Ripen With Age Quotes

The magic of autumn has seized the countryside; now that the sun isn't ripening anything it shines for the sake of the golden age; for the sake of Eden; to please the moon for all I know.

I feel aged. I feel as if you’ve aged me with your own hands, Michael. Ripened me. Like a red fruit, at the edge of a branch, hanging at its peak. Beautiful — and just about to fall.

A message came from my youth of vanished days, saying, 'I wait for you among the quivering of unborn May, where smiles ripen for tears and hours ache with songs unsung.' It says, 'Come to me across the worn-out track of age, through the gates of death. For dreams fade, hopes fail, the fathered fruits of the year decay, but I am the eternal truth, and you shall meet me again and again in your voyage of life from shore to shore.

I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man's milk and restorative cordial.

they convinced me i only had a few good years left before i was replaced by a girl younger than me as though men yield power with age but women grow into irrelevance they can keep their lies for i have just gotten started i feel as though i just left the womb my twenties are the warm-up for what i'm really about to do wait till you see me in my thirties now that will be a proper introduction to the nasty. wild. woman in me. how can i leave before the party's started rehearsals begin at forty i ripen with age i do not come with an expiration date and now for the main event curtains up at fifty let's begin the show

A paradox: the same century invented History and PHotography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening.

In short, immaturity is spoiled. And what is spoiled doesn’t ripen. It goes bad early, gets bitter and withers on the vine.

Life's existential tasks have lost the interest of reality; illusion cannot build a sanctuary for the divine growth of inwardness which ripens to decisions. One man is curious about another, every one is undecided, and their way of escape is to say that some one must come who will do something--and then they will bet on him.

Though the face before me was that of a young woman of certainly not more than thirty years, in perfect health and the first flush of ripened beauty, yet it bore stamped upon it a seal of unutterable experience, and of deep acquaintance with grief and passion. Not even the slow smile that crept about the dimples of her mouth could hide the shadow of sin and sorrow. It shone even in the light of those glorious eyes, it was present in the air of majesty, and it seemed to say: 'Behold me, lovely as no woman was or is, undying and half-divine; memory haunts me from age to age, and passion leads me by the hand--evil have I done, and with sorrow have I made acquaintance from age to age, and from age to age evil shall I do, and sorrow shall I know till my redemption comes.

There is time on this greener earth for girls to ripen into themselves; what they'll do with that is beyond anyone's knowing, seeing as they are not limited to anger versus dinner, seriousness versus sentiment, survival versus all life's rampancy. They can choose.

Age brings maturity, experience ripens it.

Often the soul is ripened into fuller goodness while age has spread an ugly film, so that mere glances can never divine the preciousness of the fruit.

I find friendship to be like wine. Raw when new. Ripened with age.

To ripen into an elder, into a being that is more than simply elderly and more than only self, is a deliberate, thoughtful, sustained choice that arises from the intention to see things as they are. There

Aging brings out the flavors of a personality. The individual emerges over time, the way fruit matures and ripens. In the Renaissance view, depression, aging, and individuality all go together: the sadness of growing old is part of becoming an individual. Melancholy thoughts carve out an interior space where wisdom can take up residence. Saturn

I see, in place of that empty figment of one linear history which can be kept up only by shutting one’s eyes to the overwhelming multitude of facts, the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout it’s whole life-cycle; each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will and feelings, its own death. Here indeed are colours, lights, movements, that no intellectual eye has yet discovered. Here the Cultures, peoples, languages, truths, gods, landscapes bloom and age as the oaks and the pines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves - but there is no ageing “Mankind.” Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in the deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline.

As though on a seedling whose blossoms ripen at different times, I had seen in old ladies, on that beach at Balbec, the dried-up seeds and sagging tubers that my girl-friends would become. But, now that it was time for buds to blossom, what did that matter?

yet to all who love human faces best for what they tell of human experience, Nancy’s beauty has a heightened interest. Often the soul is ripened into fuller goodness while age has spread an ugly film, so that mere glances can never divine the preciousness of the fruit.

I must do what I can to make myself intelligible to you. Our natures, however, are so different, that this may not be easy. Men and women live but to die; we, that is such as I-we are but a few-live to live on. Old age is to you a horror; to me it is a dear desire: the older we grow, the nearer we are to our perfection. Your perfection is a poor thing, comes soon, and lasts but a little while; ours is a ceaseless ripening. I am not yet ripe, and have lived thousands of your years-how many, I never cared to note. The everlasting will not be measured.

they convinced me i only had a few good years left before i was replaced by a girl younger than me as though men yield power with age but women grow into irrelevance they can keep their lies for i have just gotten started i feel as though i just left the womb my twenties are the warm-up for what i’m really about to do wait till you see me in my thirties now that will be a proper introduction to the nasty. wild. woman in me. how can i leave before the party’s started rehearsals begin at forty i ripen with age i do not come with an expiration date and now for the main event curtains up at fifty let’s begin the show - timeless

Something in one's heart takes fright, not at the thought of growing old, not at feeling one's youth used up in this mineral universe, but at the thought that far away the whole world is ageing. The trees have brought forth their fruit; the grain has ripened in the fields; the women have bloomed in their loveliness. But the season is advancing and one must make haste; but the season is advancing and still one cannot leave; but the season is advancing...and other men will glean the harvest.

Age is not all decay: it is the ripening, the swelling of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.

Often the soul is ripened into fuller goodness while age has spread an ugly film, so that mere glances can never divine the preciousness of the fruit

I know that mood. Three years of the desert taught it to me. Something in one’s heart takes fright, not at the thought of growing old, not at feeling one’s youth used up in this mineral universe, but at the thought that far away the whole world is ageing. The trees have brought forth their fruit; the grain has ripened in the fields; the women have bloomed in their loveliness. But the season is advancing and one must make haste; but the season is advancing and still one cannot leave; but the season is advancing ... and other men will glean the harvest.

Something happens to a novel as it ages, but what? It doesn’t ripen or deepen in the manner of cheese and wine, and it doesn’t fall apart, at least not figuratively. Fiction has no half-life. We age alongside the novels we’ve read, and only one of us is actively deteriorating. Which is to say that a novel is perishable only by virtue of being stored in such a leaky cask: our heads.

we all share the same fate: we carry within us more love, and above all more longing than today’s society is able to satisfy. We have all ripened for something, and there is no one to harvest the fruit … Karl Mannheim (1922)

But I shall tell you that as we age, our intellect and emotions ripen. We come to understand that while we long for Utopia, we must live in the present world. And if we cannot find acceptance of it in some form, then we will die on the rack of misery.

Love is for every age auspicious, But for the virginal and young Its impulses are more propitious Like vernal storms on meadows sprung: They freshen in the rain of passion, Ripening in their renovation – And life, empowered, sends up shoots Of richest blooms and sweetest fruits. But at a late age, dry and fruitless, The final stage to which we’re led, Sad is the trace of passions dead: Thus storms in autumn, cold and ruthless, Transform the field into a slough, And strip the trees from root to bough.

As she sat thus, the lamplight full on her clear brow, he said to himself with a secret dismay that he would always know the thoughts behind it, that never, in all the years to come, would she surprise him by an unexpected mood, by a new idea, a weakness, a cruelty or an emotion. She had spent her poetry and romance on their short courting: the function was exhausted because the need was past. Now she was simply ripening into a copy of her mother, and mysteriously, by the very process, trying to turn him into a Mr. Welland.

I pass a construction site, abandoned for the night, and a few blocks later, the playground of the elementary school my son attended, the metal sliding board gleaming under a streetlamp and the swings stirring in the breeze. There's an energy to these autumn nights that touches something primal inside of me. Something from long ago. From my childhood in western Iowa. I think of high school football games and the stadium lights blazing down on the players. I smell ripening apples, and the sour reek of beer from keg parties in the cornfields. I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead o me. It's the beautiful thing about youth. There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential. I love my life, but I haven't felt that lightness of being in ages. Autumn nights like this are as close as I get.

Should God forbid the sun to perform its office upon the Sabbath, cut off its genial rays from warming the earth and nourishing vegetation? Must the system of worlds stand still through that holy day? Should He [207] command the brooks to stay from watering the fields and forests, and bid the waves of the sea still their ceaseless ebbing and flowing? Must the wheat and corn stop growing, and the ripening cluster defer its purple bloom? Must the trees and flowers put forth no bud nor blossom on the Sabbath? In such a case, men would miss the fruits

The second childhood, at which the fool jeers, is the better, the truer, the fuller childhood, growing strong to cast off altogether, with the husk of its own enveloping age, that of its family, its country, its world as well. Age is not all decay. It is the ripening, the swelling of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.

For your sake poets sequester themselves, gather images to churn the mind, journey forth, ripening with metaphor, and all their lives they are so alone... And painters paint their pictures only that the world, so transient as you made it, can be given back to you, to last forever. All becomes eternal. See: In the Mona Lisa some woman has long since ripened like wine, and the enduring feminine is held there through all the ages. Those who create are like you. They long for the eternal. They say, Stone, be forever! And that means: be yours. And lovers also gather your inheritance. They are the poets of one brief hour. They kiss an expressionless mouth into a smile as if creating it anew, more beautiful. Awakening desire, they make a place where pain can enter; that’s how growing happens. They bring suffering along with their laughter, and longings that had slept and now awaken to weep in a stranger’s arms.

He has no friends that I know of, and his few neighbours consider him a bit of a weirdo, but I like to think of him as my friend as he will sometimes leave buckets of compost outside my house, as a gift for my garden. The oldest tree on my property is a lemon, a sprawling mass of twigs with a heavy bow. The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death. One can picture it in animal species, those million salmon mating and spawning before dropping dead, or the billions of herrings that turn the seawater white with their sperm and eggs and cover the coasts of the northeast Pacific for hundreds of miles. But trees are very different organisms, and such displays of overripening feel out of character for a plant and more akin to our own species, with its uncontrolled, devastating growth. I asked him how long my own citrus had to live. He told me that there was no way to know, at least not without cutting it down and looking inside its trunk. But, really, who would want to do that?

He’d mentioned it a month before. A month. Not a good month, admittedly, but still—a month. That was enough time for him to have written something, at least. There was still something of him, or by him at least, floating around out there. I needed it. “I’m gonna go to his house,” I told Isaac. I hurried out to the minivan and hauled the oxygen cart up and into the passenger seat. I started the car. A hip-hop beat blared from the stereo, and as I reached to change the radio station, someone started rapping. In Swedish. I swiveled around and screamed when I saw Peter Van Houten sitting in the backseat. “I apologize for alarming you,” Peter Van Houten said over the rapping. He was still wearing the funeral suit, almost a week later. He smelled like he was sweating alcohol. “You’re welcome to keep the CD,” he said. “It’s Snook, one of the major Swedish—” “Ah ah ah ah GET OUT OF MY CAR.” I turned off the stereo. “It’s your mother’s car, as I understand it,” he said. “Also, it wasn’t locked.” “Oh, my God! Get out of the car or I’ll call nine-one-one. Dude, what is your problem?” “If only there were just one,” he mused. “I am here simply to apologize. You were correct in noting earlier that I am a pathetic little man, dependent upon alcohol. I had one acquaintance who only spent time with me because I paid her to do so—worse, still, she has since quit, leaving me the rare soul who cannot acquire companionship even through bribery. It is all true, Hazel. All that and more.” “Okay,” I said. It would have been a more moving speech had he not slurred his words. “You remind me of Anna.” “I remind a lot of people of a lot of people,” I answered. “I really have to go.” “So drive,” he said. “Get out.” “No. You remind me of Anna,” he said again. After a second, I put the car in reverse and backed out. I couldn’t make him leave, and I didn’t have to. I’d drive to Gus’s house, and Gus’s parents would make him leave. “You are, of course, familiar,” Van Houten said, “with Antonietta Meo.” “Yeah, no,” I said. I turned on the stereo, and the Swedish hip-hop blared, but Van Houten yelled over it. “She may soon be the youngest nonmartyr saint ever beatified by the Catholic Church. She had the same cancer that Mr. Waters had, osteosarcoma. They removed her right leg. The pain was excruciating. As Antonietta Meo lay dying at the ripened age of six from this agonizing cancer, she told her father, ‘Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it’s worth.’ Is that true, Hazel?” I wasn’t looking at him directly but at his reflection in the mirror. “No,” I shouted over the music. “That’s bullshit.” “But don’t you wish it were true!” he cried back. I cut the music. “I’m sorry I ruined your trip. You were too young. You were—” He broke down. As if he had a right to cry over Gus. Van Houten was just another of the endless mourners who did not know him, another too-late lamentation on his wall. “You didn’t ruin our trip, you self-important bastard. We had an awesome trip.” “I am trying,” he said. “I am trying, I swear.” It was around then that I realized Peter Van Houten had a dead person in his family. I considered the honesty with which he had written about cancer kids; the fact that he couldn’t speak to me in Amsterdam except to ask if I’d dressed like her on purpose; his shittiness around me and Augustus; his aching question about the relationship between pain’s extremity and its value. He sat back there drinking, an old man who’d been drunk for years.

There was only one thing to do, she decided: make pickles. The mangoes on the tree were just about ready: grassy-green and tongue-smackingly sour. She asked the boys to pick them from the tree. When they were younger, this was the children’s job. Maya was by far the better climber: her foot would curl over the branches and hold her fast, while she stretched her arms and plucked the fruit, throwing it down to Rehana, who kept shouting, ‘Be careful! Be careful!’ She would slice the green mangoes and cook them slowly with chillies and mustard seeds. Then she would stuff them into jars and leave them on the roof to ripen. There was a rule about not touching pickles during the monthlies. She couldn’t remember who had told her that rule – her mother? – no, her mother had probably never sliced a mango in her brief, dreamy life. Must have been one of her sisters. Marzia, she was the best cook. And the enforcer of rules. But Rehana had decided long ago this was a stupid rule. It was hard enough to time the pickle-making anyway, between the readiness of the fruit and the weather, which had to be hot and dry. As she recited the pickle recipe to herself, Rehana wondered what her sisters would make of her at this very moment. Guerrillas at Shona. Sewing kathas on the rooftop. Her daughter at rifle practice. The thought of their shocked faces made her want to laugh. She imagined the letter she would write. Dear sisters, she would say. Our countries are at war; yours and mine. We are on different sides now. I am making pickles for the war effort. You see how much I belong here and not to you.

calm silence filled the office as Roger Belkin sprang awake at his desk. He rarely dozed off on his throne, but today he felt unusually tired. Roger was a handsome man ripened to the age of thirty-five. He was tall with dark features where it counted and parted his hair to the side in

calm silence filled the office as Roger Belkin sprang awake at his desk. He rarely dozed off on his throne, but today he felt unusually tired. Roger was a handsome man ripened to the age of thirty-five. He was tall with dark features where

The maid was of an age at which men had stopped seeing her. She had had the body of a woman when she was still a girl, when she was married off, so young, and her body had ripened further after she birthed and nursed her child, and men had once paused to look at her, not at her face, but at her figure, and she had often been alarmed by those looks, in part because of the danger in them, and in part because she knew how they changed when she was revealed to be mute, and so the end of being seen was mostly a relief. Mostly, almost entirely, yet not entirely, for life had given the maid no space for the luxuries of vanity, but even so, she was human.

Sagacity did not magically arrive with age. As his family grew, so did his affections. The deeper he loved, the more easily he was injured. His heart had not become reinforced. It had softened--and ripened. It was a larger target and far more easily rent.

Entertaining Possibilities "Why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." - The Queen of Hearts, Alice in Wonderland riding bareback on a triceratops through green galaxies while you ride beside me on your favorite mastodon running a finger over those I love and like a highlighter pen turning them neon noting them forever so I can return to them easily when I need them thinking something good can come of "ethnic cleansing" swimming in an ocean deep and wet enough to fill the eternity of love between these two sheets walking into the vowels of a word like open and becoming it locking away Pandora's box putting evil back in its place for good and swallowing the key lighting myself with a single match then watching me melt warm and liquid over your body cooling gently in the shape of you sitting flat in round anticipation I will be page 233 in the book that you have just opened and I will chew on each delicious moment of every turn as you move page by page closer to me stowing away in your pillowcase and sailing your dreams so that when you are sent to walk the plank I can catch you together we can be the mutiny on any bounty letting my best ideas ripen beside yours on the vine then stomping it all juicy between toes yours and mine aging then bottling it all till the sun falls and we uncork our store one by one and drink forever in the twilight planting a memory watering the spot watching it grow tall, tender, familiar, then putting my ear to its blossom and hearing my grandmother's voice tell me again that I can be both the gift and the giver

Generation after generation of short-spanned living creatures has ripened and rotted, they looking calmly on, superior in their unwithering amaranthine bloom—generation after generation has gaped open-mouthed, awed by their solemn presence—generation after generation will so gaze and stare until the world is overrun with a new deluge of barbarians from the far West, or till it comes to its final ending. That happy man, to whose deathless glory it was granted to fashion the Laocoon, must have had in his mind to excite the envy and shame of puny, feeble after-ages, long after he and his chisel should be dust together; showing them what manner of men there were in the old time, in blue-skied templed Hellas.[390] But then, again, one feels inclined—perhaps from aversion to acknowledge that we have degenerated—to doubt whether those god-faces and Titan-frames[391] could have been copied from any mere flesh-and-blood creature that, while in life, drudged away on the earth and had material blood flowing in his veins. Could such stainless triumphant beauty and might have been ever found in our world, where perfection in anything is proverbially unattainable? Rather must it have been some divine afflatus[392] breathed into the fashioner’s soul, speaking to him of a flawlessness of outward build such as had never

He chose them precisely for their age, that’s when they are most beautiful.” He turned his gaze on me, his eyes were very deep. “Their colors are subtler, the petals softer, the seeds have ripened.

People who don’t read science fiction, but who have at least given it a fair shot, often say they’ve found it inhuman, elitist, and escapist. Since its characters, they say, are both conventionalized and extraordinary, all geniuses, space heroes, superhackers, androgynous aliens, it evades what ordinary people really have to deal with in life, and so fails an essential function of fiction. However remote Jane Austen’s England is, the people in it are immediately relevant and revelatory—reading about them we learn about ourselves. Has science fiction anything to offer but escape from ourselves? The cardboard-character syndrome was largely true of early science fiction, but for decades writers have been using the form to explore character and human relationships. I’m one of them. An imagined setting may be the most appropriate in which to work out certain traits and destinies. But it’s also true that a great deal of contemporary fiction isn’t a fiction of character. This end of the century isn’t an age of individuality as the Elizabethan and the Victorian ages were. Our stories, realistic or otherwise, with their unreliable narrators, dissolving points of view, multiple perceptions and perspectives, often don’t have depth of character as their central value. Science fiction, with its tremendous freedom of metaphor, has sent many writers far ahead in this exploration beyond the confines of individuality—Sherpas on the slopes of the postmodern. As for elitism, the problem may be scientism: technological edge mistaken for moral superiority. The imperialism of high technocracy equals the old racist imperialism in its arrogance; to the technophile, people who aren’t in the know/in the net, who don’t have the right artifacts, don’t count. They’re proles, masses, faceless nonentities. Whether it’s fiction or history, the story isn’t about them. The story’s about the kids with the really neat, really expensive toys. So “people” comes to be operationally defined as those who have access to an extremely elaborate fast-growth industrial technology. And “technology” itself is restricted to that type. I have heard a man say perfectly seriously that the Native Americans before the Conquest had no technology. As we know, kiln-fired pottery is a naturally occurring substance, baskets ripen in the summer, and Machu Picchu just grew there. Limiting humanity to the producer-consumers of a complex industrial growth technology is a really weird idea, on a par with defining humanity as Greeks, or Chinese, or the upper-middle-class British. It leaves out a little too much. All fiction, however, has to leave out most people. A fiction interested in complex technology may legitimately leave out the (shall we say) differently technologized, as a fiction about suburban adulteries may ignore the city poor, and a fiction centered on the male psyche may omit women. Such omission may, however, be read as a statement that advantage is superiority, or that the white middle class is the whole society, or that only men are worth writing about. Moral and political statements by omission are legitimated by the consciousness of making them, insofar as the writer’s culture permits that consciousness. It comes down to a matter of taking responsibility. A denial of authorial responsibility, a willed unconsciousness, is elitist, and it does impoverish much of our fiction in every genre, including realism.

the art of growing i felt beautiful until the age of twelve when my body began to ripen like new fruit and suddenly the men looked at my newborn hips with salivating lips the boys didn’t want to play tag at recess they wanted to touch all the new and unfamiliar parts of me the parts i didn’t know how to wear didn’t know how to carry and tried to bury in my rib cage boobs they said and i hated that word hated that i was embarrassed to say it that even though it was referring to my body it didn’t belong to me it belonged to them and they repeated it like they were meditating upon it boobs he said let me see yours there is nothing worth seeing here but guilt and shame i try to rot into the earth below my feet but i am still standing one foot across from his hooked fingers and when he charges to feast on my half moons i bite into his forearm and decide i hate this body i must have done something terrible to deserve it when i go home i tell my mother the men outside are starving she tells me i must not dress with my breasts hanging said the boys will get hungry if they see fruit says i should sit with my legs closed like a woman oughta or the men will get angry and fight said i can avoid all this trouble if i just learn to act like a lady but the problem is that doesn’t even make sense i can’t wrap my head around the fact that i have to convince half the world’s population my body is not their bed i am busy learning the consequences of womanhood when i should be learning science and math instead i like cartwheels and gymnastics so i can’t imagine walking around with my thighs pressed together like they’re hiding a secret as if the acceptance of my own body parts will invite thoughts of lust in their heads i will not subject myself to their ideology cause slut shaming is rape culture virgin praising is rape culture i am not a mannequin in the window of your favorite shop you can’t dress me up or throw me out when i am worn you are not a cannibal your actions are not my responsibility you will control yourself the next time i go to school and the boys hoot at my backside i push them down foot over their necks and defiantly say boobs and the look in their eyes is priceless

In Faceless Time by Stewart Stafford Her stare burned into me, In full view, a naked look, Hubbub quietened down, Inaudible to the two of us. Beckoning, a ripened vine, Ingénue cameo of her face, I, a happy gatecrasher to life, Tiptoed in the requited chase. Her looks carry with me now, Resplendent in aged raiment, Ages after my gaze fell on her, A souvenir sheltered radiant. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

But thirty million dollars of subsidy money from Washington had been plowed into Project Soybean—an enormous acreage in Louisiana, where a harvest of soybeans was ripening, as advocated and organized by Emma Chalmers, for the purpose of reconditioning the dietary habits of the nation. Emma Chalmers, better known as Kip’s Ma, was an old sociologist who had hung about Washington for years, as other women of her age and type hang about barrooms. For some reason which nobody could define, the death of her son in the tunnel catastrophe had given her in Washington an aura of martyrdom, heightened by her recent conversion to Buddhism. “The soybean is a much more sturdy, nutritious and economical plant than all the extravagant foods which our wasteful, self-indulgent diet has conditioned us to expect,” Kip’s Ma had said over the radio; her voice always sounded as if it were falling in drops, not of water, but of mayonnaise. “Soybeans make an excellent substitute for bread, meat, cereals and coffee—and if all of us were compelled to adopt soybeans as our staple diet, it would solve the national food crisis and make it possible to feed more people. The greatest food for the greatest number—that’s my slogan. At a time of desperate public need, it’s our duty to sacrifice our luxurious tastes and eat our way back to prosperity by adapting ourselves to the simple, wholesome foodstuff on which the peoples of the Orient have so nobly subsisted for centuries. There’s a great deal that we could learn from the peoples of the Orient.

Ghoulishly sugared in sweet candy pigment, he clamped down on her, tussled her to the floor, and as more of that perfect rose complexion, blasted into a million motes, came filtering down, in a dense frustration of lust and fury— penis uncoiling, mottled purple-black as if with rage, blundering, uncovering the chute he had heard rumor of—he stuffed his way ungracefully into her. An aging uncle, wizened bird man in dhoti and spectacles, watching through a crack in the wall outside, felt his own lust ripen and—pop—it sent him hopping about the courtyard.

A calm silence filled the office as Roger Belkin sprang awake at his desk. He rarely dozed off on his throne, but today he felt unusually tired. Roger was a handsome man ripened to the age of thirty-five. He was tall with dark features where it counted and parted his hair to the side in a 1950s style. Roger enjoyed this time of the day.

she did not know really what she was going to face. Yet, the trip once started, is pursued with the greatest effort. It proves way harder than anticipated, but is not given up. The analogy to my own plan applies as the reality of life in Israel in 1950 was harsh, much harder than expected. I thought of my day of departure from the U.S. as my declaration of independence, as my Fourth of July. The decision was not taken lightly and did not ripen overnight. I was nearing an age when I knew that I had to create my own home, my own family.

As you ripen, you’ll notice that time is the weirdest thing in the world, that these surprises are relentless, and that getting older is not a stroll but an ambush.

until they have ripened enough to be sent off to the mountains and colleges of the Northeast. Not to hunt husbands (for a certain parity has always obtained in the Five Towns whereby a nice boy can be predestined for husband as early as age sixteen or seventeen); but to be granted the illusion at least of having “played the field”—so necessary to a girl’s emotional development.

He gazed into her eyes. There were little flecks of gold ringing her pupils. Now that she wasn’t running from him or terrified by him, he realized Elspeth Stewart was really quite a beauty. Her lips were full and lush. By some trick of musculature under her smooth skin, the corners of them turned up naturally in a beguiling half smile, as if she were hugging a delicious secret to herself. There were soft hollows beneath her rosy cheeks, a sign of the bone-deep loveliness that only ripens with age. “Lachlan Drummond is a lucky bastard,” Rob said with conviction.

how can i leave before the party’s started rehearsals begin at forty i ripen with age i do not come with an expiration date and now for the main event curtains up at fifty let’s begin the show - timeless

I feel aged. I feel as if you’ve aged me with your own hands, Michael. Ripened me. Like a red fruit, at the edge of a branch, hanging at its peak. Beautiful — and just about to fall.’ A little laugh, his own thoughts embarrassing him. ‘Maybe I’m the dramatic one.

To ripen into an elder, into a being that is more than simply elderly and more than only self, is a deliberate, thoughtful, sustained choice that arises from the intention to see things as they are.

What is more, in the Age of Affluence access to luxuries, pleasures, and comforts abound, and even commoners possess the wealth and leisure to indulge in them. “A spoiled society begins to rot from within.”, William Ophuls explains. In adapting themselves to abundance, the people grow incapable of enduring even mild forms of hardship and suffering, and as the often repeated saying goes, good times create weak men. “Prosperity ripened the principle of decay.”, Edward Gibbon explained in reference to Rome.

they convinced me i only had a few good years left before i was replaced by a girl younger than me as though men yield power with age but women grow into irrelevance they can keep their lies for i have just gotten started i feel as though i just left the womb my twenties are the warm-up for what i’m really about to do wait till you see me in my thirties now that will be a proper introduction to the nasty. wild. woman in me. how can i leave before the party’s started rehearsals begin at forty i ripen with age i do not come with an expiration date and now for the main event curtains up at fifty let’s begin the show

wait till you see me in my thirties now that will be a proper introduction to the nasty. wild. woman in me. how can i leave before the party’s started rehearsals begin at forty i ripen with age i do not come with an expiration date and now for the main event curtains up at fifty let’s begin the show - timeless

Mankind,’ however, has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the family of butterflies or orchids. ‘Mankind’ is a zoological expression, or an empty word. But conjure away the phantom, break the magic circle, and at once there emerges an astonishing wealth of actual forms the Living with all its immense fullness, depth and movement hitherto veiled by a catchword, a dryasdust scheme, and a set of personal ‘ideals.’ I see, in place of that empty figment of one linear history which can only be kept up by shutting one’s eyes to the overwhelming multitude of the facts, the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle, each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will, and feeling, its own death Here indeed are colours, lights, movements, that no intellectual eye has yet discovered. Here the Cultures, peoples, languages, truths, gods, landscapes bloom and age as the oaks and the stone-pines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves but there is no ageing ‘Mankind.’ Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline. These cultures, sublimated life-essences, grow with the same superb aimlessness as the flowers of the field. They belong, like the plants and the animals, to the living Nature of Goethe, and not to the dead Nature of Newton. I see world-history as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvelous waxing and waning of organic forms. The professional historian, on the contrary, sees it as a sort of tapeworm industriously adding on to itself one epoch after another.

The drama of age regression and incest recapitulation (or, for that matter, any therapeutic cathartic or intellectual project) is healing only because it provides therapist and patient with some interesting shared activity while the real therapeutic force—the relationship—is ripening on the tree.

I see, in place of that empty figment of one linear history which can only be kept up by shutting one’s eyes to the overwhelming multitude of the facts, the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle; each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will and feeling, its own death. Here indeed are colours, lights, movements, that no intellectual eye has yet discovered. Here the Cultures, peoples, languages, truths, gods, landscapes bloom and age as the oaks and the stone-pines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves—but there is no ageing “Mankind.” Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline.

The maid was of an age at which men had stopped seeing her. She had had the body of a woman when she was still a girl, when she was married off, so young, and her body had ripened further after she birthed and nursed her child, and men had once paused to look at her, not at her face, but at her figure, and she had often been alarmed by those looks, in part because of the danger in them, and in part because she knew how they changed when she was revealed to be mute, and so the end of being seen was mostly a relief.

Fruits will ripen and drop from the tree on their own if left untouched. But people do pick some fruits. Sometimes, the wind blows and makes the fruit fall. Each fruit has its destiny, which is decided by nature. It is the same with people. Regardless of age, nature decides the time for us to depart. Accept destiny and surrender to nature. It will reduce your suffering.

Liberty, next to religion, has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime, from the sowing of the seed at Athens, two thousand four hundred and sixty years ago, until the ripened harvest was gathered by men of our race. It is the delicate fruit of a mature civilisation; and scarcely a century has passed since nations, that knew the meaning of the term, resolved to be free. In every age its progress has been beset by its natural enemies, by ignorance and superstitution, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man’s craving for power, and the poor man’s craving for food. During long intervals it has been utterly arrested, when nations were being rescued from barbarism and from the grasp of strangers, and when the perpetual struggle for existence, depriving men of all interest and understanding in politics, has made them eager to sell their birthright for a pottage, and ignorant of the treasure they resigned. At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition, and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success. No obstacle has been so constant, or so difficult to overcome, as uncertainty and confusion touching the nature of true liberty. If hostile interests have wrought much injury, false ideas have wrought still more; and its advance is recorded in the increase of knowledge, as much as in the improvement of laws. The history of institutions is often a history of deception and illusions; for their virtue depends on the ideas that produce and on the spirit that preserves them, and the form may remain unaltered when the substance has passed away.

they convinced me/ i only had a few good years left/ before i was replaced by a girl younger than me/ as though men yield power with age/ but women grow into irrelevance/ they can keep their lies/ for i have just gotten started/ i feel as though i just left the womb/ my twenties are the warm-up/ for what i'm really about to do/ wait till you see me in my thirties/ now that will be a proper introduction/ to the nasty. wild. woman in me./ how can i leave before the party's started/ rehearsals begin at forty/ i ripen with age/ i do not come with an expiration date/ and now/ for the main event/ curtains up at fifty/ let's begin the show

when Catherine the Great told her chancellor that she wanted to ride out in the great Empire of Russia and meet the happy peasants everyone kept telling her lived there, the chancellor—his name was Potemkin—understood immediately that shit-caked, disease-ridden serfs begging from frostbitten lips and extending three-fingered hands to their absolute monarch would not entirely fill her with joy. So he grabbed a couple of hundred minor nobles and dressed them as peasants and paid them off. Then he built a bunch of fake villages and rode Catherine through them, and she was delighted to see that agricultural labour was surprisingly easy and the soil of Russia was amazingly fertile even without much assistance from mankind. She was thrilled at the beauty of her subjects and at their surprisingly educated voices as they sang and tilled the soil. She went back to the palace and eventually died at the age of sixty-seven, still at least notionally unaware that she ruled an impoverished, brutal nation ripening towards a staggering violence. (She died of a stroke. There was, contrary to the prurient slander, no horse penis involved.) In short, I have been building Potemkin villages: faking it.

i ripen with age i do not come with an expiration date and now for the main event curtains up at fifty let’s begin the show - timeless

All public schools are designed for mediocre minds, and therefore for those whose fruits are not very significant, if they ripen at all. It is for these that the higher minds and spirits, from whose ripening and fruit-bearing everything really proceeds, are sacrificed. Here we show ourselves as belonging to an age whose culture is dying through its own means. No doubt the gifted mind knows how to help itself; its inventive power is shown precisely in the way that, despite the bad soil in which it is planted, despite the bad environment to which it is supposed to adapt, despite the bad diet which it is fed, it knows how to preserve itself through its own powers. But there is no justification in this for the stupidity of those who put it in this position.