#age

Madame Tallien shared honors with Josephine Beauharnais in being mistress to Barras, an ex-nobleman and ex-terrorist whose appetite for beautiful women, beautiful young men, and money was the only wholesome trait in his character. ↗

— J. Christopher Herold

#french-revolution #napoleon #age

Just as Napoleon was the sole authority in the state, so the husband and father was to exercise authority over his family. Unfortunately the only possible result of despotism on either level is hypocrisy. ↗

— J. Christopher Herold

#family-values #hypocrisy #napoleon #age

The English soldier was probably the worst-treated soldier in Europe, and judging from the English casualty rates during the Napoleonic wars, English generals were more lavish with their soldiers' lives than were their French and German colleagues. ↗

— J. Christopher Herold

#napoleonic-wars #soldiers #age

Leonard Woolf’s endurance of Virginia’s famous frigidity is, we must suppose after the fact, altogether to his credit. Their honeymoon did not bring the amelioration they had hoped for and it is incredibly innocent and moving to think of them discussing it with Vanessa. They wanted to know when she had first had an orgasm. She said she couldn’t remember but she knew she had been “sympathetic” from the age of two. Vita Sackville-West said about Virginia, “She dislikes the possessiveness and love of domination in men. In fact she dislikes the quality of masculinity. ↗

— Elizabeth Hardwick

#vanessa-bell #virginia-woolf #vita-sacksville-west #age

He’s a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man although not for a woman, as at my age a woman is an old maid but a man is not an old bachelor until he’s fifty, and even then there’s still hope for the ladies, as Mary Whitney used to say. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#age

But man is still today, at the age of twenty-five, at the mercy of an erection, physically too, from time to time, it's the common lot, even I was not immune, if that can be called an erection. It did not escape her naturally, women smell a rigid phallus ten miles away and wonder, How on earth did he spot me from there? ↗

— Samuel Beckett

#age

The war against Napoleon was won not by England but by Russia, Austria, and Prussia; but England won the last battle and she won the peace. ↗

— J. Christopher Herold

#napoleonic-wars #age

Life had engraved such beauty in those lines of age and wisdom ... ↗

— Rosslyn Elliott

#life #age

One of the odd things about middle age...was the strange decisions a man discovers he’s made by not really making them. ↗

— Richard Russo

#age

If a writer rewrites an essay, people who read the new version are unlikely to complain that their thoughts have been broken by some newly introduced incompatibility. ↗

— Paul Graham

#age