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" It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers,
When each had numbered more than fourscore years,
And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,
Had but begun his Characters of Men.
Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales,
At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales;
Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,
Completed Faust when eighty years were past,
These are indeed exceptions; but they show
How far the gulf-stream of our youth may flow
Into the arctic regions of our lives.
Where little else than life itself survives. "
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
27
" For at this stage in our youth we can hold two kinds of anticipation of love, which seem contradictory and yet coexist and reinforce each other. We can dream delicately because even to imagine it is to touch one of the most sacred of our hopes, of searching for the other part of ourselves, of the other being who will make us whole, of the ultimate and transfiguring union. At the same time we can gloat over any woman, become insatiably curious about the brute facts of the pleasures which we are then learning or which are just to come. In that phase we are coarse and naked, and anyone who has forgotten his youth will judge that we are too tangled with the flesh ever to forget ourselves in the ecstasy of romantic love. But in fact, at this stage in one's youth, the coarseness and nakedness, the sexual preoccupations, the gloating over delights to come, are - in the secret heart where they take place - themselves romantic. They are a promise of joy. "
― C.P. Snow , Time of Hope (Strangers and Brothers, #1)