My Present Age Quotes

“I remember you organized the big laundry party and all of our friends took their dirty clothes to the laundromat and drank wine out of a wineskin until the manager threw us out because you kept yelling that there ought to be a prize given to the owner of the biggest pair of boxer shorts.”
― Emblem Editions, My Present Age

“Embrace one another with courage. Search each other's hearts for hidden suffering and never flee what you discover! That's the ticket!”
― Guy Vanderhaeghe, My Present Age

“It is in the face of all this visual chaos, so opposed to order and simplicity, that I suddenly, perhaps a little guiltily, recall my vow to simplify my life. When I made that promise I had in mind the image of the ancient Greek subsisting on a fragment of pungent cheese, coarse bread, a handful of sun-warmed olives, a little watered wine; a man who discussed the Good, the True, the Beautiful with grave delight, and piped clear music in a sylvan glade. But I feel the absence of hills clothed in myrtle and thyme; of the Great Mother, Homer's wine-dark sea. Good resolutions, it seems, require good scenery.”
― Guy Vanderhaeghe, My Present Age

“As long as I can remember I have been carelessly casting myself uninvited into novels where no self-respecting novelist would have me. This literary gate-crashing of mine must be a sign of a wretched thirsting after immortality.”
― Guy Vanderhaeghe, My Present Age

“The fact remains, I was never meant to sell china. Only truly saintly men are cut out for that; the sort of men who trudge the roads to Benares, or reside on the icy hilltops speculating on infinity. It takes more faith than I can summon.”
― Guy Vanderhaeghe, My Present Age

“That's the wonderful thing about one's thirties...Almost anything can surface. Old radical friends - and you and I can think of a number - emigrate to the suburbs, build two-car attached garages, take their daughters for lessons in bourgeois dance, and coach competitive sport. One the other hand we find the individual who decides he doesn't care what Granny or Aunt Edna thinks. He says to himself, 'There it is. I'm queer, queer as the day is long. I'm going to prance and wear satin pants until I'm eighty. I don't care.' Admirable.”
― Guy Vanderhaeghe, My Present Age