#ife

Perhaps that was the point; life, if you did it right, meant learning and changing. If you didn't, you died- or stopped growing - which amounted to more or less the same thing. So I would slide in and out of different roles until I discovered the one that fit me best. -Deuce, (183) ↗

— Ann Aguirre

#coming-of-age #deuce #meaning-of-life #age

When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary. ↗

— Walter M. Miller Jr.

#change #death #depression #ennui #life

I am a lonely man," he said again that evening. "And is it not possible that you are also a lonely person? But I am an older man, and I can live with my loneliness, quietly. You are young, and it must be difficult to accept your loneliness. You must sometimes want to fight it." "But I am not at all lonely." "Youth is the loneliest time of all. Otherwise, why should you come so often to my house?" Sensei continued: "But surely, when you are with me, you cannot rid yourself of your loneliness. I have not it in me to help you forget it. You will have to look elsewhere for the consolation you seek. And soon, you will find that you no longer want to visit me." As he said this, Sensei smiled sadly. ↗

— Sōseki Natsume

#life-lesson #loneliness #age

We made love like green is blue. That’s because we were only half into it, though for the record I was the blue and she was the disinterested yellow.
 ↗

— Dark Jar Tin Zoo

#color #colors #disinterest #funny #green

Once you pass a certain age, life becomes noting more than a process of continual loss. Things that are important to your life begin to slip out of your grasp, one after another, like a comb losing teeth. And the only things that come to take their place are worthless imitations. Your physical strength, your hopes, your dreams, your ideals, your convictions, all meaning, or, then again, the people you love: one by one, they fade away. Some announce their departure before they leave, while others just disappear all of a sudden without warning one day. And once you lose them you can never get them back. Your search for replacement never goes well. It’s all very painful- as painful as actually being cut with a knife. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#age

Life is an adventure of passion, risk, danger, laughter, beauty, love; a burning curiosity to go with the action to see what it is all about, to go search for a pattern of meaning, to burn one's bridges because you're never going to go back anyway, and to live to the end. ↗

— Saul D. Alinsky

#life #passion #beauty

For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home. ↗

— Walter Benjamin

#age

And the view was suddenly clear to me. The world opened out to its grim beyonds and I realized that, at forty, one must learn the rigors of acceptance. Capitalize it: Acceptance. I needed to accept what was put before me--be it a watery grave in Ireland's only natural fjord, or a return to the city and its grayer intensities, or a wordless exile in some steaming Cambodian swamp hole, or poems or no poems, or children or not, lovers or not, illness or otherwise, success or its absence. I would accept all that was put in my way, from here on through until I breathed my last. ↗

— Kevin Barry

#aging #clarity #forty #life #realization

Knowledge and book learning are not wisdom," said the captain. "Is this book wisdom?" asked Lucy, putting the manuscript back on the table. "It has some elements of wisdom in it, me dear," replied the captain. "I did not lead a very wise life myself but it was a full one and a grown-up one. You come to age very often through shipwreck and disaster, and at the heart of the whirlpool some men find God. ↗

— R.A. Dick

#living-a-full-life #wisdom #age

I bargained with Life for a penny, And Life would pay no more, However I begged at evening When I counted my scanty store; For Life is just an employer, He gives you what you ask, But once you have set the wages, Why, you must bear the task. I worked for a menial's hire, Only to learn, dismayed, That any wage I had asked of Life, Life would have paid. ↗

— Jessie B. Rittenhouse

#hire #learning #life #philosophy #poem