#cynic

I'm not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naive and romantic and idealistic - the part of you that you treasure most - to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact? ↗

— Kenneth Cain

#cynicism #idealism #maturity #age

And you that sought for magic in your youth but desire it not in your age, know that there is a blindness of spirit which comes from age, more black than the blindness of eye, making a darkness about you across which nothing may be seen, or felt, or known, or in any way apprehended. ↗

— Lord Dunsany

#alveric #cynicism #lirazel #magic #youth

Love should last a lifetime. But not the lifetime of a giant tortoise. More like the lifespan of a gastrotrich. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#funny #humor #love #age

It is a well-known fact that very often, putting the period of boyhood out of the argument, the older we grow the more cynical and hardened we become; indeed, many of us are only saved by timely death from moral petrification, if not from moral corruption. ↗

— H. Rider Haggard

#amorality #corruption #cynicism #growing-old #hopelessness

I'm getting old, thought Eileen Calder. Old and worn out and cynical. And being cynical is a lot worse than being old or worn out. ↗

— Charles Sheffield

#burnout #cynicism #age

It is one of the consolations of middle-aged reformers that the good they inculcate must live after them if it is to live at all. ↗

— Saki

#wry #age

I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life--that life that must go on, come what may. You are all like dogs that lick everything they smell. You with your promise of a humdrum happiness--provided a person doesn't ask much of life. I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now! I want it total, complete: otherwise I reject it! I will not be moderate. I will not be satisfied with the bit of cake you offer me if I promise to be a good little girl. I want to be sure of everything this very day; sure that everything will be as beautiful as when I was a little girl. If not, I want to die! ↗

— Jean Anouilh

#happiness #hope #society #beauty

The universe is a meat grinder and we're just pork in designer shoes, keeping busy so we can pretend we're not all headed for the sausage factory. Maybe I've been hallucinating this whole time and there is no Heaven and Hell. Instead of having to choose between God and the devil, maybe our only real choice comes down to link or patty? ↗

— Richard Kadrey

#existential #business

It's just so perfuck. ↗

— Toba Beta

#cynicism

One simple answer is that there has been a massive rise in the incidence of sanctimony and smugness among the successful that has nothing to do with any change in the underlying reality. Rather, it has been stimulated by politicians who have realized that it is possible to win power by recruiting the most economically successful forty per cent or so of the population in a crusade to roll back the gains made by their fellow citizens in the previous forty years. And how better to rationalize this than to tell people that they deserve the incomes that the market generates? ↗

— Brian M. Barry

#economics #nulabor #politics #reaganism #thatcher