“And there was this sweet-looking little old lady with her white hair in a bun and everything, the typical grandmother type, and she was swearing her head off. I guess Alzheimer s had brought out her inner sailor.”
“when you live forever and don t age, it gives you time to hope”
“هم يضحكون: الكبير(العجوز) مثل الصغير، ويقصدون بذلك أن أحدهما فقد عقله، أما الثاني لم يمتلكه بعد. هذا صحيح، الكبير والصغير هما فقط القادران بحساسية وحدة أن يُدهَشا لوجودهما، ولكل ما يحيط بهما في كل خطوة.”
“I was young at Myna, that first time. When had the change come? He had retreated to here, to Collegium, to spin his awkward webs of intrigue and to lecture at the College. Then, years on, the call had come for action. He had gone to that chest in which he stored his youth and found that, like some armour long unworn, it had rusted away. He tried to tell himself that this was not like the grumbling of any other man who finds the prime of his life behind him. I need my youth and strength now, as never before. A shame that one could no husband time until one needed it. All his thoughts rang hollow. He was past his best and that was the thorn that would not be plucked from his side. He was no different from any tradesman or scholar who, during a life of indolence, pauses partway up the stairs to think, This was not so hard, yesterday.”
“... forty s nothing, at fifty you re in your prime, sixty s the new forty, and so on.”
“I don t mind getting older; it s a privilege denied to so many!”
“Ce matin, l idée m est venue pour la première fois que mon corps, ce fidèle compagnon, cet ami plus sûr, mieux connu de moi que mon âme, n est qu un monstre sournois qui finira par dévorer son maître.”
“You read any Greek myths, puppy? The one about the gorgon Medusa, particularly? I used to wonder what could be so terrible that you couldn t survive even looking at it. Until I got a little older and I figured out the obvious answer. Everything.”
“You will be free as soon as you are twenty-one, but I am a slave for life! Have not I as good a right to be free as you have?”
“One reason that the task of inventing manners is so difficult is that etiquette is folk custom, and people have emotional ties to the forms of their youth. That is why there is such hostility between generations in times of rapid change; their manners being different, each feels affronted by the other, taking even the most surface choices for challenges.”
“You do know, I hope, that no man under the age of forty can even approach fascinating.”
“... as we age we have not only to readdress earlier developmental crises but also somehow to find the way to three affirmations that may seem to conflict. ... We have to affirm our own life. We have to affirm our own death. And we have to affirm love, both given and received. [p. 88]”
“As to the charge that I am a cranky old man, I plead guilty.”
“Moving is both liberating and debilitating. Undertaken too late, it is a very stressful process, one that sometimes seems to catapult people into frail old age, and undertaken too soon, it may preempt other possibilities. [p. 38]”
“-You never stop teaching, do you? -This is life, Yrene. We never stop learning. Even at my age.”
“I ve done what I could; a man that can live as lone as I have and not know when to quit is a fool.”
“Torture is like dancing: I’m too old for it. Let the younger ones practice their bravery.”