Light (1919), Ch. XXII - Light
Context: I do not regret my youth and its beliefs. Up to now, I have wasted my time to live. Youth is the true force, but it is too rarely lucid. Sometimes it has a triumphant liking for what is now, and the pugnacious broadside of paradox may please it. But there is a degree in innovation which they who have not lived very much cannot attain. And yet who knows if the stern greatness of present events will not have educated and aged the generation which to-day forms humanity's effective frontier? Whatever our hope may be, if we did not place it in youth, where should we place it?
“We simply gow up. In Florence, at age fifty-four, I was a brash youth. Had I known the Duse was there her poet chap might have found dangerous competition, ha-ha. The only trouble is that now, nearing eighty, I keep discovering that damned war has made the world older than I. The world frowns now on youth in a vacuum, it insists youth be turned-to, utilized, exploited. No time for pranks. No more Vheissus.”
Source: V. (1963), Chapter Nine, Part II, Godolphin
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Thomas Pynchon 134
American novelist 1937Related quotes
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“The age of antiquity is the youth of the world.”
The Advancement of Learning (1605), Book I, v, 8
(la) Antiquitas saeculi juventus mundi.
Context: The age of antiquity is the youth of the world. These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we account ancient ordine retrogrado, by a computation backward from ourselves.
Above two in Violence is not the hallmark of the Congress, 6 December 2013, Rediff.com http://www.rediff.com/news/2001/feb/20inter.htm,
We all are one, whichever religion we belong to
“Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.”
Source: The Summing Up (1938), p. 290