#ness

There's an old adage," he said, "translated from the ancient Coptic, that contains all the wisdom of the ages -- "Life is life and fun is fun, but it's all so quiet when the goldfish die. ↗

— Beryl Markham

#fun #life #nature #quiet #stillness

I wondered if that's what aging felt like. That desire and reality were dueling until the day you die, that nobody every got to a place of peace. I had always wanted to get old so I didn't have to care anymore, but I began to think that it would be best just to skip the getting older part and just die. ↗

— Portia de Rossi

#old #portia-de-rossi #reality #unbearable-lightness #age

You would like to read, but somehow the rain gets into the book, too; not literally, and yet it really does, the letters are meaningless, and all you hear is the rain. You would like to play the piano, but the rain comes to sit alongside and play an accompaniment. And then the dry weather returns, which is to say there is steam and bright light. People age quickly. ↗

— Sándor Márai

#depression #age

Sometimes the saddest stories take the fewest words. ↗

— Karen Thompson Walker

#age

Was it the forgetfulness of old age or personal incapacity that made the man able to say please but not thank you? ↗

— Yann Martel

#old-age #rudeness #study-in-character #age

I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#dreams #reality #sadness #dreams

[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#isolation #loneliness #modern-society #noise #peace

But Margaret was at an age when any apprehension, not absolutely based on a knowledge of facts, is easily banished for a time by a bright sunny day, or some happy outward circumstance. And when the brilliant fourteen fine days of October came on, her cares were all blown away as lightly as thistledown, and she thought of nothing but the glories of the forest. ↗

— Elizabeth Gaskell

#age

I have a hundred times heard him say, that all ages and nations have represented their gods as wicked, in a constantly increasing progression; that mankind have gone on adding trait after trait till they reached the most perfect conception of wickedness which the human mind could devise, and have called this God, and prostrated themselves before it. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#wickedness #age

The two go hand in hand like a dance: chance flirts with necessity, randomness with determinism. To be sure, it is from this interchange that novelty and creativity arise in Nature, thereby yielding unique forms and novel structures. ↗

— Eric Chaisson

#determinism #nature #necessity #randomness #age