#l

The only options I have are a four fingered shuffle and an aging vibrator whose batteries, the last time I looked, were leaking a sticky liquid. I long to do the same.” Time Was by Paul Adams ↗

— Paul Adams

#romantic-comedy #age

She tries to maintain a nondescript exterior; she learns the sideways glance instead of looking at people directly. She speaks in practised, precise sentences so that she is not misunderstood. She chooses her words carefully, and if someone addresses her in Punjabi, she answers in Urdu, because an exchange in her mother tongue might be considered a promise of intimacy. She uses English for medical terms only, because she feels if she uses a word of English in her conversation she might be considered a bit forward. When she walks she walks with slightly hurried steps, as if she has an important but innocent appointment to keep. She avoids eye contact, she looks slightly over people’s heads as if looking out for somebody who might come into view at any moment. She doesn’t want anyone to think that she is alone and nobody is coming for her. She sidesteps even when she sees a boy half her age walking towards her, she walks around little puddles when she can easily leap over them; she thinks any act that involves stretching her legs might send the wrong signal. After all, this is not the kind of thing where you can leave your actions to subjective interpretations. She never eats in public. Putting something in your mouth is surely an invitation for someone to shove something horrible down your throat. If you show your hunger, you are obviously asking for something. ↗

— Mohammed Hanif

#self-consciousness #age

I can tell you kids grew up with a silver spoon in your mouth. When I was your age, we took a bath once a week on Saturday night, and all of us used the same bath water. ↗

— K. Martin Beckner

#silver-spoon #age

Nobody peels a banana before stabbing themselves with it. But that’s exactly how I love—dangerously. 
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#dangerous #dangerously #food #fruit #funny

So you think the best way to prepare kids for the real world is to bus them to a government institution where they're forced to spend all day isolated with children of their own age and adults who are paid to be with them, placed in classes that are too big to allow more than a few minutes of personal interaction with the teacher-then spend probably an hour or more everyday waiting in lunch lines, car lines, bathroom lines, recess lines, classroom lines, and are forced to progress at the speed of the slowest child in class? ↗

— Steven James

#homeschooling #school #age

Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction the cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is a part. Some economists are so attached to the notion of growth that they can't let go of that word, so they refer to recession as a time of "negative growth". ↗

— Eckhart Tolle

#new-age #spirituality #age

How terrible, Jack thought, to be old and know that your life has been wasted. ↗

— Ken Follett

#lifes-work #old-age #age

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties. ↗

— Harold Bloom

#anxiety #canon #literature #age

To Vic and other kids his age, the past didn't exist except as a quick, oversimplified Wikipedia snippets, that ultimately didn't matter because they weren't now. Dolores wonders if that is all she really is, a little piece of now, relentlessly pushed forward by time, trying desperately to look back over her shoulder to see what the past could possibly tell her, but caught in a rush that refused to stand still long enough for her to hear what it had to say. ↗

— David Hontiveros

#age

A great many people, and more all the time, live their entire lives without ever once sleeping out under the stars. ↗

— Alan S. Kesselheim

#modern-life #outdoors #age