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The crucial task of old age is balance: keeping just well enough, just brave enough, just gay and interested and starkly honest enough to remain a sentient human being.

Florida Scott-Maxwell

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Florida Scott-Maxwell
Age: 95 †
Born: 1883
Born: September 14
Died: 1979
Died: March 6
Playwright
Suffragette
Writer
Florida Pier Scott-Maxwell
Balance
Crucial
Honest
Task
Age
Keeping
Wells
Gay
Human
Tasks
Humans
Brave
Starkly
Well
Remain
Sentient
Enough
Interested
Bravery

More quotes by Florida Scott-Maxwell

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No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.
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We who are old know that age is more than a disability. It is an intense and varied experience, almost beyond our capacity at times, but something to be carried high.
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Difficulties are what makes it honorable and interesting to be alive.
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I wonder if living alone makes one more alive. No precious energy goes in disagreement or compromise. No need to augment others, there is just yourself, just truth - a morsel - and you.
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We must find out for ourselves, otherwise it wouldn't be discovery.
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I grow more intense as I age.
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life is a tragic mystery. We are pierced and driven by laws we only half understand, we find that the lesson we learn again and again is that of accepting heroic helplessness.
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You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality. When at last age has assembled you together, will it not be easy to let it all go, lived, balanced, over?
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My kitchen linoleum is so black and shiny that I waltz while I wait for the kettle to boil. This pleasure is for the old who live alone.
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What fun it is to generalize in the privacy of a note book. It is as I imagine waltzing on ice might be. A great delicious sweep in one direction, taking you your full strength, and then with no trouble at all, an equally delicious sweep in the opposite direction. My note book does not help me think, but it eases my crabbed heart.
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As I do not live in an age when rustling black skirts billow about me, and I do not carry an ebony stick to strike the floor in sharp rebuke, as this is denied me, I rap out a sentence in my note book and feel better. If a grandmother wants to put her foot down, the only safe place to do it these days is in a note book.
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Is there any stab as deep as wondering where and how much you failed those you loved.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
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love at any age takes everything you've got.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
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Making those we love happy sounds innocent as a dove, but it can be as destructive as a lion.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
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I want to tell people approaching and perhaps fearing old age that it is a time of discovery. If they say Of what? I can only answer We must find out for ourselves, otherwise it wouldn't be discovery.
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To know another, and to be known by another--that is everything.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
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as we age we are more alive than seems likely, convenient, or even bearble. Too often our problem is the fervor of life within us. My dear fellow octogenarians, how are we to carry so much life, and what are we to do with it?
Florida Scott-Maxwell
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Admiration is one of the chief delights of living.
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Order, cleanliness, seemliness make a structure that is half support, half ritual, and - if it does not create it - maintains decency.
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In very truth the days are almost free, and if it is another way of saying that our lives are empty, well -- there are days when emptiness is spacious, and non-existence elevating . . .
Florida Scott-Maxwell