These years ago quotes will inspire you. Years ago you use ago when you are referring to past time.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging years ago quotes, years ago sayings, and years ago proverbs.
Best Years Ago Quotes
- “I could write songs about politics, but I’m conscious of not writing songs that sound the same as the ones I wrote 30 years ago.” ~ Paul Weller
- “A hundred years ago, if you had a child out of marriage, you’d be a social disgrace. Today women feel comfortable enough economically and culturally to bring up a child without a recognized commitment from a man.” ~ Helen Fisher
- “I just feel like if I start opening the door to talking about my university experience, then people just kind of… own everything. There was a lot of stuff a couple of years ago saying that I was bullied at Brown and awful things like that, none of which were true.” ~ Emma Watson
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“I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.” ~ James D. Watson
- “Sexism is alive and well! We were saying this forty years ago. I’m an optimist, so I like to think we’ve progressed in some ways – in Australia, we get equal pay.” ~ Jacki Weaver
- “There’s an idea I came across a few years ago that I love: My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance and in inverse proportion to my expectations. That’s the key for me. If I can accept the truth of ‘This is what I’m facing – not what can I expect but what I am experiencing now’ – then I have all this freedom to do other things.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “I’m not sure what I think about current fashion, though. A few years ago, I would have said it’s really, really bad and you hardly ever see anybody looking good. There must be some very good designers in the world.” ~ Vivienne Westwood
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“Eighteen years ago, the Holy Spirit led me to establish a church in the heart of Times Square.” ~ David Wilkerson
- “For years I felt that I didn’t have enough stamina and then, four years ago, I felt like I was not getting enough air but I was diagnosed with exercise-induced asthma. The medicine for asthma never worked.” ~ Venus Williams
- “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.” ~ E. O. Wilson
- “The historical circumstance of interest is that the tropical rain forests have persisted over broad parts of the continents since their origins as stronghold of the flowering plants 150 million years ago.” ~ E. O. Wilson
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“Just because society, and government, and whatever was different 100 years ago, doesn’t mean that people didn’t have sex, pick their nose, or swear.” ~ Kate Winslet
- “What a turnaround in sentiment ‘Glee’ exemplifies. It was only a few years ago that pursuing the dream of a Broadway career or cabaret stardom relegated some poor yearning dope to a lavender ghetto of losers, self-deluders, and social rejects.” ~ James Wolcott
- “My role 14 years ago in Richard III – that was the first time I played a bad guy and learned a lot about it – they have all the fun!” ~ Denzel Washington
- “Even before I had an assistant, my calendar was color-coded and I had all these different e-mail rules for how to prioritize e-mails, so I made it a point years ago to figure all that stuff out because my life was a mess.” ~ Chris Hardwick
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“Do not think of knocking out another person’s brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago.” ~ Horace Mann
- “I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
- “Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” ~ Eugene V. Debs
- “It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, i thought I was an artist. I no longer think about it. I am. There are no more books to be written, thank God.” ~ Henry Miller
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“But my lord, when we addressed this issue a few years ago, didn’t you argue the other side?” He said, “That’s true, but when I get more evidence I sometimes change my mind. What do you do?” ~ John Maynard Keynes
- “I think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self-contained; I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition; They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins; They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God; Not one is dissatisfied-not one is demented with the mania of owning things; Not one kneels to another, nor his kind that lived thousands of years ago; Not one is responsible or industrious over the whole earth.” ~ Walt Whitman
- “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; They called me the hyacinth girl.’ —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Od’ und leer das Meer.” ~ T. S. Eliot
- “I’m an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas / but not afraid / to speak my lonesomeness in a car, / because not only my lonesomeness / it’s Ours, all over America, / O tender fellows –/ & spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy / in the moon 100 years ago or in / the middle of Kansas now.” ~ Allen Ginsberg
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“Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into the nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.” ~ Thomas Wolfe
- “…so now, Mrs. Ramsay thought, she could return to that dreamland, that unreal but fascinating place, the Manning’s drawing-room at Marlow twenty years ago; where one moved about without haste or anxiety, for there was no future to worry about. She knew what had happened to them, what to her. It was like reading a good book again, for she knew the end of that story, since it had happened twenty years ago, and life, which shot down even from this dining-room table in cascades, heaven knows where, was sealed up there, and lay, like a lake, placidly between its banks.” ~ Virginia Woolf
- “Last night I encountered a dream cat with a very long neck and a body like a human fetus, gray and translucent. I don’t know what it needs or how to provide for it. Another dream years ago of a human child with eyes on stalks. It is very small, but can walk and talk “Don’t you want me?” Again, I don’t know how to care for the child. But I am dedicated to protecting and nurturing him at any cost! It is the function of the Guardian to protect hybrids and mutants in the vulnerable stage of infancy.” ~ William S. Burroughs
- “I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.” ~ Jack Kerouac
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“Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.” ~ Susanna Clarke
- “I said it before and I’ll say it again: books are dead, plays are dead, poems are dead: there’s only movies. Music is still okay because music is a soundtrack. Ten, fifteen years ago, every arts student wanted to be a novelist or a playwright. I’d be amazed if you could find a single one now with such a dead-end ambition. They all want to make movies. Not write movies. You don’t write movies. You make movies.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star. It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist anymore. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.” ~ Haruki Murakami
- “In America, fundamentalist Christians believe the world was created 6,000 years ago – in England people drink in bars that are older than that.” ~ Steve Aylett
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“All my life I used to wonder what I would become when I grew up. Then, about seven years ago, I realized that I was never going to grow up–that growing is an ever ongoing process.” ~ M. Scott Peck
- “A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age … pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don’t want to be who they are anymore. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cast members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts, and Snuffleupagus. It’s universal.” ~ Douglas Coupland
- “100 years ago, buying something you could make was considered wasteful; now making something you could buy is considered wasteful. I am not convinced this is a step in the right direction.” ~ Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
- “I was born lazy. I am no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that is because I reached the limit forty years ago. You can’t go beyond possibility.” ~ Mark Twain
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“That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.” ~ Evelyn Waugh
- “This was not a good idea coming home for Christmas. I’m too old. Years ago, coming back from schools or trips, I always expected some sort of new perspective or fresh insight about the family on returning. That doesn’t happen anymore-the days of revelation about my parents, at least, are over… its time to move on. I think we’d all appreciate that.” ~ Douglas Coupland
- “Please stop putting quotes from Nietzsche at the end of your emails. Five years ago you were laughing your guts out over American Pie 2. What — suddenly you’ve magically turned into Noam Chomsky?” ~ Douglas Coupland
- “I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.” ~ Lorrie Moore
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“Your hand and your mouth agreed many years ago that, as far as chocolate is concerned, there is no need to involve your brain.” ~ Dave Barry
- “So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome, and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it then seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven?” ~ Joseph Heller
- “Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, “In this world, Elwood, you must be” – she always called me Elwood – “In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.” Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.” ~ Mary Chase
- “I knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn’t identify with any of the guys at all. None of them liked art or music, they just wanted to fight and get laid. It was many years ago but it gave me this real hatred for the average American macho male.” ~ Kurt Cobain
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“A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age – regardless of how they look on the outside – pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.” ~ Douglas Coupland
- “In places where a loved one has died, time stops for eternity. If I stand on the very spot, one says to oneself, like a prayer, might I feel the pain he felt? They say that on a visit to an old castle or whatever, the history of the place, the presence of people who walked there many years ago, can be felt in the body. Before, when I heard things like that, I would think, what are they talking about? But i felt I understood it now.” ~ Banana Yoshimoto
- “Little bits of things make me do it; — perhaps a word that I said and ought not to have said ten years ago; — the most ordinary little mistakes, even my own past thoughts to myself about the merest trifles. They are always making me shiver.” ~ Anthony Trollope
- “Eternity ended ten years ago.” ~ Brandon Sanderson
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“The fact is that five years ago I was, as near as possible, a different person to what I am tonight. I, as I am now, didn’t exist at all. Will the same thing happen in the next five years? I hope so.” ~ Siegfried Sassoon
- “I tell lies sometimes. The last time I lied was a year ago. I absolutely detest lying. You could say that lying and silence are the two greatest sins of present-day society. Actually, I lie a lot, and I’m always clamming up.” ~ Haruki Murakami
- “A few hundred years ago there were no differences between magic and medicine.” ~ Joanne Harris
- “Heads in the Women’s Ward On pillow after pillow lies The wild white hair and staring eyes; Jaws stand open; necks are stretched With every tendon sharply sketched; A bearded mouth talks silently To someone no one else can see. Sixty years ago they smiled At lover, husband, first-born child. Smiles are for youth. For old age come Death’s terror and delirium.” ~ Philip Larkin
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“Years ago, before this estate was generously and unwillingly turned over to the crown, the lord here was a genuine dimwit. He had a minister stashed behind his throne to whisper clever things to say.” ~ Shannon Hale
- “Global warming, along with the cutting and burning of forests and other critical habitats, is causing the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That event was believed to have been caused by a giant asteroid. This time it is not an asteroid colliding with the Earth and wreaking havoc: it is us.” ~ Al Gore
- “Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point, during the story, I could stop, and ask, ‘Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not?’ But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else’s vision.” ~ Penn Jillette
- “Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he’d taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth.” ~ Ayn Rand
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“Nefertiti, the most beautiful calico in the world, chose me as her own six short years ago.” ~ P. C. Cast
- “Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way, I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view.” ~ Ian Mcewan
- “So many things I had thought forgotten Return to my mind with stranger pain: Like letters that arrive addressed to someone Who left the house so many years ago.” ~ Philip Larkin
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“I was ripe ten years ago. Now I’m merely preserved, and before long I’ll be buried back in the orchard with the other pits.” -Amanda to Jack” ~ Lisa Kleypas
- “Keeping a journal has taught me that there is not so much new in your life as you sometimes think. When you re-read your journal you find out that your latest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. Still, it is true that one penetrates deeper and deeper into the same ideas and the same experiences.” ~ Thomas Merton , Years ago quotes in life
- “And now I was trying to brush my hair, you know, when I thought about it, and looking at myself in mirrors, wondering if I was pretty. Pretty! A year ago, when my hair got in my eyes I hacked it off with a knife. The only thing important about my clothes was whether they were too stiff to move fast in battle. And Fang had been my best friend and an excellent fighter.” ~ James Patterson
- “Thousands of years ago, man lived in harmony with the rest of the natural world. Through what we would today call Telepathy, he communicated with animals, plants, and other forms of life-none of which he considered “beneath” himself, only different, with different jobs to perform. He worked side by side with earth angels and nature spirits, with whom he shared responsibility for taking care of the world.” ~ Benjamin Hoff
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“Lord, the money we do spend on Government and it’s not one bit better than the government we got for one-third the money twenty years ago.” ~ Will Rogers
- “And I thought, eight years ago, when I began carefully charting the progress of American Gods, nervously dipping my toes into the waters of blogging, would I have imagined a future in which, instead of recording the vicissitudes of bringing a book into the world, I would be writing about not-even-interestingly missing cups of cold camomile tea? And I thought, yup. Sounds about right. Happy Eighth Birthday, blog.” ~ Neil Gaiman
- “Maybe a hundred years ago our people should have run away from this place, I said… And then run from the next place and the next place and the place after that? You run once, what makes you think you won’t have to run all the rest of your life?… We love moment to moment… Everything changes. One minute we are part of the river, and the next we are joined with the sea.” ~ Alice Hoffman
Year ago used to compare a company’s financial results from twelve months ago with its results now.
