#m

I have fallen into an abyss. I live in a world so curious, so strange. Of the dream that was my life, this is my nightmare. ↗

— Camille Claudel

#dreams #life #sadness #dreams

I have begun in old age to understand just how oddly we all are put together. We are so proud of our autonomy that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others. One of the booby traps of freedom--which is bordered on all sides by isolation--is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life's banquet. ↗

— Saul Bellow

#age

I felt suddenly very young - or perhaps I felt my age: an almost childlike twenty-two, rather than that permanent middle-age that attaches itself to the man who lives alone and supports himself by wearing a suit in a city not of his birth. ↗

— Mohsin Hamid

#being-young #corporate-life #feeling-middle-age #age

Preserve your own mystery. We live in an age of social media and what seems like extreme sharing of personal details. I would beg to differ that these revelations are not honest truths but more self-branding. Whatever the case, save a little bit, or a lot, for yourself. If you run around naked all the time, when the storm hits, you’ll have no raincoat. ↗

— Susan Kirschbaum

#quote #susan-kirschbaum #age

If a writer rewrites an essay, people who read the new version are unlikely to complain that their thoughts have been broken by some newly introduced incompatibility. ↗

— Paul Graham

#age

So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#childhood #coming-of-age #earthsea #age

It’s not easy to be God. ↗

— Péter Zilahy

#coming-of-age #dark-humour #sacrifice #age

There are times when you almost tell the harmless old lady next door what you really think of her face—that it ought to be on a night-nurse in a house for the blind; when you’d like to ask the man you’ve been waiting ten minutes for if he isn’t all overheated from racing the postman down the block; when you nearly say to the waiter that if they deducted a cent from the bill for every degree the soup was below tepid the hotel would owe you half a dollar; when—and this is the infallible earmark of true exasperation—a smile affects you as an oil-baron’s undershirt affects a cow’s husband. But the moment passes. Scars may remain on your dog or your collar or your telephone receiver, but your soul has slid gently back into its place between the lower edge of your heart and the upper edge of your stomach, and all is at peace. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#age

Martinis in a can, Callie. We live in an age of wonders. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#wonders #age

I realized then that even though I was a tiny speck in an infinite cosmos, a blip on the timeline of eternity, I was not without purpose. And as long as I had a part in the music of the spheres, even if it was only a single grace note, I was not worthless. Nor was I alone. ↗

— R.J. Anderson

#r-j-anderson #ultraviolet #music