Not Feeling Old Quotes & Sayings

He makes a face and tosses the flower at me. It lands on my cheek, and I pick it up and twirl it between my fingers. I could lie out here all day, not moving an inch, feeling the sun above and the grass below. With a contented sigh, I stretch my arms wide, raking the grass with my fingers - and find myself brushing Aladdin's hand with my own. I pull it away quickly, my cheeks warming. He laughs a little.
"Sometimes," he says, "I forget you're supposed to be four thousand years old. You act as shy as a girl of sixteen."
"I do not!" I sit up and glare at him.
He grins and shrugs, sliding his hands under his head. There are bits of grass stuck in his hair, and after a moment's hesitation, I reach over and flick them away.
Aladdin watches me silently, his throat bobbing as he swallows. I drop my gaze. — Jessica Khoury

I remember being a 12 year old art kid and feeling like there was no exciting art movement happening, especially for somebody like me. I was looking around for artistic inspiration and could find nothing - until my older brother's friend brought a Giger book over to the house. Upon seeing the first image I knew I would never be the same. A whole new world opened up to me and I have been exploring it ever since. It's no doubt that I would not be here today, doing what I do, without his influence. H.R. Giger is the king of the Dark Art movement. — Chet Zar

So I spoke to my old friend Bruce and told him I was feeling it, his loss of Clarence. We talked for quite a while, and there is no need to go into what two old friends had to say to each other at this point, except to say that two old friends spoke to each other about their music, their muses, their partners in crime, their proof, their friendship, their souls and their lives. Ben Keith was my Clarence Clemons. Clarence Clemons was Bruce's Ben Keith. When he died last year it touched me to the core. I don't want to ever think of any one else playing his parts or occupying his space. No one could. I can't do those songs again unless it's solo. So I told Bruce, "Waylon once looked at me and said, 'There's very few of us left.'" He liked that. I told him when he looked to his right I would be there. That's enough. I'm not talking about that anymore. — Neil Young

Well ... yes, and here we go again. But before we get to The Work, as it were, I want to make sure I know how to cope with this elegant typewriter - (and, yes, it appears that I do) - so why not make this quick list of my life's work and then get the hell out of town on the 11:05 to Denver? Indeed. Why not? But for just a moment I'd like to say, for the permanent record, that it is a very strange feeling to be a 40-year-old American writer in this century and sitting alone in this huge building on Fifth Avenue in New York at one o'clock in the morning on the night before Christmas Eve, 2000 miles from home, and compiling a table of contents for a book of my own Collected Works in an office with a tall glass door that leads out to a big terrace looking down on The Plaza Fountain. Very strange. — Hunter S. Thompson

One of the hardest aspects of this protracted public persona is not knowing others as well as they feel they know me. It's a rather clumsy feeling actually; to not know someone who acts as though you're old friends. — Christopher Knight

I lie in a bathtub of cold water, still sweating and singing love songs to myself. I put the gun to my head and cock it.
I think of my Grandma and remember that old feeling of being so in love that nothing matters except seeing and being seen by her. I drop the gun to my chest. I'm so sad and I can't really see a way out of what I'm feeling but I'm leaning on memory for help. Faster. Slower. I think I want to hurt myself more than I'm already hurting. I'm not the smartest boy in the world by a long shot, but even in my funk I know that easy remedies like eating your way out of sad, or fucking your way out of sad, or lying your way out of sad, or slanging your way out of sad, or robbing your way out of sad, or gambling your way out of sad, or shooting your way out of sad, are just slower, more acceptable ways for desperate folks, and especially paroled black boys in our country, to kill ourselves and others close to us in America. — Kiese Laymon

I have a feeling of reverence about my father being in his 80s - a feeling that I want to whisper, take soft steps, not intrude too much. He's like a stately old cathedral to me now. — Patti Davis

It's a corny old gag about Las Vegas, the temporal city if there ever was one, trying to camouflage the hours and retard the dawn, when everybody knows that if you're feeling lucky you're really feeling time in its rawest form, and if you're not feeling lucky, they've got a clock at the bus station. — Michael Herr

Whatever actions may have been appropriate for your survival when you were a child, are probably no longer necessary. However, the ego cannot know that. It is like a computer program, reacting to life robotically; doing what it deems is most applicable in the present circumstance, according to past experience. The problem is, it often blocks you from feeling what is appropriate in the present moment, through its preconceived notions of what worked best in the past, and may not necessarily pertain any longer. For example you may resist intimacy now by pushing others away, in effect shut them out, because as a five year old you did the same in order to protect your vulnerability. — Paula Horan

My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house. I knew just what it was. In fact, when it happen, you can't miss it. — Alice Walker

The old school of thought would have you believe that you'd be a fool to take on nature without arming yourself with every conceivable measure of safety and comfort under the sun. But that isn't what being in nature is all about. Rather, it's about feeling free, unbounded, shedding the distractions and barriers of our civilization - not bringing them with us. — Ryel Kestenbaum

She had read articles over the years about a man's supposed biological craving for young women: it was all about primeval procreation, in theory, the need to plant seed in fertile soil. Maybe ... She thought of a line from Nabokov: "Because you took advantage of my disadvantage." Lolita. In this case, however, Kristin felt that she was at the disadvantage - not the young thing. The truth was, she feared, all men were Humbert Humbert. Maybe they weren't pedophiles lusting after twelve-year-olds, but didn't Lolita look old for her age? Older, anyway? Sure, there were MILFs in porn, but Kristin had a feeling that considerably more men wanted their porn stars to be students at Duke University than moms from the bleachers at a middle-school soccer game. — Chris Bohjalian

If I am asked, What do you propose to substitute for universal suffrage? Practically, What have you to recommend? I answer at once, Nothing. The whole current of thought and feeling, the whole stream of human affairs, is setting with irresistible force in that direction. The old ways of living, many of which were just as bad in their time as any of our devices can be in ours, are breaking down all over Europe, and are floating this way and that like haycocks in a flood. Nor do I see why any wise man should expend much thought or trouble on trying to save their wrecks. The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god. — James Fitzjames Stephen

This is so much like the old days. And, again, I have mixed feelings. In some ways it's good and comfortable to be fitting straight back in like I've never been away, but, on the other hand, I'm getting this constrictive feeling as well. It's the same places - like the bars and pubs on Friday night - the same people, the same conversations, the same arguments and the same attitudes. Five years away and not much seems to have changed. I can't decide if this is good or bad. — Iain Banks

Who is there who has not felt a sudden startled pang at reliving an old experience or feeling an old emotion? — Agatha Christie

Those are life-and-death-type experiences he goes through in the mines. Eventually he gets out and goes back to his old life. But nothing in the novel shows he learned anything from these experiences, that his life changed, that he thought deeply now about the meaning of life or started questioning society or anything. You don't get any sense, either, that he's matured. You have a strange feeling after you finish the book. It's like you wonder what Soseki was trying to say. It's like not really knowing what he's getting at is the part that stays with you. — Haruki Murakami

My sister says tearfully that she has a feeling that she will never see me again. I am not very much impressed, because she has felt this every time I go to the East. And what, she asks, is she to do if Rosalind gets appendicitis? There seems no reason why my fourteen-year-old daughter should get appendicitis, and all I can think of to reply is: 'Don't operate on her yourself!' For my sister has a great reputation for hasty action with her scissors, — Agatha Christie Mallowan

Won't the new 'Suggested for Mature Audience' protect our youngsters from such films? I don't believe so. I know many forty-five-year old men with the mentalities of six-year-olds, and my feeling is that they should not see such pictures, either. — Shirley Temple

Whenever I think about my stupid empty life, I come to the conclusion that I'm just wasting my time, and I'm not the only one. Everybody I know is the same, except for old Jiko. Just wasting time, killing time, feeling crappy.
And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever?
And if time is lost forever, what does that mean? It's not like you get to die any sooner, right? I mean, if you want to die sooner, you have to take matters into your own hands. — Ruth Ozeki

Sorrow and self-pity consume enormous quantities of energy. If you only can desist from feeling victimized by fate and look for a new solution instead, not only would you conserve old energies but at the same time also feel the surge of the new. New hope is kindled in the process. — G.R. Gopinath

Old as I am in age, I have no feeling that I have ceased to grow inwardly or that my growth will stop at the dissolution of the flesh. What I am concerned with is my readiness to obey the call of Truth, my God, from moment to moment, no matter how inconsistent it may appear. My commitment is to Truth, not to consistency. — Mahatma Gandhi

Dear Jutta, Sorry I have not written these past months. The fever is mostly gone now and you should not worry. I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads. It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel. Say hello to Frau Elena and the children who are left. — Anthony Doerr

....one of those long, romantic novels, six hundred and fifty pages of small print, translated from French or German or Hungarian or something -- because few of the English ones have the exact feeling I mean. And you read one page of it or even one phrase of it, and then you gobble up all the rest and go about in a dream for weeks afterwards, for months afterwards -- perhaps all your life, who knows? -- surrounded by those six hundred and fifty pages, the houses, the streets, the snow, the river, the roses, the girls, the sun, the ladies' dresses and the gentlemen's voices, the old, wicked, hard-hearted women and the old, sad women, the waltz music -- everything. What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. 'The house I was living in when I read that book,' you think, or 'This colour reminds me of that book. — Jean Rhys

So you should accept knowledge as if you were hearing something you already knew. But this does not mean to receive various pieces of information merely as an echo of your own opinions. It means that you should not be surprised at whatever you see or hear. If you receive things just as an echo of yourself, you do not really see them, you do not fully accept them as they are. So when we say, "Rozan is famous for its misty, rainy days," it does not mean to appreciate this sight by recollecting some scenery we have seen before: "It is not so wonderful. I have seen that sight before." Or "I have painted much more beautiful paintings! Rozan is nothing!" This is not our way. If you are ready to accept things as they are, you will receive them as old friends, even though you appreciate them with new feeling. — Shunryu Suzuki

While she lay there with these old worn thoughts coming obediently into her mind, called there by habit and the familiar quiet of early morning, she was aware that at the back of her mind there was another thought that was not at all stale, but so fresh that it was nearly a feeling, with all a feeling's delicious power to kill thought. — Stella Gibbons

MY MOST CONSTANT and vivid memory is not so much of the people but of the actual house in Aracataca where I lived with my grandparents. It's a recurring dream which persists even now. What's more, every single day of my life I wake up with the feeling, real or imaginary, that I've dreamed I'm in that huge old house. Not that I've gone back there but that I am there, at no particular age, for no particular reason - as if I'd never left it. Even now in my dreams that sense of night-time foreboding which dominated my whole childhood still persists. It was an uncontrollable sensation which began early every evening and gnawed away at me in my sleep until I saw dawn breaking through the cracks in the door. — Gerald Martin

Jealousy can instigate the cruellest act, or more to the point, hatred can. Miss Bennett was the one who found Nathan lying at the bottom of the stairs in the cellar, said he must have slipped or something, especially with one leg being so much weaker than the other. They as good people never would have suspected their own daughter of pushing him. That she never showed emotion over her brother's death was put down to trauma. I could see what they could not - a child incapable of any kind of feeling apart from selfishness. I can still picture him now, lying on his stomach, his head twisted at an unnatural angle, eyes glazed like one of Rhiannon's dolls. She was then about seven years old with the face of an angel and a nature as cruel as anyone on death row. — Tami Egonu

The disaster of being old was in not feeling safe to venture anywhere, of seeing freedom put out of reach. — Elizabeth Taylor

For many years, I decided not to do television because I have three children, but now my youngest is finally old enough to be in kindergarten. So I'm not feeling that kind of tug of not being with her as much. — Elisabeth Shue

She pushed the bathroom door open to discover Magnus lurking on the other side, clutching a towel in one hand and his glittery hair in the other. He must have slept on it, she thought, because one side of the glittered spikes looked dented in. "Why does it take girls so long to shower?" he demanded. "Mortal girls, Shadowhunters, female warlocks, you're all the same. I'm not getting any younger waiting out here."
Clary stepped aside to let him pass. "How old are you, anyway?" she asked curiously.
Magnus winked at her. "I was alive when the Dead Sea was just a lake that was feeling a little poorly."
Clary rolled her eyes.
Magnus made a shooing moving. "Now move your petite behind. I need to get in there; my hair is a wreck. — Cassandra Clare

I say, 'This is quite a room you have, Josh Raymond,' I am trying to let it bother me because jealousy is a mean, unpleasant feeling that only eats you from the inside, and I do not need to stand here, an almost-eighteen-year-old with a really sexy girlfriend, even if she's not allowed to see me anymore, and worry about the fact that my stepbrother seems to own thousands of Legos. — Jennifer Niven

While Celia was gone he walked up and down remembering what he had originally felt about Dorothea's engagement, and feeling a revival of his disgust at Mr. Brooke's indifference. If Cadwallader-- if every one else had regarded the affair as he, Sir James, had done, the marriage might have been hindered. It was wicked to let a young girl blindly decide her fate in that way, without any effort to save her. Sir James had long ceased to have any regrets on his own account: his heart was satisfied with his engagement to Celia. But he had a chivalrous nature (was not the disinterested service of woman among the ideal glories of old chivalry?): his disregarded love had not turned to bitterness; its death had made sweet odors-- floating memories that clung with a consecrating effect to Dorothea. He could remain her brotherly friend, interpreting her actions with generous trustfulness. — George Eliot

The white population could not possibly be unaffected by those events some whites more stubborn in their defense of segregation, but others beginning to think in different ways. And the black population was transformed, having risen up in mass action for the first time, feeling its power, knowing now that if the old order could be shaken it could be toppled. — Howard Zinn

I hit you. Won't that make you go away? What else can I do?" he snarled. He'd fallen back on his old standby, anger.
"I'm not going away, Cole, so maybe we can cut out the assaults in the future. You don't want me to go away. I know that. You love me, Cole. That's the feeling that makes you so angry." She'd sighed and looked at the ceiling. "You don't know what to do with it, because the people you've loved in the past caused you pain. That's what you think love is. Pain."
She'd looked at his face until he met her eyes. They were still green.
"But, Cole, I love you. Have I hurt you? Ever?"
Cole had to shake his head. She hadn't. Not once.
"I'm showing you what to do with love, Cole." She stood and held out her arms.
A hug. A simple hug he didn't have to earn by throwing a chair. Human contact that wasn't required because he was trying to hurt someone. She still trusted him. She still saw something in him. — Debra Anastasia

I have never yet gotten entirely over the feeling that a Yankee, on account of his peculiar teachings and bringing-up, is far inferior to the better class of Southern people. I do not believe the world ever saw or will ever again see, unless the millennium comes, such high state of civilization and culture and exalted virtue as was the Southern states prior to the war. I have yet to find one Yankee, thought I do not say there are none, who, when the money test is made, will not for his own interest do some small or little thing, and often mean thing, if it is to his advantage to do so.

Writing as I now do after the lapse of nearly 40 years (and years do soften, and old age ought to) one may somewhat judge my feeling about the Yankees when the war ended. — George Benjamin West

You may not stop getting older, but you can paint your world with the vibrant colors of love to keep feeling younger. — Debasish Mridha

A DESCRIPTION OF HAPPINESS IN KOBENHAVN
All this windless day snow fell
into the King's Garden
where I walked, perfecting and growing old,
abandoning one by one everybody:
randomly in love with the paradise
furnace of my mind. Now I sit in the dark,
dreaming of a marble sun
and its strictness. This
is to tell you I am not coming back.
To tell you instead of my private life
among people who must wrestle their hearts
in order to feel anything, as though it were
unnatural. What I master by day
still lapses in the night. But I go on
with the cargo cult, blindly feeling the snow
come down, learning to flower by tightening. — Jack Gilbert

I wondered if this longing in a three-year-old had sparked what came at eight. That fuzzy feeling of difference, that her crushes on female teachers or her cousin were more real than the other girls' crushes. Hers contained a desire beyond sweetness and attention, it fed a longing, beginning to flower green and yellow into a crocuslike lust, the soft petals opening into her awkward adolescence. It was not so much, she would write in her journal, that she wanted to have sex with women, but that she wanted to disappear inside of them forever. To hide. — Alice Sebold

It quite often happens that the old man is subject to the delusion of a great moral renewal and rebirth, and from this experience he passes judgments on the work and course of his life, as if he had only now become clear-sighted; and yet the inspiration behind this feeling of well-being and these confident judgements is not wisdom, but weariness . — Friedrich Nietzsche

This was the feeling that Ms. Hempel couldn't shake: a conviction that she spent her days among people at the age when they are most purely themselves. How could she not be depleted when she came home, having been exposed for hours, without protection, to all those thrumming radiant selves? Here they were, just old enough to have discovered their souls, but not yet dulled by the ordinary act of survival, not yet practiced in dissembling. — Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

Now, how do the young prepare to meet the old? The same way the old prepare to meet the young: with a little condescension; with low expectation of the other's rationality; with the knowledge that the other will find what they say hard to understand, that it will go beyond them (not so much over the head as between the legs); and with the feeling that they must arrive with something the other will like, something suitable. — Zadie Smith

I really don't want to leave this house," she murmurs. "I know that feeling." "It's not healthy." "And your old life was? Healthy doesn't mean shit. Happiness should be our goal. Are you happy here? — Bijou Hunter

In chess the most unbelievable thing for me is that it's a game for everybody: rich, poor, girl, boy, old, young. It's a fantastic game which can unite people and generations! It's a language which you'll find people "speak" in every country. If you reach a certain level you find a very rich world! Art, sport, logic, psychology, a battlefield, imagination, creativity not only in practical games but don't forget either how amazing a feeling it is to compose a study, for example (unfortunately that's not appreciated these days but it's a fantastic part of chess!). — Judit Polgar

Where the real sex feeling begins, timidity and distrust are its companions, heritage from old wicked days when love and violence went often hand in hand. The bent head, the averted eye, the faltering voice, the wincing figure - these, and not the unshrinking gaze and frank reply, are the true signals of passion. Even in my short life I had learned as much as that - or had inherited it in that race memory which we call instinct. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Feeling prosperous means paying your utility bills on time and with a smile on your face. Prosperity means not only giving to the homeless person, but having a smile on your face when you do it. Prosperity also means buying fresh produce with a smile on your face instead of buying day-old bread or bargain overripe fruit with a scowl on your face. Still more, being prosperous means tipping generously with a smile on your face when the waiter has given you great service instead of trying to stiff him with a mere percent, or worse, no tip at all. — Ernie J Zelinski

We might possess every technological resource ... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative. — Adrienne Rich

You thought I didn't notice the way you two looked at each other? I may be old but I'm not blind. I remember that
feeling. The spark, the electricity ...
I had to interject before I got the unabridged version of Anjali Does Mumbai. — Nicola Marsh

All my girlhood I always planned to do something big ... something constructive. It's queer what ambitious dreams a girl has when she is young. I thought I would sing before big audiences or paint lovely pictures or write a splendid book. I always had that feeling in me of wanting to do something worth while. And just think, Laura ... now I am eighty and I have not painted nor written nor sung."
"But you've done lots of things, Grandma. You've baked bread ... and pieced quilts ... and taken care of your children."
Old Abbie Deal patted the young girl's hand. "Well ... well ... out of the mouths of babes. That's just it, Laura, I've only baked bread and pieced quilts and taken care of children. But some women have to, don't they? ... But I've dreamed dreams, Laura. All the time I was cooking and patching and washing, I dreamed dreams. And I think I dreamed them into the children ... and the children are carrying them out ... doing all the things I wanted to and couldn't. — Bess Streeter Aldrich

didn't realize I was crying until the tears hit my chin and plummeted to my shirt. Fire burned my nose. Five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven-twelve-thirteen-and-fourteen-year-old Vanessa all came back to me with the same feeling that had been so strong in those years: hurt. The Vanessa who was fifteen and older had felt a different emotion for so long: anger. Anger at my mom's selfishness. Anger at her for not being able to clean her act up until years after we'd been taken away from her. Anger for being let down for so long, time and time again. — Mariana Zapata

Success on a cosmic level completely eludes me. I'm deeply suspicious of things being too good. It's part of my superstition, I think, to generate pain in order to give the illusion of gain. I'm not saying I reject success, but honestly, I don't quite know how to deal with it. It's an old feeling: As soon as you have the thing you've been going after all your life, that reasonable degree of security, you start kicking against it, doubting it. — Hugh Laurie

I never accepted the plain truth that I myself could hold no interest, no appeal, for the cool, gracious old lady. It was a kind of rebuff that perhaps Americans, very warm, generous, naive people, are especially attuned to. I explained it to myself. Spiritually, we are fresh children, unable to realize that other peoples are infinitely older and wearier than we. We do not yet know much world-pain, except vicariously. Europeans who grow bored or exasperated with our enthusiasm are not simply feeling superior to us; there is also tolerance and understanding, which we are as yet incapable of recognizing. — M.F.K. Fisher

It makes Brooke feel strange in her stomach. It is like the feeling when she reads a book like the one about the man with the bomb, or thinks a sentence, just any old sentence like: the girl ran across the park, and unless you add the describing word then the man or the girl are definitely not black, they are white, even though no one has mentioned white, like when you take the the out of a headline and people just assume it's there anyway. Though if it were a sentence about Brooke herself you'd have to add the equivalent describing word and that's how you'd know. The black girl ran across the park. — Ali Smith

Desford said abruptly: "How old are you, my child? Sixteen? Seventeen?"
"Oh, no, I am much older than that!" she replied. "I'm as old as Lucasta - all but a few weeks!"
"Then why are you not downstairs dancing with the rest of them?" he demanded. "You must surely be out!"
"No, I'm not," she said. "I don't suppose I ever shall be, either. Unless my papa turns out not to be dead, and comes home to take care of me himself. But I don't think that at all likely, and even if he did come home it wouldn't be of the least use, because he seems never to have sixpence to scratch with. I am afraid he is not a very respectable person. My aunt says he was obliged to go abroad on account of being monstrously in debt." She sighed, and said wistfully: "I know that one ought not to criticize one's father, but I can't help feeling that it was just a little thoughtless of him to abandon me. — Georgette Heyer

And if you look around, if you listen to some music nowdays, I'm not so optimistic ... I have the feeling that some of the young people I've met they think already, before they start playing, they think already about the product: how can we sell it ... maybe my view is really very old fashioned nowadays, but I think art at any times needs time for development and this fast food bullshit is not working ... younger guys: take your time, music is really a thing of long terms, actually it's a lifelong thing to learn and to develop your own stuff. — Peter Brotzmann

The homosexuals wrote as if they were women. The timid ones wrote about orgies. The frigid ones about frenzied fulfill-ments. The most poetic ones indulged in pure bestiality and the purest ones in perversions. We were haunted by the marvelous tales we could not tell. We sat around, imagined this old man, talked of how much we hated him, because he would not allow us to make a fusion of sexuality and feeling, sensuality and emotion. — Anais Nin

The second primary objective of a curriculum for Christlikeness is to remove our automatic responses against the kingdom of God, to free the apprentices of domination, of "enslavement" (John 8:34; Rom. 6:6), to their old habitual patterns of thought, feeling, and action. These are the "automatic" patterns of response that were ground into the embodied social self during its long life outside The Kingdom Among Us. They make up "the sin that is in my members" which, as Paul so brilliantly understood, brings it about that "wishing to do the good is mine, but the doing of it is not" (Rom. 7:18). — Dallas Willard

Forgiveness is not the misguided act of condoning irresponsible, hurtful behavior. Nor is it a superficial turning of the other cheek that leaves us feeling victimized and martyred. Rather, it is the finishing of old business that allows us to experience the present, free of contamination from the past. — Joan Z. Borysenko

Do you not believe that you deserve to die painfully?" "By the revolutionary," I said, hoping that if I asked that death as a favor it would not be granted. "Yes, that would be fitting. But ... " And here he paused. The moment passed, then two. The first brass-backed fly of the new summer buzzed against the port. I wanted to crush it, to catch and release it, to shout at Master Palaemon to speak, to flee from the room; but I could do none of these things. I sat, instead, in the old wooden chair beside his table, feeling that I was already dead but still must die. — Gene Wolfe

And I remembered now, too, my inadvertent youthful condescension, when the woman had said, apologizing for some information she couldn't recall, "I still remember the coat I wore when I was five, but I have no idea what I ate for breakfast today." I'd laughed and smiled in warm sympathy. How sweet, I had thought, she remembers her coat. She must have loved it not to have forgotten. But the coat wouldn't ask any effort of preservation. Feeling ninety, and no longer five, there would be the real effort. Telling that five-year old girl, in her beautiful coat, You're all finished. Submerged. Obsolete.
We are ghosts of ourselves, and of others, and all of these ghosts appear perfectly real. — Susan Choi

Jan had friends who like him had left their old homeland and who devoted all their time to the struggle for its lost freedom. All of them had sometimes felt that the bond tying them to their country was just an illusion and that only enduring habit kept them prepared to die for something they did not care about. They all knew that feeling and at the same time were afraid of knowing it; they turned their heads away from fear of seeing the border and stumbling (lured by vertigo as by an abyss) across it to the other side, where the language of their tortured people make a noise as trivial as the twittering of birds. — Milan Kundera

Ruta Skadi was four hundred and sixteen years old, with all the pride and knowledge of an adult witch queen. She was wiser by far than any short-lived human, but she had not the slightest idea of how like a child she seemed beside these ancient beings. Nor did she know how far their awareness spread out beyond her like filamentary tentacles to the remotest corners of universes she had never dreamed of; nor that she saw them as human-formed only because her eyes expected to. If she were to perceive their true form, they would seem more like architecture than organism, like huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling.
But they expected nothing else: she was very young. — Philip Pullman

Today, the world is gripped by a sickness - the mental sickness of the young as well as the old. Discotheques would not flourish, as they do, if young minds had something better to learn and something to understand. This mental sickness, the feeling of insecurity, of unhappiness amidst plenty, is the disease of affluence, which has afflicted men down the ages in all civilizations. — Jignesh R. Shah

I might just crawl under my bed and not come out until I'm old and doddering and can't remember feeling anything for anyone at all. — Paula McLain

Who's to say that once I run, I'll find that isn't enough? Who's to say I won't end up feeling exactly the way I do right now-not safe, but stifled? Maybe I'll want to run again, and again, and eventually I'll end up back on those old tracks, because there's nowhere left to go. Maybe. Maybe not. You have to take the risk, don't you — Paula Hawkins

This was not the career she'd dreamed of as an ambitious seventeen-year-old, but now it was hard to remember ever feeling innocent and audacious enough to dream of a certain type of life, as if you got to choose how things turned out. — Liane Moriarty

Old age is far more than white hair, wrinkles, the feeling that it is too late and the game is finished, that the stage belongs to the rising generations. The true evil is not the weakening of the body, but the indifference of the soul. — Andre Maurois

Well, you're lucky, that's all. Even if he is a vamp now. You must be pretty used to all sorts of weird stuff, being a Shadowhunter, so I bet it doesn't faze you.
"It fazes me," Clary said, more sharply then she'd intended. "I'm not Jace."
The smirk widened. " No one is. And I get the feeling he knows it.
"Whats that supposed to mean?"
"Oh, you know. Jace reminds me of an old boyfriend. Some guys look at you like they want sex. Jace looks at you like you've already had sex, it was great, and now you're just friends- even though you want more. Drives girls crazy. You know what i mean?
Yes, Clary thought. "No." she said. — Cassandra Clare

I was 9 years old when I had my first glimpse of wholeness. It was early Christmas morning and I was standing in my pajamas in the living room and looked out of the large windows. Outside the white snow flakes silently singled down toward a snowclad landscape. Suddenly I was filled with a feeling of being one with the slowly dancing snowflakes, one with the silent landscape.
I did not understand then that this was my first taste of meditation, but it created a deep thirst and a longing in my heart to return to this natural and effortless experience of being one with the Whole. — Swami Dhyan Giten

The meaning of life is creative love. Not love as an inner feeling, as a private sentimental emotion, but love as a dynamic power moving out in the world and doing something original. — Old Tom Morris

New teacher, if old was GreenHollyWood the new.... will be.... will be.... why not Holly Grendery... a teacher who lives agony - My Father (Bill) used to say if somebody is feeling miserable... let's take him out of his own misery. — Deyth Banger

Are you the one named Alyse? For he calls that name in his sleep."
"No, that is his beloved sister, dead these past three years." The depth of my disappointment that it is not my name he calls takes me completely by surprise.
"Ah," the old nun says sympathetically, as if she somehow knows what I am feeling. "Then perhaps you are Sybella. That is the name he asks for when he is awake. — R.L. LaFevers

When I was five years old I was molested and just, you know. I remember feeling, literally right before it happened, I just could not believe that this person was going to do this to me. That thing followed me all my life. The shame of thinking my molestation was my fault - it led me to believe I wasn't worth anything. — Mary J. Blige

It's not easy, getting old, feeling one's relevance slip away. — Kate Morton

The small talk that sprang readily to their lips came to hers only with a tremendous effort. After an opportunity had come and gone, she often scolded herself for not saying this or doing that, for laughing too loud or smiling too little. Whenever she tried to re-create the moment of contact, she was easily rebuffed by the slightest gesture, withdrawing all too quickly if she thought she was in the way. The old stone-and-brick schoolhouse, with its four gabled roofs and round little windows, was the only thing that seemed steadfast to her, while the beings that populated its rooms and thundered down its corridors were unreal and unpredictable. It gripped her like a monstrous truth that she was condemned to lead life without belonging or feeling close to anyone. — Erick Setiawan

There is nothing that anyone can get past a forty-five-year-old woman." We laugh hard, the first honest sound I make that afternoon, or in many days, each of us feeling the ravages of experience, our debt to enduring. We are not to be fucked with. We rule. Even as we age and help our children push past us, as we worry about the estimate for the roof, forget things we meant to do, regard our widening bodies, we rule. We've returned again and again to our original selves for another look; we have refined our purpose. Changes we thought we'd been resisting have anyway been wrought, and they have made us unbreakable. — Susanna Sonnenberg

There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but what a marvelous one. Better than G.B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore, scraping the mind and the sensibilities. It was good to read them all though. It made you realize that thoughts and words could be fascinating, if finally useless. — Charles Bukowski

You didn't like him, did you, Dad?"
"It wasn't that I didn't like him," my dad says slowly. "It was just that he lives in a completely different world, and I worried that he didn't really approve of you the way you are, that he was trying to change you into something else."
God, I never realized my dad was that perceptive..
"You see, the thing is," he says after we've both sat for a while in the sunshine, "the thing is that love is really the most important thing. I know it's hard for you to see it now" - he chuckles quietly- "but when I first laid eyes on your mother I thought she was fantastic, and I've never stopped loving her, not for a second. Oh yes, we've had our rough patches, and she can be a bit of an old battle-ax at times, but I still love her. That in-love feeling at the beginning settles down into a different, familiar sort of love, but it has to be there right from the start, otherwise it just won't work. — Jane Green

Within her presence, I had once been used
to feeling - trembling - wonder, dissolution;
but that was long ago. Still, though my soul,
now she was veiled, could not see her directly,
by way of hidden force that she could move,
I felt the mighty power of old love. — Dante Alighieri

The night was waiting for me as always. And my thirst could wait no longer. I stood for a moment, head thrown back, eyes closed, and mouth open, feeling that thirst, and wanting to roar like a hungry beast. Yes, blood again when there is nothing else. When the world seems in all its beauty to be empty and heartless and I myself am utterly lost. Give me my old friend, death, and the blood that rushes with it. The Vampire Lestat is here, and he thirsts, and tonight of all nights, he will not be denied. — Anne Rice

For the past few years, I've been on a quest for a good old-fashioned date, the kind where the guy calls, makes the plans, picks you up in a car that's not his dad's or his other girlfriend's, and takes you somewhere that shows he put thought into what you might like, not what he might get off on like the latest how-many-naked-boobs-can-we-cram-into-this-movie-to-disguise-the-complete-lack-of-plot movie. I'm looking for the kind of date that starts with good conversation , has a sweet and satisfying middle, and ends with long, slow kisses and the dreamy feeling that you're walking on clouds. — Karen Marie Moning

And it really is a good feeling to get up there and make that sound. I'm not stuck in a time warp, because I can use as many of the old songs as I want to, just the favorites. — Dan Hicks

I'll never forget one of the first families I visited. The father was a railroad man who had lost his job. I was told by my supervisor that I really had to see the poverty. If the family needed clothing, I was to investigate how much clothing they had at hand. So I looked into this man's closet - (pauses, it becomes difficult) - he was a tall, gray-haired man, though not terribly old. He let me look in the closet - he was so insulted. (She weeps angrily.) He said, "Why are you doing this?" I remember his feeling of humiliation . . . this terrible humiliation. (She can't continue. After a pause, she resumes.) He said, "I really haven't anything to hide, but if you really must look into it. . .." I could see he was very proud. He was so deeply humiliated. And I was, too. . .. — Studs Terkel

You ask me what it means to be irrelevant? The feeling is akin to visiting your old house as a wandering ghost with unfinished business. Imagine going back: the structure is familiar ,but the door is now metal instead of wood,the walls have been painted a garish pink ,the easy chair you loved so much is gone .Your office is now the family room and your beloved bookcases have been replaced by a brand-new television set . This is your house,and it is not. And you are no longer relevant to this house , to its walls and doors and floors ; you are not seen . — Azar Nafisi

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around. — Richard Curtis

Love, he thought. That too is love. The old miracle. It not only casts a rainbow of dreams against the gray sky of facts - it also sheds romantic light upon a heap of dung - a miracle and a mad mockery. Suddenly he had the strange feeling of having become, in a remote way, an accomplice. — Erich Maria Remarque

I have a completely new knee. It's brilliant. I am not feeling my age at all. I feel about 43, a willowy blonde 43 years old with long legs. — Judi Dench

It was not so much a feeling of being insulted, but an overwhelming pain for the people of my native land. We were not treated by our own government as proper human beings, and consequently some outsiders did not regard us as the same kind of humans as themselves. I thought of the old observation that Chinese lives were cheap, and one Englishman's amazement that his Chinese servant should find a toothache unbearable. — Jung Chang

Why did you give me a freedom for which I was unfit? Why did you stop teaching me? If you wished it, if you guided me differently, none of all this would happened. I should not now be punished, for no fault at all, by your indifference and even contempt, and you would not have taken from me unjustly all that I valued in life.
Let us be thankful that there is an end of the old emotions and excitements.
That day ended a romance of our marriage. Old feeling became a precious irrecoverable remembrance but a new feeling of love for my kids and their father laid the foundation of a new life and quite different happiness. That life and happiness lasted until to the present time. — Leo Tolstoy

And Grace calls out, 'You are not just a disillusioned old man who may die soon, a middle-aged woman stuck in a job and desperately wanting to get out, a young person feeling the fire in the belly begin to grow cold. You may be insecure, inadequate, mistaken or potbellied. Death, panic, depression, and disillusionment may be near you. But you are not just that. You are accepted.' Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery that you really are accepted. — Brennan Manning

We are resolved to protect individual freedom of belief. This freedom must include the child as well as the parent. The freedom for which we stand is not freedom of belief as we please, ... not freedom to evade responsibility, ... but freedom to be honest in speech and action, freedom to respect one's own integrity of thought and feeling, freedom to question, to investigate, to try, to understand life and the universe in which life abounds, freedom to search anywhere and everywhere to find the meaning of Being, freedom to experiment with new ways of living that seem better than the old. — Sophia Lyon Fahs

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA: WHY IT'S A BAD TITLE
I admit that "Love in the time of ... " is a great title, up to a point. You're reading along, you're happy, it's about love. I like the way the word time comes in - a nice, nice feeling. Then the morbid Cholera appears. I was happy till then. Why not "Love in the Time of the Blue, Blue, Bluebirds"? "Love in the Time of Oozing Sores and Pustules" is probably an earlier title the author used as he was writing in a rat-infested tree house on an old Smith Corona. This writer, whoever he is, could have used a couple of weeks in Pacific Daylight Time. — Steve Martin

I had a slight feeling of babysitting as we walked soberly along together using all our old phrases, making all our old jokes, not quite feeling all our old fondness. — Ben Dolnick

He married and made a home. He went endlessly from house to house and spoke the mission and the truth. The hopeless suffering of his people made in him a madness, a wild and evil feeling of destruction. At times he drank strong liquor and beat his head against the floor. In his heart there was a savage violence, and once he grasped the poker from the hearth and struck down his wife. She took Hamilton, Karl Marx, William, and Portia with her to her father's home. He wrestled in his spirit and fought down the evil blackness. But Daisy did not come back. And eight years later when she died his sons were not children anymore and they did not return to him. He was left an old man in an empty house. — Carson McCullers

The feeling of intense repulsion, which had begun to oppress and torture his heart while he was on his way to the old woman, had by now reached such a pitch and had taken such a definite form that he did not know what to do with himself to escape from his wretchedness — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I was unable to resist my stare at her, I never felt like this before, I knew it's not that old feeling for a friend. What is it? Is it love? — Swapna Rajput

Whether it is the old lady's fear, or the many ghostly traditions of this place, or the crucifix itself, I do not know, but I am not feeling nearly as easy in my mind as usual. — Bram Stoker

The rock, when one came to think of it, was the utmost expression of human need; even mere feeling yearned for it; it was the highest comparison of loyalty in love and friendship. Christ Himself had used that comparison for the disciple to whom He gave the keys of His Church. And the Hebrews of the Old Testament, always being carried captive into foreign lands,
their rock was an idea of God, the only thing their conquerors could not take from them. — Willa Cather

I felt melancholy, I felt joy, I felt dread, I felt a sadness so deep it cannot be described in words. I felt emotions that have not been given names, I felt emotions that have been given the wrong names, I saw what it meant to feel and I saw that it was all the same feeling and I felt big feelings, the old feelings, the ones before language, before the mind had language, before the mind had learned to tell a fake story called consciousness and developed anxiety when it invented time, and danger, and risk, and probability, and the future. — Charles Yu

Here's a guy and everybody's there, right? Up to him to put down what's on everybody's mind. He starts the first chorus, then lines up his ideas, people, yeah, yeah, but get it, and then he rises to his fate and has to blow equal to it. All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets it - everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops. He's filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it's not the tune that counts but IT. — Jack Kerouac

was still afraid - not of the dark-lipped girl who seemed to be waiting for his kiss, not even of the twentieth-century sorceress she pretended to be, but rather of that vague and strangely terrifying feeling she aroused, of awakening senses and powers and old half memories in himself. — Jack Williamson