Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every remeeting a foretaste of the resurrection. That is why even people who are indifferent to each other rejoice so much if they meet again after twenty or thirty years of separation.
"Do you know," Ivan Bunin recalls Anton Chekhov saying to him in 1899, near the end of his too-short life, "for how many years I shall be read? Seven." "Why seven?" Bunin asked. "Well," Chekhov answered, "seven and a half then."
The best business returns are usually achieved by companies that are doing something quite similar today to what they were doing five or ten years ago.
It's a lot harder to find fault with the mundane details of daily existence when you really, really know on a cellular level that you're going to go, and that this moment, right now, is life. Life isn't what happens to you in 20 years. This moment, right now, is your life.
But at sixteen the conscience rarely gnaws So much, as when we call our old debts in At sixty years, and draw the accounts of evil, And find a deuced balance with the devil.
The latter qualification brings to mind a fellow who applied for a job and stated he had twenty years of experience-which was corrected by a former employer to read "one year's experience-twenty times.
I am, and have been for years, a confirmed anti-vaccinationist...I have not the least doubt in my mind that vaccination is a filthy process that is harmful in the end.
If we got there and we looked up and we said, "You know what? Black folks are still doing a little bit worse off than whites, but it's not like it was 20 years ago," then we can have a discussion about how do we get that last little bit. But that's a high-class problem to have.