...a tall, gaunt man with small narrow eyes set deep in his skull like two old sisters trying to spy out of the windows of their house without being noticed themselves.
If my mom told one more story about how cute I looked in the bathtub when I was three years old I was going to burrow into the snow and freeze myself to death.
And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears- the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?
And to all the doctors and people who said there was no hope for children with progeria and they don’t live long I want to say, ‘You’re wrong.
Her young soul felt cut up like a fifty-year-old, like a squirrel that appeared content, but carried scars from the vestige of time in its black and gray grooves.
There's in my mind a... turbulent moon-ridden girl or old woman, or both, dressed in opals and rags, feathers and torn taffeta, who knows strange songs but she is not kind.
People are laughing at me today for having holes in my pockets, and ink blood on my fingers- a thirty-something old writer, who strangles words from dictionaries, and feeds on the decay of poetry.
He tried to get drunk, “to forget about life for awhile,” as that old Billy Joel song once said, but the scotch couldn't anesthetize his pain and provide a retreat from the reality of his latest failures.
Jo told me once that she was an old woman everywhere but in her studio. “There I’m only myself,” she’d said. Standing in the middle of masterpieces that only Jo had ever seen and touched, I knew what she meant.
I am determined that only the deepest love will induce me into matrimony. So, I shall end an old maid, and teach your ten children to embroider cushions and play their instruments very ill.
Out here we speak Malspeak, a mangle of English and old languages like Spanish, Mandarin, and Russian. Dialects from a time when the land was defined by many borders. Now there’s only one that matters. And I am on the wrong side of it.
And then what did you do, Lord Oliver?" Karl's eight-year-old daughter gazed up at him in awe, as though this were the best story she had ever heard.
Both the old and new physics were dealing with shadow-symbols, but the new physics was forced to be aware of that fact - forced to be aware that it was dealing with shadows and illusions, not reality.
Denton struck Charley as the kind of man who never wasted energy on extra movement or idle chitchat. He was foursquare Sonny Boy Williamson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a Silvertone guitar, older than old school.
She had to live in this bright, red gabled house with the nurse until it was time for her to die... I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people. Children we understand, their fears and hopes and make-believe.
After all these years, his best friend is malaria. Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old battles.
The moment of crisis had come, and I must face it. My old fears, my diffidence, my shyness, my hopeless sense of inferiority, must be conquered now and thrust aside. If I failed now I should fail forever.
Entering the foyer, Royale already decided that he would thank Shake once more for being by his side at Keena’s recital. But she stunned him by eagerly waiting for him just like old times—on her knees wearing only a collar and a leash.
Cats are meowable gloves you don’t wear, you pet to keep your hands warm. But I keep my hands warm the old-fashioned way—by applauding all the political rhetoric coming out of Washington DC.
My plan to live from 65 to forever is to simply keep showing up. I also don’t want to retire at the same age as a road’s speed limit—unless that speed limit is 35. Live slow, die old.
A tree once saved my life. A posse was going to hang me, but this wise old oak would not let them. As a token of my gratitude to that tree, I used it for furniture instead of firewood.
