Frederic

“He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives past, that grows from them, exceeds them, and another that is original, pure, free, that is beyond the prejudice which protects us, the habit which gives us shape. He wants them to know both degradation and sainthood, the one without humiliation, the other without ignorance.”
― James Salter

“What is it the wind has lost that she keeps looking for under each leaf?”
― Jim Harrison, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry

“The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Once I had read in an Edmund Wilson essay of his dislike of women past menopause. He said they were like dried fruits, withered on the vine. The juice was gone. I understood what he meant. Although the words stabbed my heart even then, before I was forty. What about your juice? I had written in the margins of the book. But I knew that crones were female and old men were kings, stallions, and producers of heirs. Saul Bellow had a baby at the age of eighty-three. He didn't live long enough after that for her to play Cordelia to his Lear.”
― Anne Roiphe