“Almost any age is better than twenty-two.”
“At last he said, Did you come out of the big mountains? Gitano shook his head slowly. No, I walked down the Salinas Valley. The afternoon thought would not let Joey go. Did you ever go into the big mountains back there? The old dark eyes grew fixed, and their light turned inward on the years that were living in Gitano s head.”
“Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.”
“Prettiness fades after a few years, but elegance only increases with age.”
“If we are to use the words ‘childish’ and ‘infantile’ as terms of disapproval, we must make sure that they refer only to those characteristics of childhood which we become better and happier by outgrowing. Who in his sense would not keep, if he could, that tireless curiosity, that intensity of imagination, that facility of suspending disbelief, that unspoiled appetite, that readiness to wonder, to pity, and to admire?”
“Like the culture that created me, I am receding into the past at a rate of knots. Soon I ll need a whole row of footnotes if anybody under thirty-five is going to comprehend the least thing I say.”
“Though most expect young men to be fools, I ve noticed that just a little bit of age can make a man far more foolish than he was as a child.”
“It doesn t matter if you re 20, 40, 60, 80, or 100. Embrace your sexy-ass self and express it!”
“I am seventeen. The good things about seventeen is that you’re not sixteen. Sixteen goes with the word sweet, and I am so far from sweet.”
“You are mortal. You age, you die. If that is not hell, pray tell me, what is?”
“His parents called him Youngster. They did this in the subconcious hope that he might take the hint. Wensleydale gave the impression of having been born with a mental age of 47.”
“A man doesn t grow old because he has lived a certain number of years. A man grows old when he deserts his ideal. The years may wrinkle his skin, but deserting his ideal wrinkles his soul.”
“I felt suddenly very young - or perhaps I felt my age: an almost childlike twenty-two, rather than that permanent middle-age that attaches itself to the man who lives alone and supports himself by wearing a suit in a city not of his birth.”
“It is very easy to grow tired at collecting; the period of a low tide is about all men can endure. At first the rocks are bright and every moving animal makes his mark on the attention. The picture is wide and colored and beautiful. But after an hour and a half the attention centers weary, the color fades, and the field is likely to narrow to an individual animal. Here one may observe his own world narrowed down until interest and, with it, observation, flicker and go out. And what if with age this weariness becomes permanent and observation dim out and not recover? Can this be what happens to so many men of science? Enthusiasm, interest, sharpness, dulled with a weariness until finally they retire into easy didacticism? With this weariness, this stultification of attention centers, perhaps there comes the pained and sad memory of what the old excitement was like, and regret might turn to envy of the men who still have it. Then out of the shell of didacticism, such a used-up man might attack the unwearied, and he would have in his hands proper weapons of attack. It does seem certain that to a wearied man an error in a mass of correct data wipes out all the correctness and is a focus for attack; whereas the unwearied man, in his energy and receptivity, might consider the little dross of error a by-product of his effort. These two may balance and produce a purer thing than either in the end. These two may be the stresses which hold up the structure, but it is a sad thing to see the interest in interested men thin out and weaken and die. We have known so many professors who once carried their listeners high on their single enthusiasm, and have seen these same men finally settle back comfortably into lectures prepared years before and never vary them again. Perhaps this is the same narrowing we observe in relation to ourselves and the tide pool—a man looking at reality brings his own limitations to the world. If he has strength and energy of mind the tide pool stretches both ways, digs back to electrons and leaps space into the universe and fights out of the moment into non-conceptual time. Then ecology has a synonym which is ALL.”
“She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she s looked that way ever since she was two.”
“You are old and grey,” she teased. “And you’re never too immortal for a spanking,” he shot back...”
“... but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.”