A Quote by George MacDonald
Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.
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The genuine music lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it.
Olive's private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as "big bursts" and "little bursts." Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.
Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.
Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.
I had looked forward
to old age as a time
of quietness, a time to draw
my horizons about me,
to watch memories ripening
in the sunlight of a walled garden.
But there is the void
over my head and the distance
within that the tireless signals
come from. And astronaut
on impossible journeys
to the far side of the self
I return with messages
I cannot decipher.
The arrogance is not greatness but swelling; and the swelling seems big but it's not healthy.
Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk.
The truth thy speech doth show, within my heart reproves the swelling pride.
But grant, the virtues of a temp'rate prime
Bless with an age exempt from scorn or crime;
An age that melts with unperceived decay,
And glides in modest Innocence away
I get bursts of creativity with bursts of physical activity.
Hitherto without being; hidden away in the womb of eternity; possessed neither of thought nor feeling; remote from the range of human ken -- the Man bursts, in some unknown manner, the bars of non-existence, and announces with a cry the beginning of his brief life. In the night of non-existence there bursts forth also a little candle, lit by an unseen hand. Mark well its flame: for it is the life of that Man.
What people love about life is its miraculous beauty; what they hate about death is the loss and decay around it. Yet losing is not losing, and decay turns into beauty, as beauty turns back into decay. We are breathed in, breathed out. Therefore all you need is to understand the one breath that makes up the world.
Concealed sorrow bursts the heart, and rages within us as an internal fire.
In thy apparel avoid singularity, profuseness, and gaudiness. Be not too early in the fashion, nor too late. Decency is half way between affectation and neglect. The body is the shell of the soul, apparel is the husk of that shell; the husk often tells you what the kernel is.
Year chases year, decay pursues decay,
Still drops some joy from with'ring life away;
New forms arise, and diff'rent views engage
True love is boundless like the ocean and, swelling within one, spreads itself out and, crossing all boundaries and frontiers, envelops the whole world.
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