O for those days when these tired metaphors were teenagers too, when it was still possible to recite ‘Daffodils’ and feel thrilled as you gazed at the golden laburnum in bloom. Recognising clichés is a sign of aging. Sweet as the past may be, it...
Reunion with the mother is a siren call haunting our imagination. Once there was bliss, and now there is struggle. Dim memories of life before the traumatic separation of birth may be the source of Arcadian fantasies of a lost golden age.
I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don't have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and l...
The name Eve/Eab/Age stems from the Latin aetas, which is from aevum, “lifetime.” The word aetas is remarkably similar to the name Aïdes, i.e. Hades. Eve, you see, is not Adam’s wife but Adam’s father, Zeus bronnton, Zeus “the thunderer/ea...
The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accid...
Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in yo...
It is impossible to control outcomes or results, although most of us have been programmed from a very young age to believe otherwise. The idea that we can perform actual ‘magic’ causes tremendous dysfunction, unnecessary suffering and prevents th...
There were books everywhere. Hundreds of books. Thousands of books. There were books of every size, shape, and color. They lined the walls from floor to ceiling, standing straight and rigid as soldiers on the polished mahogany shelves, the gilt lette...
A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.
Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of l...
A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and ...
Imagine the message that sent to my sister and me. A cousin violates us, confesses, and walks away with barely a slap on the wrist. I learned at a young age that if I was ever going to see justice for the wrongs done to me, I had to find it myself.
I wondered--not for the first time--whether one was ever justified in neglecting the welfare of one's own family in order to fight for the welfare of others. Can there be anything more important than looking after one's aging mother? Is politics mere...
Everywhere that we looked, were objects & artifacts reminiscent of a bygone age. of war & destruction, of mankind's determination to rule his neighbour, to prove how mighty he and his people are, yet a romance of days past that I am drawn to like a s...
Why did they go away, do you think? If there ever were such things." "Who knows? Times change. Would you call this age a good one for unicorns?" "No, but I wonder if any man before us ever thought his time a good time for unicorns.
In ev'ry life there comes a winter bleak That, in it, never yet seems life to come And on each heart such desolation wreak That even light from Heaven seems succumb'. But, even as in year, doth follow Spring As ever hath it, through all Ages past Yet...
I should get 365 different t-shirts made up, each a slightly different color than the last, forming a gradient from green to blue. Then I should take a daily picture, and move down the color line accordingly, so that I can subtly age like a chameleon...
I don't know about you, but I just can't rule out finding the love of my life simply because he's twenty four years older than me. I'm only sorry you had to wait so long for me to reach the right age to come looking for you.
Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from o...
When he spoke, his words came with a confusion which was delightful to hear because one felt that it indicated not so much a defect in his speech as a quality of his soul, as it were a survival from the age of innocence which he had never wholly outg...
If you close your eyes when you sing in Latin, and if you stand right at the back so you can keep one hand against the cold stone wall of the church, you can pretend you're in the Middle Ages. That's why I did it. That's what I was in it for.
