One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave.
Interpretation
People often ignore the reality of aging until they are close to death.
This quote suggests that individuals tend to overlook the process of aging and the implications it has on life, remaining youthful in spirit and behavior until they face the inevitable end. It reflects a human tendency to live in the moment, often disregarding the passage of time until it becomes unavoidable, prompting a deeper reflection on our relationship with age and mortality.
In practice
In a speech about embracing the aging process.
It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.
The only virtue on which I pride myself is my self-doubt; when a writer loses her self-doubt, the time has come to lay aside her pen.
You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.
Truffles must come to the table in their own stock and as you break open this jewel sprung from a poverty-stricken soil, imagine - if you have never visited it - the desolate kingdom where it rules.
I don't need anyone to rectify my existence. The most profound relationship we will ever have is the one with ourselves.
The great powers of the world may have done wonders in giving the world an industrial look, but the great gift still has to come from Africa - giving the world a more human face.
Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.
I can measure the motion of bodies but I cannot measure human folly.
Pervading nationalism imposes its dominion on man today in many different forms and with an aggressiveness that spares no one. The challenge that is already with us is the temptation to accept as true freedom what in reality is only a new form of slavery.
I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,' Smiley went on, more lightly. 'Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.
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