I have lived to see that being seventeen is no protection against becoming seventy, but to know this needs the experience of a lifetime, for no imagination copes with it.

Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life - it has given me me . It has provided time and experience and failures and triumphs and time-tested friends who have helped me step into the shape that was waiting for me. I fit into me now. I have an organic life, finally, not necessarily the one people imagined for me, or tried to get me to have. I have the life I longed for. I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I would be.

Grown people know that they do not always know the way of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof.

Genius has no youth, but starts with the ripeness of age and old experience.

His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough"(72).

Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.