Late-Life Love Quotes

“The title of Kent Haruf’s Our Souls at Night promised just that. I read it in a few hours, tranquilized by its tenderness for two widowed characters who find late-life intimacy in the simplest of ways.”
― Susan Gubar, Late-Life Love

“With splendid specificity, all the creative texts I have studied provide alternative models for thinking about aging. Scanty and eccentric though they may be, their tributes to love and friendship tell me that many stories have yet to be recounted. But there is a late-life love tradition, and it explores the manifold ways enduring passion sustains older people dedicated to prized partnerships and also to a range of desires: to keep on writing or reading, to go on seeing and savoring beloved places or works of art, to continue nurturing each other or progenitors or descendants, to prolong the kaleidoscope of fractured and reformed memories that accrue as a diminishing future is enhanced by a lengthening past that embellishes the present for those lucky enough to be loving while living in our final years.”
― Susan Gubar, Late-Life Love

“The novelist Ian McEwan, who credits fiction with providing the possibility of “imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself,” argues that this process is “the basis of all sympathy”: “Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination.”
― Susan Gubar, Late-Life Love

“That Robinson’s character eases her grief by reading speaks to me of the importance of reading. In stories, we contemplate others like and unlike ourselves, confronting situations we might also face, but differently. As we consider creatures whose background and problems and values differ from our own, we identify and sympathize and see ourselves anew. Empathy for those who are not-us humanizes us. Whether or not it translates into compassionate behavior, it stretches the boundaries of our being. We each of us expand to contain multitudes.”
― Susan Gubar, Late-Life Love

“For in the sequel to Gilead (which is really a prequel), later-life lovers must contend with the aftershocks of trauma. Love that arrives late can come after great pain, as Shakespeare knew. Yet that pain may not arrest or numb but burn or blister a later-life lover, making her wince at the touch of the hand she wants to hold. Our”
― Susan Gubar, Late-Life Love