Forty Years

Famous quotes containing the words forty years, forty and/or years:

    The language I have learnt these forty years,
    My native English, now I must forgo,
    And now my tongue’s use is to me no more
    Than an unstringèd viol or a harp.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    Punishment followed on a grand scale. For ten days, an unconscionable length of time, my father blessed the palms of his child’s outstretched, four-year-old hands with a sharp switch. Seven strokes a day on each hand; that makes one hundred forty strokes and then some. This put an end to the child’s innocence.
    Christoph Meckel (20th century)

    We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead—and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.
    Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)