All Quotes By Tag: Young
“The more risk you can take upfront in life, the better off you will be later.”
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“She felt time in the lean muscles in her thighs and rounded bottom when she pushed herself off the ground. She felt time in the way her arms and legs pumped when she walked into the river, bathed herself in the cool reflected surface of the dark pool under the waterfall. Josephine felt the possibility of time the night she watched the couple bend, release, break, and come back together on the trunk of the hundred-year-old tree. -The Girl with Dragonfly Wings”
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“Great growth comes from loneliness. You have time to develop, dwell in your own mind and go a bit mad. All the great people are a bit mad. That’s good to remember. Don’t escape it. Great growth comes from time spent in foreign lands, watching foreign people with foreign cultures. It makes you forget about your own land and race and town for a while. Great growth also comes from rooting yourself into one place from time to time. Unpack your bags, get a nice bed, a bookshelf, some friends. Learn to show up, keep in touch, stick around. Growth comes in all sorts of forms and shapes, everywhere at all times, and it’s yours to take and consume. Do what ought to be done. Here and now, to get you somewhere — anywhere.”
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“Some social ills are preserved by the common misbelief that things such as ignorance, greed, and stupidity do not have the stamina required to reach old age.”
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“Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.”
“Death devours not only those who have been cooked by old age; it also feasts on those who are half-cooked and even those who are raw.”
“Among other possibilities, money was invented to make it possible for a foolish man to control wise men; a weak man, strong men; a child, old men; an ignorant man, knowledgeable men; and for a dwarf to control giants.”
“Loneliness tortures many if not most of the elderly more intensely and more frequently than it torments many if not most of us who will never be or have not yet been pushed or pulled into old age.”
“So I died many times that year.In the cold, in the storm, on the run or on the drunk for my heart did not want to beatbut kept on beating anywayand my pain was as real as real can be,and I tried to learn and deal and run and feelbut nothing really worked.I built a comfortable home in my sorrow and settled into a quiet living. No sparks or grand gestures, just a simple daily hymn to comfort. The leaves fell off the trees and coloured this city in all kinds of pretty, and some days that was enough to make me smile at least a little bit, within.”
“We still need the old to tell the young that in time they will learn.”
“I don’t know where to start,” one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O’ Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don’t worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down.”
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“I fell for her like a suicide from a bridge.”
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