“Average Jones had come by his nickname inevitably. His parents had foredoomed him to it when they furnished him with the initials A. V. R. E. as preface to his birthright of J for Jones. His character apparently justified the chance concomitance. He was, so to speak, a composite photograph of any thousand well-conditioned, clean-living Americans between the ages of twenty-five and thirty.” WellsCharacterAgeSpeakParentChanceFiveThousandTwentiesCleanPhotographAverageThirtyJustifiedInitialsTwenty FiveBirthrightNicknamesCompositesClean Living Book:Average Jones Source: Average Jones
“For more than twenty years he [Blanchard] toiled on through the most fatiguing paths of literary composition, mostly in periodicals, often anonymously; pleasing and lightly instructing thousands, but gaining none of the prizes, whether of weighty reputation or popular renown, which more fortunate chances, or more pretending modes of investing talent, have given in our day to men of half his merits.” MenYearsGivenChanceHalfPathTalentTwentiesInvestingReputationFortunateMeritPrizePretendingCompositionRenown Author:Samuel Laman Blanchard
“So, eventually, he made one final arrangement with himself, which he has religiously held to ever since, and that was to count each fish that he caught as ten, and to assume ten to begin with. For example, if he did not catch any fish at all, then he said he had caught ten fish - you could never catch less than ten fish by his system; that was the foundation of it. Then, if by any chance he really did catch one fish, he called it twenty, while two fish would count thirty, three forty, and so on.” IfsMadeSaidTwoThreeChanceSeaExampleTenRiversTwentiesFoundationAssumingFinalsCaughtFishesBoatThirtyLakesFishingFortyArrangements Book:Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog Source: Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog
“in reading ... stories, you can be many different people in many different places, doing things you would never have a chance to do in ordinary life. It's amazing that those twenty-six little marks of the alphabet can arrange themselves on the pages of a book and accomplish all that. Readers are lucky - they will never be bored or lonely.” PeopleLittlesBookDifferentStoriesReadingChanceReaderLuckySixPagesOrdinaryLonelyMarkTwentiesAccomplishBoredDifferent PeoplesBook ReadingDifferent PlaceAlphabetOrdinary LifeReading Stories Author:Natalie Babbitt
“If you don't begin to be a revolutionist at the age of twenty, then at fifty you will be a most impossible old fossil. If you area red revolutionary at the age of twenty, you have some chance of being up-to-date when you are forty!” IfsAgeChanceImpossibleRedAreasTwentiesRevolutionaryFiftyFortyFossilsUp To Date Author:George Bernard Shaw
“He's (Jack McKeon) been around baseball for twenty-plus years. He knows what it takes to be a manager. I hope he gets the chance.” KnowsYearsChanceBaseballTwentiesManagersPlus Author:Ken Griffey, Jr.
“The chance to own a home; chance to own an education; chance to get access to capital. This is the real civil rights battle of the twenty-first century.” FirstsRealHomeChanceRightsCenturyBattleTwentiesAccessCivil Rights Author:Jack Kemp