that anybody ever had, and either you jump out the window or you live. "
6 " Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported missing. "
― Dennis Lehane , Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro, #4)
7 " This is my favorite part of the day. “Good morning, Class Two C,” I say. The entire class leaps up and sings out, “Good morning, miss!” Twenty-three faces are smiling at me. Sometimes they shout it with so much conviction that I laugh. "
― Jamie Zeppa , Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey Into Bhutan
8 " Imagine that the genome is a book.There are twenty-three chapters, called CHROMOSOMES.Each chapter contains several thousand stories, called GENES.Each story is made up of paragraphs, called EXTONS, which are interrupted by advertisements called INTRONS.Each paragraph is made up of words, called CODONS.Each word is written in letters called BASES. "
― Matt Ridley , Genome: the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
9 " Nick demonstrated twenty-three ways of communicating without words by fanning himself with a napkin. " This one means oops, your fly is open, sir, and if you lower the fan a little and look at someone over the top of it, it means wow, I'd like to marry you. But if you do it the other way around, it means ha ha, we are now at war with Spain. "
10 " You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three "
11 " I was sitting in a bar one night, talking rather loudly about a person I hated - and a man with a beard sat down beside me, and he said amiably, " Why don't you have him killed?" " I've thought of it," I said. " Don't think I haven't." " Let me help you to think about it clearly," he said. His voice was deep. His beak was large. He wore a black mohair suit and a black string tie. His little red mouth was obscene. " You're looking at the situation through a red haze of hate," he said. " What you need are the calm, wise services of a murder counsellor, who can plan the job for you, and save you an unnecessary trip to the hot squat." " Where do I find one?" I said." You've found one, " he said." You're crazy," I said." That's right," he said. " I've been in and out mental institutions all my life. That makes my services all the more appealing. If I were to testify against you, your lawyer would have no trouble establishing that I was a well-known nut, and a convicted felon besides." " What was the felony?" I said." A little thing - practising medicine without a license," he said." Not murder then?" I said." No," he said, " but that doesn't mean I haven't murdered. As a matter of fact, I murdered almost everyone who had anything to do with convicting me of practising medicine without a license." He looked at the ceiling, did some arithmetic. " Twenty-two, twenty-three - maybe more," he said. " Maybe more. I've killed them over a period of years, and I haven't read the paper every single day. "
12 " Bashere shrugged, grinning brhind his grey-streaked moustaches, " When I first slept in a saddle, Muad Cheade was Marshal-General. The man was as mad as a hare in spring thaw. Twice every day he searched his bodyservant for poison, and he drank nothing but vinegar and water which he claimed was sovereign against the poison the fellow fed him, but he ate everything the man prepared for as long as I knew him. Once he had a grove of oaks chopped down because they were looking at him. And then insisted they be given decent funerals; he gave the oration. Do you have any idea how long it takes to dig graves for twenty-three oak trees?" " Why didn't somebody do something? His Family?" " Those not as mad as him, or madder, were afraid to look at him sideways. Tenobia's father wouldn't have let anyone touch Cheade anyway. He might have been insane, but he could outgeneral anyone I ever saw. He never lost a battle. He never even came close to losing. "
13 " It's completely logical," explained the Dodecahedron. " The more you want, the less you get, and the less you get, the more you have. Simple arithmetic, that's all. Suppose you had something and added something to it. What would that make?" " More," said Milo quickly." Quite correct," he nodded. " Now suppose you had something and added nothing to it. What would you have?" " The same," he answered again, without much conviction. " Splendid," cried the Dodecahedron. " And suppose you had something and added less than nothing to it. What would you have then?" " FAMINE!" roared the anguished Humbug, who suddenly realized that that was exactly what he'd eaten twenty-three bowls of. "
14 " This sentence consists of eleven words, twenty-three syllables and seventy-four letters. "
