As someone who has spent hours researching (read: clicking my mouse, orchestrating the keyboard, traversing through pages) for some ideas I had for book reviews, I appreciated the author's what must have been a mammoth effort in achieving completeness, with a genuinely pleasing contribution from a graphic designer no less (lovely colours and design!), of compiling quotes for the ages 0-100.
A book that you can pick up time and time again, and ignite all sorts of discussions with a friend, a family member, a partner. I read through this pretty quickly this first time around; I was cruising through the first few decades, enjoying my own associations with these numbers ascribing meaning and interval to our existence; but I must admit that in the final few decades, my expression became gloomy, having been put face to face, though literarily rather than literally, for the first time in a while, with the finiteness of life; the inevitability of death.
In this review, I wanted to share the relevant entries to my dear Goodreads friends, well, those whose temporal position I was able to ascertain through some profile and even Google-stalking.
15
At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honourable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
21
I have come legally to man's estate. I have attained the dignity of twenty-one. But this is a sort of dignity that may be thrust upon one. Let me think what I have achieved.
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
23
One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.
Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That
24
She was twenty-four years old. She wanted to inhabit facts, not dreams.
Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown
25
At twenty-five I was dumbfounded afresh
By my ignorance of the simplest things.
Ted Hughes, Fulbright Scholars
26
I was twenty-six. I thought: this is maturity. This is civilisation.
Martin Amis, Experience
27
Twenty-seven!... It was a time of sudden revelations. "Heyyyy, know what? This thought came to me."
Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde
28
Physical identity meant a great deal to me when I was twenty-eight years old. I had almost the same
kind of relationship with my mirror that many of my contemporaries had with their analysts. When I began to wonder who I was, I took the simple step of lathering my face and shaving.
Don DeLillo, Americana
29
It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before; and, generally speaking, if there has been neither ill health nor anxiety, it is a time of life at which scarcely any charm is lost.
Jane Austen, Persuasion
31
No, life isn't over at the age of thirty-one, Prince. Prince Andre suddenly decided definitively, immutably. It's not enough that I know all that's in me, everyone else must know it, too.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
32
He was not so old - thirty-two. His temperament might be said to be just at the point of maturity.
James Joyce, The Dubliners
35
My age - thirty five - shouted at me all the time, standing tall and wide in my head, and blocking access to what my life afforded. Thirty-five never sat down with its hands folded. Thirty-five had no composure. It was always humming mean, terse tunes on a piece of folded cellophane.
Carol Shields, Unless
58
Fifty-eight is the porter's golden age; he is used to his lodge, he and his room fit each other like the shell and the oyster, and "he is known in the neighborhood."
Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Pons
3.5 stars.
October 10, 2016