#age

I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life. - - - But when my father noticed that I could not do any work more than to drink, he engaged an expert palm-wine-tapster for me; he had no other work more than to tap palm-wine every day. So my father gave me a palm-tree farm which was nine miles square and it contained 560,000 palm-trees, and this palm-wine tapster was tapping one hundred and fifty kegs of palm-wine every morning, but before 2 o’clock p.m., I would have drunk it all; after that he would go and tap another 75 kegs. ↗

— Amos Tutuola

#age

On est forcé d'être des enfants toute sa vie. C'est pour ça que ceux qui veulent devenir des hommes sont malheureux. Vous voulez chanter l'opéra? On rit de vous. Vous voulez vous conduire en monsieur avec les femmes? Elles vous traitent de tapette si vous n'êtes pas champion avec des muscles gros comme ça. Vous voulez avoir une bonne position dans un bureau? La compétence, c'est toujours les autres qui l'ont. ↗

— Roger Lemelin

#coming-of-age #dreams #age

I do not think the sunny youth of either will prove the forerunner of stormy age. I think it is deemed good that you two should live in peace and be happy - not as angels but as few are happy amongst mortals. Some lives are thus blessed: it is God's will: it is the attesting trace and lingering evidence of Eden. Other lives run from the first another course. Other travellers encounter weather fitful and gusty wild and variable - breast adverse winds are belated and overtaken by the early closing winter night. Neither can this happen without the sanction of God and I know that amidst His boundless works is somewhere stored the secret of this last fate's justice: I know that His treasures contain the proof as the promise of its mercy. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#lucy-snowe #paulina-bassompierre #providnece #villette #age

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#fiction #inspirational #age

...one of the roles of man is to shut his eyes and keep them shut to see if he can continue into the night of his old age the dream curtailed in the night of his youth. ↗

— Machado de Assis

#old-age #youth #age

The youngest, aged twelve, could not conceal her disappointment, and turned away, feeling as so many of us have felt when we discover that our idols are very extraordinary men and women. ↗

— Louisa May Alcott

#jo-s-boys #louisa-may-alcott #age

...a row of tables manned by seated, serious women. Each woman looked like she could be someone's least-favourite aunt. ↗

— Adam Rex

#funny #women #age

Emblematic of this era was the prolific Viennese surgeon Theodor Billroth. Born in 1821, Billroth studied music and surgery with almost equal verve. (The professions still often go hand in hand. Both push manual skill to its limit; both mature with practice and age; both depend on immediacy, precision, and opposable thumbs.) ↗

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

#medicine #music #age

Now is everything Now is the essence Now is the focus Focus on the now For that is the key ↗

— Karen Hackel

#living-in-the-present #living-life-to-the-full #new-age #now #the-present

...no matter how rhapsodic one waxes about the process of wresting edible plants and tamed animals from the sprawling vagaries of nature, there's a timeless, unwavering truth espoused by those who worked the land for ages: no matter how responsible agriculture is, it is essentially about achieving the lesser of evils. To work the land is to change the land, to shape it to benefit one species over another, and thus necessarily to tame what is wild. Our task should be to delivery our blows gently. ↗

— James E. McWilliams

#farming #food #politics #age