A Quote by Timothy Garton Ash

Europe is a woman, now middle-aged, who has already had a number of heart attacks and is currently experiencing the biggest health crisis of her life, but one that need not be fatal.
My father was 91 when he passed away of natural causes, and my mother died aged 88. She had a heart condition and had many heart attacks throughout her life, but she had ten children, so that would have put a strain on her body.
The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life - the number of children, whether she had money of her own, if she had a room to herself, whether she had help bringing up her family, if she had servants, whether part of the housework was her task - it is only when we can measure the way of life and experience made possible to the ordinary woman that we can account for the success or failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer.
Any middle-aged woman knows that our feet are not for the faint of heart, especially in midwinter. I wear clogs, so it's actually like my feet are wooden now.
To marry a woman with any success a man must have a total experience of her, he must come to see her and accept her in time as well as in space. Besides coming to love what she is now, he must also come to realize and love equally the baby and the child she once was, and the middle-aged woman and the old lady she will eventually become.
The two things are synergistic, the health care crisis and the food crisis. Right now, to a large extent, the food industry's biggest product is patients for the health care industry and we have to break that.
The biggest pieces of work that we do are vaccines, because those save lives, and also family planning. Because if a woman can space the births of her children, it changes everything for her health and her child's health.
One of the patients that really stands out for me was a middle-aged woman who actually had HIV in the early days, and helping her kind of come to terms with that. She had rather late-stage illness, but just helping her, sort of cope with the challenges of the disease and the infections and all that, but also her social issues, like, coming out to her family about the illness, and a very religious family.
I met a woman who went through a very difficult personal crisis, and she was really bed-ridden for a long time, and 'Friends' got her through. I met a woman who had a brain injury while living in Europe, and 'Friends' got her through.
This person had arrived, he had illuminated her, he had ensorcelled her with notions of miracle and beauty, he had both understood and misunderstood her, he had married her, he had broken her heart, he had looked upon her with those sad and hopeless eyes, he had accepted his banishment, and now he was gone. What a stark and stunning thing was life- that such a cataclysm can enter and depart so quickly, and leave such wreckage behind!
We all need Europe, not just those of us in Europe. And we Germans need Europe more than the others. Germany is the country with the longest border, the most neighbours, and is, by population and economic strength, the number one in Europe.
Besides the obvious difference, there was not much distinction between losing a best friend and losing a lover: it was all about intimacy. One moment, you had someone to share your biggest triumphs and fatal flaws with; the next minute, you had to keep them bottled inside. One moment, you'd start to call her to tell her a snippet of news or to vent about your awful day before realizing you did not have that right anymore; the next, you could not remember the digits of her phone number.
Selfishly, perhaps, Catti-brie had determined that the assassin was her own business. He had unnerved her, had stripped away years of training and discipline and reduced her to the quivering semblance of a frightened child. But she was a young woman now, no more a girl. She had to personally respond to that emotional humiliation, or the scars from it would haunt her to her grave, forever paralyzing her along her path to discover her true potential in life.
The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosohpically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.
There were days - she could remember this - when Henry would hold her hand as they walked home, middle-aged people, in their prime. Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it. But she had that memory now, of something healthy and pure.
Too often, the idea seemed to be that the cost of being part of Europe was being less like Britain. So after years of fighting to defend Europe against attacks from the Eurosceptic right, it would be fatal to retreat into the same arguments and begin the battle anew.
The route for the refugees currently goes through Greece and the Balkans or through Italy; if there were a crisis in north-eastern Europe, Poland might just as well be affected. In this case we are dealing with mechanisms that we do not control. We need to change that.
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