What one really wants is youth, and what one really loses is years. Life becomes at last a mere piece of acting. One goes on by ha...bit, playing more or less clumsily that one is still alive. It is ludicrous and at times humiliating, but there is a certain style in it which youth has not. We become all, more or less, gentlemen; we are ancien régime; we learn to smile while gout racks us.... We get out of bed in the morning all broken up, without nerves, color or temper, and by noon we are joking with young women about the play. One lives in constant company with diseased hearts, livers, kidneys and lungs; one shakes hands with certain death at closer embrace every day; one sees paralysis in every feature and feels it in every muscle; all one's functions relax their action day by day; and, what is worse, one's grasp on the interests of life relaxes with the physical relaxation; and, through it all, we improve; our manners acquire refinement; our sympathies grow wider; our youthful self-consciousness disappears; very ordinary men and women are found to have charm; our appreciations have weight; we should almost get to respect ourselves if we knew of anything human to respect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
With its frame of shaking curls all in disarray, earrings swinging,... make-up smudged by beads of sweat, eyes languid at the end of lovemaking, may the face of the slim girl who's riding on top of you protect you long. What's the use of Vishnu, Shiva, Skanda, and all those other gods?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for th...eir reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sometimes a musical phrase would perfectly sum up The mood of a moment. One of those lovelorn sonatas... For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse. Everybody wondered who the new arrival was.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey ...his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too "personal" style.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »