#time

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through. ↗

— Alexis de Tocqueville

#american society #aristocratic #breaking #colours #covered

Could a scar be like the rings of a tree, reopened with each emotional season? ↗

— Magenta Periwinkle

#coming-of-age #cutting #cutting-class #first-love #geeks

By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself. ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#choke #time #age

We know one another. This is the present. There is no past and no future. Here I am washing my hands, and the cracked mirror shows me to myself, suspended as it were, in time; this is me, this moment will not pass. And then I open the door and go to the dining-room, where he is sitting waiting for me at a table, and I think how in that moment I have aged, and passed on, how I have advanced one step towards an unknown destiny. We smile, we choose our lunch, we speak of this and that, but - I say to myself-I am not she who left him five minutes ago. She has stayed behind. I am another woman, older, more mature… ↗

— Daphne du Maurier

#age

when you live forever and don't age, it gives you time to hope ↗

— Laurell K. Hamilton

#forever #hope #time #age

The past embraces the future The future embraces the past They are both intertwined Linked in all eternity ↗

— Karen Hackel

#future #living #new-age #past #time

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

You’re nothing but an aging sad cliché and I don’t want any part of it anymore. You’ll wind up right here, in a room just like this, twenty years from now paying for what I’ve been giving you for free from someone even younger than I am right now. Only you’ll be twenty years older and nothing more than a broken down image of the man you used to be. Good luck with that. ↗

— Ryan Field

#jim-darling #m-m-romance #age

One spring morning timing the lean near-liquid progress of a horse on a track, the dust exploding, the rapid hasping of his hocks, coming up the straight foreshortened and awobble and passing elongate and birdlike wish harsh breaths and slatted brisket heaving and the muscles sliding and brunching in clocklike flexion under the wet black hide and a gout of foam hung from the long jaw and then gone in a muted hoofclatter, the aging magistrate snapped his thumb from the keep of the stopwatch he held and palmed it into his waistcoat pocket and looking at nothing, nor child nor horse, said anent that simple comparison of rotary motions and in the oratory to which he was prone that they had witnessed a thing against which time would not prevail. ↗

— Cormac McCarthy

#liquid #time #age

So this is it ⎯ what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty. ↗

— Jennifer Egan

#death #getting-old #getting-older #wasting-time #age