#age

Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all of which were different terms for the same illusion. ↗

— Anthony Marra

#time #time-passing #wisdom #youth-is-wasted-on-the-young #age

...alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life--it was not worth much--not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage,he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one--we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist. ↗

— James Salter

#faith #loneliness #regret #selfishness #age

In so many senseless deaths, beauty is to blame. ↗

— Suzanne Finnamore

#death #divorce #infidelity #marriage #seperation

In a time when nothing is more certain than change, the commitment of two people to one another has become difficult and rare. Yet, by its scarcity, the beauty and value of this exchange have only been enhanced. ↗

— Robert Sexton

#love #marriage #scarce #value #work

I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#virginia-woolf #beauty

Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing. ↗

— John Cheever

#delusions #dissatisfaction #fables #indifference #jokes

I would have made her a part of me. If I could, I would have had a notch cut in my already aging side and a slip of her, my young rose, inserted there and lashed to me with twine. ↗

— John Banville

#age

Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at the time, that he may wonder at them; so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed ages that fled. ↗

— Charles Mackay

#history-of-mankind #reflection #age

Since Mom wasn't exactly the most useful person in the world, one lesson I learned at an early age was how to get things done, and this was a source of both amazement and concern for Mom, who considered my behavior unladylike but also counted on me. "I never knew a girl to have such gumption," she'd say. "But I'm not too sure it's a good thing. ↗

— Jeannette Walls

#daughter #determination #mixed-feelings #mother #strong-willed-child

Let us not rest until we are free to live in dignity in the land of our birth. ↗

— Mark Mathabane

#inspirational #politics #age