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Somewhere Towards the End QUOTES

Somewhere Towards the End QUOTES

1 " An important aspect of the ebbing of sex was that other things became interesting. Sex obliterates the individuality of young women more often than it does that of young men, because so much more of a woman than a man is used by sex. "

― Diana Athill , Somewhere Towards the End

2 " She was an object lesson on the essential luck, whatever hardships may come their way, of those born able to make things. "

― Diana Athill , Somewhere Towards the End

3 " How, then, does the written word work? What part of a reader absorbs it - or should that be a double question: what part of a reader absorbs what part of a text?
I think that underneath, or alongside, a reader's conscious response to a text, whatever is needy in him is taking in whatever the text offers to assuage that need. "

― Diana Athill , Somewhere Towards the End

4 " To me it was plain silly. It is so obvious that life works in terms of species rather than individuals. The individual just has to be born, to develop to the point at which it can procreate, and then to fall away into death to make way for its successors, and humans are no exception whatever they may fancy. "

― Diana Athill , Somewhere Towards the End

5 " I am not sure that digging in our past guilts is a useful occupation for the very old, given that one can do so little about them. I have reached a stage at which one hopes to be forgiven for concentrating on how to get through the present. "

― Diana Athill , Somewhere Towards the End

6 " Dwindling energy is one of the most boring things about being old. From time to time you get a day when it seems to be restored, and you can't help feeling that you are 'back to normal', but it never lasts. You just have to resign yourself to doing less--or rather, taking more breaks than you used to in whatever you are doing. In my case I fear that what I most often do less of is my duty towards my companion rather than indulgence of my private inclinations. "

― Diana Athill , Somewhere Towards the End

7 " All through my sixties I felt I was still within hailing distance of middle age, not safe on its shores, perhaps, but navigating its coastal waters. My seventieth birthday failed to change this because I managed scarcely to notice it, but my seventy-first did change it. Being 'over seventy' is being old: suddenly I was aground on that fact and saw that the time had come to size it up. "

― Diana Athill , Somewhere Towards the End

8 " I have heard people bewailing man's landing on the moon, as though before it was touched by an astronaut's foot it was made of silver or mother-of-pearl, and that footprint turned it into gray dust. But the moon never was made of mother-of-pearl, and it still shines as if it were so made. "

― Diana Athill , Somewhere Towards the End

9 " and as for toddlers, I didn’t go so far as to blame them for being what they were, but I did feel that they were tedious to have around except in very small doses. "

― Diana Athill , Somewhere Towards the End