Quote

Another secret we carry is that though drab outside - wreckage to the eye, mirrors a mortification - inside we flame with a wild life that is almost incommunicable.

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
Secret
Flame
Though
Flames
Age
Wild
Eye
Mirrors
Another
Carry
Incommunicable
Life
Outside
Drab
Inside
Wreckage
Almost
Mortification

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Admiration is one of the chief delights of living.
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Difference of opinion has never been sufficiently appreciated. It is the unexpected, the unknowable, the divine irrationality of life that saves us.
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Difficulties are what makes it honorable and interesting to be alive.
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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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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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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.
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I grow more intense as I age.
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love at any age takes everything you've got.
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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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No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.
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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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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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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 . . .
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Is there any stab as deep as wondering where and how much you failed those you loved.
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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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Making those we love happy sounds innocent as a dove, but it can be as destructive as a lion.
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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?
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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.
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