Margie > Margie's Quotes

“I am not sure that digging in our past guilts is a useful occupation for the very old, given that one can do so little about them. I have reached a stage at which one hopes to be forgiven for concentrating on how to get through the present.”
― Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End

“You don't always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they'd be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it's the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.”
― Diana Athill

“All through my sixties I felt I was still within hailing distance of middle age, not safe on its shores, perhaps, but navigating its coastal waters. My seventieth birthday failed to change this because I managed scarcely to notice it, but my seventy-first did change it. Being 'over seventy' is being old: suddenly I was aground on that fact and saw that the time had come to size it up.”
― Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End

“Every human being begins at the beginning, as his fathers did, with the same difficulties and pleasures, the same temptations, the same problems of good and evil, the same inward conflict, the same need to learn how to live, the same need to ask what life means.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture