#la

Omnipotence is most omnipotent when one does nothing! ↗

— Stanisław Lem

#stanislaw-lem #the-cyberiad #age

Marple closed her eyes and fell asleep. It felt good. She felt like a kid again. She’d waited a long time to feel like that. It felt like the universe was folding in on itself. It felt like origami birds being born. —from THE IMMORTALS ACT THEIR AGE ↗

— Eric Beeny

#age

I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because he will find an easy way to do it. ↗

— Ziad K. Abdelnour

#easy #job #lazy #age

There were a few middle-aged and even elderly women in the train, their silver-wiry hair and wrinkled faces, scourged by time and trouble, having almost a grotesque, certainly a pathetic, appearance in such a jaunty situation. In a true view, perhaps, there was more to be gathered and told of each anxious and experienced one, to whom the years were drawing nigh when she should say, 'I have no pleasure in them', than of her juvenile comrades. But let the elder be passed over here for those under whose bodices the life throbbed quick and warm. ↗

— Thomas Hardy

#age

I'm sorry you don't like coming back here," her mother often said, to cap whatever petty dust-up they'd had. How could Emily explain: it wasn't her mother or Kersey she'd disowned, but her earlier self, that strange, ungrateful girl who strove to be first at everything and threw tantrums when she failed. ↗

— Stewart O'Nan

#arguments #coming-home #daughters #family #fights

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#reading #age

The immense cities lie basking on the beaches of the continent like whales that have taken to the land. ↗

— Arnold J. Toynbee

#cities #continent #immense #land #lie

You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner." (Elizabeth Bennett) ↗

— Jane Austen

#behaviour #declaration #empowerment #gentlemanlike #gentlemen

The Moth don't care when he sees The Flame. He might get burned, but he's in the game. And once he's in, he can't go back, he'll Beat his wings 'til he burns them black... No, The Moth don't care when he sees The Flame. . . The Moth don't care if The Flame is real, 'Cause Flame and Moth got a sweetheart deal. And nothing fuels a good flirtation, Like Need and Anger and Desperation... No, The Moth don't care if The Flame is real. . . ↗

— Aimee Mann

#fire #flame #moths #anger

Life is such a glorious trauma, is it not? ↗

— J.R. Ward

#jr-ward #life #wrath #life