You are truly the generation in the middle! You have at once aging parents as well as maturing children to cope with, and you are ...not granted the deference accorded age, or the indulgence given the young.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 »
Bourbon's the only drink. You can take all that champagne stuff and pour it down the English Channel. Well, why wait 80 years befo...re you can drink the stuff? Great vineyards, huge barrels aging forever, poor little old monks running around testing it, just so some woman in Tulsa, Oklahoma can say it tickles her nose.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am devoted to those who endured, like Colette. It is easier ... to kiss the world a bitter goodbye than to go on working, writin...g, changing, enduring the slings & arrows of outrageous aging. Colette endured. And she wrote & wrote & wrote. Whenever I feel really depressed, I think of her & keep going.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For a younger person it is almost a sin--and certainly a danger--to be too much occupied with himself; but for the aging person it... is a duty and a necessity to give serious attention to himself. After having lavished its light upon the world, the sun withdraws its rays in order to illumine itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The proliferation of support groups suggests to me that too many Americans are growing up in homes that do not contain a grandmoth...er. A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt.... The emotionally satisfying discussions that take place in Chronic Pain Outreach and Depression Resources are simply updated versions of the grandmotherly practice of hanging crepe. We could eliminate much of the isolation that support groups exist to fill and save the "traditional family" that everybody is so worried about if more couples took their aging parents to live with them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Grandparents can be role models about areas that may not be significant to young children directly but that can teach them about p...atience and courage when we are ill, or handicapped by problems of aging. Our attitudes toward retirement, marriage, recreation, even our feelings about death and dying may make much more of an impression than we realize.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The politics of the exile are fever, revenge, daydream,... theater of the aging convalescent. You wait in the wings and rehearse. You wait and wait.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know the thing that's most uncommon (Envy be silent and attend!);... I know a reasonable woman, Handsome and witty, yet a friend.
Not warped by passion, awed by rumour, Not grave through pride, or gay through folly; An equal mixture of good humour And sensible soft melancholy.
'Has she no faults, then (Envy says), sir?' Yes, she has one, I must aver: When all the world conspires to praise her, The woman's deaf, and does not hear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And but for fancies, which aver That all thy motions gently pass... Athwart a plane of molten glass, I scarce could brook the strain and stirLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »