Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
On life and death this old man walked.
Herman Melville • Moby Dick: or, the White Whale
I don't even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.
—Umberto Eco
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.
Colson Whitehead • The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
Makiko looked old. Everyone looks older as the years go by, but that’s not what I mean. She wasn’t even forty, but if she told you “I just turned fifty-three,” you’d wish her happy birthday. She didn’t look older. She literally looked old.
Mieko Kawakami, Sam Bett, • Breasts and Eggs
‘You are—how old? Twenty-six or -seven? I am nearly twice that and, let me tell you, you are lucky. You are lucky that what is happening to you now is happening now and not when you are forty, or something like that, when there would be no hope for you and you would simply be destroyed.’ ‘What is happening to me?’ I asked. I had meant to sound sard
... See moreJames Baldwin • Giovanni's Room (Penguin Modern Classics)
To talk to old people of this kind is like writing on the sand; if you produce any impression at all, it is gone almost immediately; old age is here nothing but the caput mortuum of life--all that is essential to manhood is gone.