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Quote by Saki

“Temptations came to him, in middle age, tentatively and without insistence, like a neglected butcher-boy who asks for a Christmas box in February for no more hopeful reason that than he didn’t get one in December. He had no more idea of succumbing to them than he had of purchasing the fish-knives and fur boas that ladies are impelled to sacrifice through the medium of advertisement columns during twelve months of the year. Still, there was something impressive in this unasked-for renunciation of possibly latent enormities.”

Quote by Saki

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Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches

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Author

Saki

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“We all have the opportunity to radically reinvent and reimagine the process of aging for ourselves. And I don’t mean merely doing more or doing differently. I don’t use “reinvention” in the way that many experts do—from the outside in. That’s the topic of most books about aging. Rather, my emphasis is on the internal, less familiar terrain of soul—those subtle yearnings that appear in images and fantasies, the ways we respond or fear to respond to those messengers, and the symbolic meanings we glean from them. As we learn the psychological and spiritual practices in this book, we discover how to orient to our inner worlds, deepen our self-knowledge, and reimagine age for ourselves, eventually shifting from denial to awareness, from self-rejection to self-acceptance, from obligation to flow, from holding on to letting go, from distraction to presence. Even from role to soul. The result: a newfound freedom from the constraints of past roles and identities, an emerging sense of becoming who you were always meant to be, and a profound gratitude for the way that your life unfolded.”

“I made many economies in my youth and they were fairly painless because the young do not particularly care for luxury. They have other interests than spending and can make love satisfactorily on a Coca-Cola, a drink which is nauseating in age. They have little idea of real pleasure: even their love-making is apt to be hurried and incomplete. Luckily in middle age pleasure begins, pleasure in love, in wine, in food. Only the taste for poetry flags a little, but I would have always gladly lost my taste for the sonnets of Wordsworth [...] if I could have bettered my palate for wine. Love-making too provides as a rule more prolonged and varied pleasure after forty-five. Aretino is not a writer for the young.”