Young people must appreciate the beauty of old age. The old people were once young.

The more older we get, less question we ask. We have lost contacts, we have lost and the curiosity of the things.

I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes.

The older we get, the swifter time seems to pass and the quicker memories seem to fade.

-just on the verge ofbecoming a woman, and in these three years and almost five months, I'dreached maturity. I was older than the mountains outside. The wisdomof the attic was in my bones, etched on my brain, part of my flesh.

Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I've more knowledge of life than you, I've lived more and betrayed more and seen more betrayed. At your age one is bursting with ideals. You think that because I can sometimes see what's trivial and what's important in art that I ought to be more virtuous. But I don't want to be virtuous. My charm (if there is any) for you is simply frankness. And experience. Not goodness. I'm not a good man. Perhaps morally I'm younger even than you are. Can you understand that?

Make your sacred-life an eventful journey.

The toilet is an intimacyonly shared with parents when you are youngand once again when they are olderand with lovers when say on a Sundaymorning stretching into the bathroomyou wake to the sound of stream into bowland go to hug the naked bodystood with its back to you and kiss the neckand taste the whole of the night on thereand smell the morning’s pale yellow lossand take the whole of him in your handand feel the water moving through himand knowing that this is love the prone fleshwhat we expel from the body and what we let inside.

The average person is in the habit of saying, “The older I get;”’ and he thereby calls the attention of his mind to the idea that he is getting older. In brief, he compels his mind to believe that he is getting older and older, and thereby directs the mind to produce more and more age. The true expression in this connection is, “The longer I live.” This expression calls the mind’s attention to the length of life, which will, in turn, tend to increase the power of that process in you that can prolong life. When people reach the age of sixty or seventy, they usually speak of “the rest of my days,” thus implying the idea that there are only a few more days remaining. The mind is thereby directed to finish life in a short period of time, and accordingly, all the forces of the mind will proceed to work for the speedy termination of personal existence. The correct expression is “from now on,” as, that leads thought into the future indefinitely without impressing the mind with any end whatever.

As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me.