Once you've been launched into parenthood, you'll need all your best skills, self-control, good judgment and patience. But at the ...same time there is nothing like the thrill and exhilaration that come from watching that bright, cheerful, inquisitive, creative, eccentric and even goofy child you have raised flourish and shine. That's what keeps you going, and what, in the end, makes it all worthwhile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...the power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. We ...have everything to dread from the dispossessed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The aging process is a part of most of our lives, and it remains one we try to ignore until it seems to pounce upon us. We evade a...ll its signals. We stay blandly unprepared for some of its obnoxious effects, even though we have coped with the cracked voices and puzzling glands of our emerging natures, and have been guided no matter how clumsily through budding love-pains, morning sickness, and hot flashes. We do what our mentors teach us to do, but few of us acknowledge that the last years of our lives, if we can survive to live them out, are as physically predictable as infancy's or those of our full flowering. This seems impossible, but it is true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have formed a strong theory that there is no such thing as "turning into" a Nasty Old Man or an Old Witch. I believe that such p...eople, and of course they are legion, were born nasty and witchlike, and that by the time they were about five years old they had hidden their rotten bitchiness and lived fairly decent lives until they no longer had to conform to rules of social behavior, and could revert to their original horrid natures.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I like old people when they have aged well. And old houses with an accumulation of sweet honest living in them are good. And the t...imelessness that only the passing of Time itself can give to objects both inside and outside the spirit is a continuing reassurance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Children and old people and the parents in between should be able to live together, in order to learn how to die with grace, toget...her. And I fear that this is purely utopian fantasy ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who wants always to look at a cafe or an altar or an oak tree with the first innocence and the limited understanding of a naive lo...vesick girl, or a born-again Byron? Five minutes or five centuries from now, we will see changeless realities with new eyes, and the sounds of sheep bleating and a new child's wail will be the same but heard through new ears. How can we pretend to be changeless, then?... Is it wrong to see the phony, painted mushroom-bollard on the quay and accept it, as part of the whole strong song that keeps on singing there, in spite of wars and movies and the turtling-on of time?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why is it that people refuse, or are unwilling, to go back to a place where once they have been happy? If you ask them, they will ...say that they do not want to spoil a beautiful memory, or that nothing can ever be the same (a wonderful thing can only happen once!).... Actually I think they may feel afraid that they will be disillusioned, if indeed they have had to convince themselves that a privately dull or ugly event was indeed a glamourous one. Or they may suspect that they are less attractive than they wanted to be, or that the other people are.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I never thought of anything but a long full life with my love, but a heavy foreboding hit me about two years into this planned ...bliss, when he said firmly that we must never go back to the fishing village where we had spent our first Christmas. And a cruel mixture of disbelief and sadness filled me as I came to understand how thoroughly and firmly he stood by his conviction, that if people know real happiness anywhere, they must never expect to find it there again.... So that year we went to Nuremberg, and the next year Strasbourg and and and, but we never returned to any place we had been before, because once, according to his private calendar, we had been there. And in a few more years we parted. You might say that we ran out of places.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »