The Measure of My Days Quotes

“You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality.”
― Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days: One Woman's Vivid, Enduring Celebration of Life and Aging

“You have neat, tight expectation of what life out to give you, but you won't get it. That isn't what life does. Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to, and it couldn't do it better. EVERY SEED DESTROYS ITS CONTAINER OR ELSE THERE WOULD BE NO FRUITION.”
― Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days: One Woman's Vivid, Enduring Celebration of Life and Aging

“Difficulties are what makes it honorable and interesting to be alive.”
― Florida Scott Maxwell, The Measure of My Days: One Woman's Vivid, Enduring Celebration of Life and Aging

“Life does not accommodate you; it shatters you. Every seed destroys its container, or else there would be no fruition.”
― Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days: One Woman's Vivid, Enduring Celebration of Life and Aging

“Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting, and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age. To my own surprise I burst out with hot conviction. Only a few years ago I enjoyed my tranquility; now I am so disturbed by the outer world and by human quality in general that I want to put things right, as though I still owed a debt to life. I must calm down. I am far too frail to indulge in moral fervor.”
― Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days: One Woman's Vivid, Enduring Celebration of Life and Aging

“...[T]here are days when emptiness is spacious, and non-existence elevating.”
― Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days: One Woman's Vivid, Enduring Celebration of Life and Aging

“This is what creation is. The might and marvel of forever creating out of opposition.”
― Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days: One Woman's Vivid, Enduring Celebration of Life and Aging

“I admire a contented mind. I revere enjoyment of the simple things. I can imagine that contentment has a high degree of truth. But the human tendency is to take good as normal, and one's natural right, and so no cause for satisfaction and pleasure. This is accompanied by the habit of regarding bad as abnormal and a personal outrage.”
― Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days: One Woman's Vivid, Enduring Celebration of Life and Aging

“I say to life, "You are very hard", and I also say: "We are blind, we prefer to be blind. It is easier...". Life has to be hard to have any affect on us; even now we hardly notice it. Beyond that can one go? I must. I add, "We are also blind to the miracles of good that come to us. We hardly heed them, we even protest against them". Then I am left where I was, appalled by the hardness of life, knowing we are forced to be unwilling heroes. Suddenly I wonder--is all hardness justified because we are so slow in realizing that life was meant to be heroic? Greatness is required of us. That is life's aim and justification, and we poor fools have for centuries been trying to make it convenient, manageable, pliant to our will. It is also peaceful and tender and funny and dull. Yes, all that.”
― Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days: One Woman's Vivid, Enduring Celebration of Life and Aging

“It is as though God said, "You think to create order? Here is the appropriate disorder, since they are one.”
― Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days: One Woman's Vivid, Enduring Celebration of Life and Aging