It is a pity that, as one gradually gains experience, one loses one’s youth.
When I was a teenager I was sure I’d be dead before I was thirty. Let’s just say that I am well into some serious gravy time now but sometimes I wonder if I am actually dead and this is hell.
Laurie, I’m 65. Every day the future looks a little bit darker, but the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.
Comic: “Watchmen” by Alan Moore
I’m old, Gandalf. I know I don’t look it, but I’m beginning to feel it in my heart. I feel thin. Sort of stretched, like butter, scraped over too much bread. I need a holiday. A very long holiday. And I don’t expect I shall return. In fact, I mean not to.
Book: “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” by J.R.R. Tolkien
A novel is, alas— for better or worse, a function of experience and maturity. Why are there almost no good novels written by people in their early twenties or in their teens? There are almost none. It’s one of the great problems of teaching writing to young people— you find talented young people, eighteen or nineteen years old; you try to teach them some skills; you try to teach them some awareness, some craft and discipline. But you are also aware that you’re getting them all dressed up with no place to go for about ten years, because they’ve got to wait until they’ve settled into their own characters and into their own lives, until they know something in their lives; and then their good fiction, their good narrative, will begin to come out of them in their middle and late twenties— I believe often not until their late thirties.
Book: Conversations: Reynolds Price and William Ray -The MVC Bulletin, Memphis State University, Memphis, Tennessee, 1976
My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.
I do note with interest that old women in my books become young women on the covers… this is discrimination against the chronologically gifted.
It’s never too late to become what you might have been.
In case you’re worried about what’s going to become of the younger generation, it’s going to grow up and start worrying about the younger generation.
Once we started relying on computers and networks to interact, we lost contact with the concept of physical decay and the process of aging. Instead an analog time span where things just sorta fade away, we have the almighty delete button. With the press of a button, content can be erased leaving virtually no evidence behind.
Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting out ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.