“Which is crueler, an old man's lost memories of a life lived, or a young man's lost memories of the life he meant to live?”

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Which is crueler, an old man's lost memories of a life lived, or a young man's lost memories of the life he meant to li…" by Diane Ackerman?
Diane Ackerman photo
Diane Ackerman 30
Author, poet, naturalist 1948

Related quotes

Jane Jacobs photo

“But in North America we live in a graveyard of lost aboriginal cultures, many of which were decisively finished off by mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was also lost.”

Source: Dark Age Ahead (2004), Chapter One, The Hazard, p. 3
Context: This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book.
The subject itself is gloomy. A Dark Age is a culture's dead end. We in North America and Western Europe, enjoying the many benefits of the culture conventionally known as the West, customarily think of a Dark Age as happening once, long ago, following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. But in North America we live in a graveyard of lost aboriginal cultures, many of which were decisively finished off by mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was also lost. Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past.

Francis Bacon photo

“A man that is young in years may be old in hours if he have lost no time.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author
Karel Appel photo
Samuel Butler photo

“The great characters of fiction live as truly as the memories of dead men. For the life after death it is not necessary that a man or woman should have lived.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Hamlet, Don Quixote, Mr. Pickwick and others
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy

Leonardo Da Vinci photo

“Things that are separate shall be united and acquire such virtue that they will restore to man his lost memory.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Of papyrus
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XX Humorous Writings

“They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.”

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) Novelist, short story writer, literary critic

Source: Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature

T. B. Joshua photo

“Whether you are young or old, what matters is the grace to continue living hereafter. A man may die young yet be satisfied with living but a wicked man is not satisfied even with long life.”

T. B. Joshua (1963) Nigerian Christian leader

On death - "Atta Mills Died A Martyr" http://ukzambians.co.uk/home/2012/08/01/atta-mills-died-a-martyr-tb-joshua/ UK Zambians" (August 1 2012)

Marcus Tullius Cicero photo

“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.”
Vita enim mortuorum in memoria vivorum est posita.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Philippica IX, 5.
Source: Philippicae – Philippics (44 BC)

Lois Lowry photo
Joseph Joubert photo

“Dream. Lost memory.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Related topics