Year System

Famous quotes containing the words year and/or system:

    One of the sadder things, I think,
    Is how our birthdays slowly sink:
    Presents and parties disappear,
    The cards grow fewer year by year,
    Till, when one reaches sixty-five,
    How many care we’re still alive?
    Philip Larkin (1922–1986)

    To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.
    Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)