#no

Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal condition. Of that I am firmly persuaded. He is made and constructed to that very end. And not only at the present time owing to some casual circumstance, but always, at all times, a decent man is bound to be a coward and a slave. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#fyodor-dostoyevsky #notes-from-the-underground #slave #age

What shall I do to be for ever known, And make the age to come my own? ↗

— Abraham Cowley

#i #inspirational #known #own #age

You understand. I don't know. I am not sure how I would feel in your shoes. My mother wanted me. ↗

— Donna K. Childree

#adventure-stories #coming-of-age-novel #the-wayward-gifted #age

…because I was only eleven years old, I was wrapped in the best cloak of invisibility in the world. ↗

— Alan Bradley

#attitude #childhood #invisibility #noticeable #attitude

Thank goodness for the first snow, it was a reminder--no matter how old you became and how much you'd seen, things could still be new if you were willing to believe they still mattered. ↗

— Candace Bushnell

#hope #optimism #snow #winter #age

There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws that are constant. It has no rules. ↗

— T.H. White

#knowledge-of-world #middle-age #age

It was now autumn, and I made up my mind to make, before winter set in, an excursion across Normandy, a country with which I was not acquainted. It must be borne in mind that I began with Rouen, and for a week I wandered about enthusiastic with admiration, in that picturesque town of the Middle Ages, in that veritable museum of extraordinary Gothic monuments. Well, one afternoon, somewhere about four o'clock, as I happened to be passing down an out-of-the-way by-street, in the middle of which flowed a deep river, black as ink, named the Eau de Robec, my attention wholly directed to examining the bizarre and antique physiognomy of the houses, was all of a sudden attracted by the sight of a series of shops of furniture brokers, one after the other, from door to door along the street. Ah! these second-hand brokers had well chosen their locality, these sordid old traffickers of bric-a-brac, in this fantastic alley leading up from stream of that sinister dark water, under the steep pointed overhanging gables of tiled roofs and projecting shingle eaves, where the weathercocks of the past still creaked overhead. ("Who Knows?") ↗

— Guy de Maupassant

#normandy #rouen #age

I want to write a poem about "Truth," "Honor," "Dignity," and whether the toilet paper should roll over or under when you pull on it. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#honor #life #poem #toilet-paper #truth

But there were also times when she cried out in the darkness biting her lips - cried out against the substance of her age: for it was now that she should be young; now above all other times, with the wisdom in her, the wisdom that was frittered away in her 'teens', set aside in her twenties, now, lying there, palpable and with forty summers gone. She clenched her hands together. What good was wisdom; what good was anything when the fawn is fled from the grove? ↗

— Mervyn Peake

#age

... the blast signatures of a detonated supernova and that of a nuclear bomb are identical. ↗

— Eric Chaisson

#nuclear-bomb #supernova #age