#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

Secularization—that is, the gradual conformity of our thinking, beliefs, commitments, and practices to the pattern of this fading age—is not just something that happens to the church; it is something that happens in the church. In fact, it’s difficult to think of secularism as anything other than a Christian heresy. ↗

— Michael S. Horton

#heresy #secularism #age

I was young too, I felt just like you. Hated authority, hated all my bosses, thought they were full of shit. Look, it's like they say, if you're not a rebel by the age of 20, you got no heart, but if you haven't turned establishment by 30, you've got no brains. Because there are no story-book romances, no fairy-tale endings. So before you run out and change the world, ask yourself, "What do you really want? ↗

— The Bob Jones

#age

Nexus I wrote stubbornly into the evening. At the window, a giant praying mantis rubbed his monkey wrench head against the glass, begging vacantly with pale eyes; and the commas leapt at me like worms or miniature scythes blackened with age. the praying mantis screeched louder, his ragged jaws opening into formlessness. I walked outside; the grass hissed at my heels. Up ahead in the lapping darkness he wobbled, magnified and absurdly green, a brontosaurus, a poet. ↗

— Rita Dove

#age

So this is it ⎯ what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty. ↗

— Jennifer Egan

#death #getting-old #getting-older #wasting-time #age

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known. ↗

— Scott Fitzgerald

#fitzgerald #jazz-age-stories #age

I'd Better Not-- A man leaned over to a man in a pub And said in a voice ‘I used to be thirty seven but now I’m fifty one’. And that’s how the years go. In handfuls. Like somebody is almost at the end of a bag of crisps And they tip the bag up And it’s as though they’re drinking crisps. That’s how the years go. ↗

— Ian McMillan

#middle-age #time #youth #age

All three are hip-deep in midlife, when the eyes go and the waistline spreads and the city on the hill that shone so brightly in youth turns out to be more like a semi-incorporated town in the middle of a garbage strike. An age when a person can feel not so much himself as an inexplicably inferior version of himself. ↗

— Mary McNamara

#age

Tarly, when I was a lad half your age, my lady mother told me that if I stood about with my mouth open, a weasel was like to mistake it for his lair and run down my throat. If you have something to say, say it. Otherwise, beware of weasels. ↗

— George R.R. Martin

#samwell-tarly #weasel #age