age

Once you got that old, you might as well be ninety-eight or a hundred and eight. Nothing left for the world to show you but the latest incarnations of cruelty.

Comparing yourself at the age when a young writer died drives home how early their lives were cut off, since likely you are thinking, But I was just getting started! I still didn’t know anything!

Tough old world, baby. If you’re not bolted together tightly, you’re gonna shake, rattle, and roll before you turn thirty.

That is one thing gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.

he was already to some extent a youth of our times—in other words, naturally honest, insisting on truth, seeking it and believing in it, and, once believing, demanding instant commitment to it with all the strength of his soul and wanting to rush off and perform great deeds, sacrificing all, if necessary even life itself.

He prided himself on his ability to judge by appearances, a pardonable weakness in one who was already fifty—an age when an intelligent, well-to-do man of the world always starts to take himself seriously, sometimes even against his better judgement.