#ow

This is the way that it goes. In your mid forties you have your first crisis of mortality (death will not ignore me); and ten years later you have your first crisis of age (my body whispers that death is already intrigued by me). But something very interesting happens to you in between. As the fiftieth birthday approaches, you get that sense that your life is thinning out, and will continue to thin out, until it thins out into nothing. And you sometimes say to yourself; That went a bit quick. That went a bit quick. In certain moods you may want to put it a bit more forcefully. As in: OY!! That went a BIT FUCKING QUICK!!!.... Then fifty comes and goes, and fifty-one, and fifty-two. And life thickens out again. Because there is now an enormous and unsuspected presence within your being, like an undiscovered continent. This is the past. ↗

— Martin Amis

#age

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? ↗

— John Keats

#intelligence #make #necessary #pains #school

The best thing about being a cartoonist is to walk into a bar or someone's apartment and they don't know you, but they've taped one of your pieces up. ↗

— Ted Rall

#apartment #bar #being #best #cartoonist

The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#love #sorrow #love

When we no longer pray, no longer listen to the voice of love that speaks to us in the moment, our lives become absurd lives in which we are thrown back and forth between the past and the future. If we could just be, for a few minutes each day, fully where we are, we would indeed discover that we are not alone and that the One who is with us wants only one thing: to give us love ↗

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

#love

Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other. ↗

— Anatole Broyard

#intimacy #resuscitation #sex #love

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#details #died #distinguish #ends #every

Choose your own attitude. Don't let another choose it for you. ↗

— Susan Gaddis

#attitude-toward-life #attitude

I have come, more and more, to believe that the way we are in the world actually has an impact on the world. When we are respectful, joyous, grateful, engaged, the world responds to that in concrete ways. When we are angry and resentful, or selfish or bitter, things sour around us. ↗

— Alan S. Kesselheim

#happy #positive-thoughts #age

Love and charity share the same root word (caritas). How is that possible, when everything in our recent history suggest they cannot coexist, that they are antiethical, that if you put the two of them together in a sack they would bite and scratch and scream, until one of them is torn apart? ↗

— Nick Hornby

#love