“It was like beginning life anew without the vigor and enthusiasm of youth, like learning to become left-handed in old age.”

— Chinua Achebe , book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 14 (pp. 120–121)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It was like beginning life anew without the vigor and enthusiasm of youth, like learning to become left-handed in old a…" by Chinua Achebe?

Chinua Achebe 63

Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic 1930–2013

Related quotes

“To make good use of life, one should have in youth the experience of advanced years, and in old age the vigor of youth.”

Stanisław Leszczyński (1677–1766) king of Poland

No. 4.
Maxims and Moral Sentences

“Moreover, regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age — after a matter of ten or fifteen years — they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter VIII https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Aftermath II, Section VI, p 165
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

“Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
Context: Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age; and if you understand that old age has wisdom for its food, you will so conduct yourself in youth that your old age will not lack for nourishment.

“Youth, what man's age is like to be doth show,
We may our ends by our beginnings know.”

John Denham (1615–1669) English poet and courtier

Of Prudence, line 225.

“The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn;
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Hellas

Source: Hellas (1821), l. 1060

“The young are of age when they twitter like the old; they are driven through school to learn the old song, and, when they have this by heart, they are declared of age.”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Cambridge 1995, pp. 61-62
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.”

Jacques Barzun (1907–2012) Historian

"Age of Reason" https://archive.is/20130630002019/www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/22/071022fa_fact_krystal?currentPage=all by Arthur Krystal, The New Yorker (2007-10-22), p. 103

“Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 27

“Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 16 “Between Drumner and Dremegole” (p. 233)

“There is an intelligent man, who never questions his ideas," said Dorsenne to himself, when the Marquis had left him. "He is like the Socialists. What vigor of mind in that old wornout machine!”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

Source: Cosmopolis (1892), Ch. 2 "The Beginning of a Drama"

“It was like beginning life anew without the vigor and enthusiasm of youth, like learning to become left-handed in old age.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Chinua Achebe 63

Related quotes

Related topics