#or

It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#achievements #concentration #electronics #information #reality

An aged monk led me to the infirmary. "He's got the place to himself. Once the other invalids learned there was a dragon coming they miraculously got well! The lame could walk and the blind decided they didn't really need to see. He's a panacea. ↗

— Rachel Hartman

#humor #miracles #age

There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books. ↗

— John Hersey

#books #death #hiroshima #japan #ways-to-die

Discover how to visit the past and bring yesterday's stories into our lives today ↗

— Gillian Hovell

#britain #bronze-age #dark-ages #history #hovell

Parker, I'm old," She said matter-of-factly. "I get away with these things." She continued to wave and smile wildly. "People treat me like an idiot so I'm allowed to act like one from time to time. It's one of the perks. ↗

— Abby Slovin

#humor #old-age #age

I showed up in L.A. with $500 and a backpack and I stayed at a shelter, so nobody handed me anything. I worked for every single thing that I have. ↗

— Jared Leto

#backpack #every #handed #i #me

Thou hast had thty day, old dame, but thy sun has long been set. Thou art now the very emblem of an old warhorse turned out on the barren heath; thou hast had thy paces in thy time, but now a broken amble is the best of them. ↗

— Walter Scott

#old-age #woman #age

Those darling byegone times, Mr Carker,' said Cleopatra, 'with their delicious fortresses, and their dear old dungeons, and their delightful places of torture, and their romantic vengeances, and their picturesque assaults and sieges, and everything that makes life truly charming! How dreadfully we have degenerated! ↗

— Charles Dickens

#humor #irony #medieval #middle-ages #nostalgia

It was like when a midde-aged woman, happily married, found out that her favorite movie star was gay. It broke her heart just a litte to know that there wasn't even a chance in fantasyland for the two of them to ever touch. ↗

— Amy Lane

#age

What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#anachronisms #death #permanence #revolution #sociology