When I finally went to Ireland, I had to go. It was 1993. My father was finally too old to travel alone, and he asked me to take him home. When an old man asks you to take him home, you have to do it.
I heard a young black pianist. He was a teenager, I was eight years old, and he was playing boogie-woogie, and he just knocked me out. He thought he was alone in the old barn on the beat-up upright piano, but I was hiding in the corner so he wouldn't...
For a ten-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl to become good friends was not easy under any circumstances. Indeed, it might be one of the most difficult accomplishments in the world.
We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.
He would get up and go out into a world which seemed very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamiliarity like the world of boyhood to which an old man returns.
our two postcard hearts were frightened in unison under the tenacious look of the unfathomable old man who kept on eating one banana after another
One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment.
Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are free from the grasp, not of one mad master only, but of many.
Now don’t you give me any of that talk about becoming overly protective and fussy in my old age. I have every right to show a little concern now and then.
Still, wouldn't you, even if entirely secure in your own sense of direction, be at least curious where others were heading, even as you struck out on your own ?
Bereavement seemed to work on him as a kind of blanket allergy, making him edgy and irritable to all the outside world. And of course it was reciprocal; the world receded on him.
The reason he could do none of the necessary things to take care of himself, on the few occasions when he thought of them, was that he was preoccupied elsewhere.
The present is an age of talkers, and not doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and doat on past achievements.
Disembodied spirits,” said his partner, “are not known to use telephones. Neither are spooks, phantoms, or werewolves.” “That was in the old days. Why shouldn’t they change with the times and be modern, too?
Old age saves us from the realization of a great many fears.
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death. (moby dick chap 29 p123)
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
Well, I guess in all honesty I would have to say that I never knew nor did I ever hear of anybody that money didnt change.
you fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain't nothin to be done about it it aint even a problem. It's just a aggravation.
The truths embodied in historical stories are thus not absolute or universal, but relative to the cultural context in which they are made.
...women have done strange things; they are a far greater puzzle to the student of human nature than the sterner, less complex sex has ever been.
