A selection from Keeping My Words: An Anthology from Cradle to Grave by Magnus Magnusson (Hodder & Stoughton, £6.99, pp. 280, ISBN 0340862645)
What though his head be empty, provided his commonplace book be full?
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), A Tale of a Tub
Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forget, because they have not the words to make us remember … By the time they learn to speak they have forgotten the details of their complaints, and so we never know. They forget so quickly, we say, because we cannot contemplate the fact that they never forget.
Margaret Drabble (b. 1939), The Mill- stone, 1965
I am fond of children (except boys).
Lewis Carroll in a letter to Kathleen Eschwege, 1879
It is only rarely that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman.
Alexandre Dumas fils (1824-95)
The 11-plus split me from the girl I carried a torch for. She passed, I failed. She went to grammar school, I sent her a love letter telling her I missed her — she sent it back with the spelling mistakes corrected.
John Prescott (b. 1938)
Children nowadays love luxury, have bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for elders.
Socrates (469-399 BC)
At school I never minded the lessons. I just resented having to work terribly hard at playing.
John Mortimer (b. 1923), A Voyage Round My Father
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
Chinese proverb
Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other both in mind and body; to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to applaud Hernani.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94), Virginibus Puerisque
Everyone who remembers his own educational experience remembers teachers, not methods and techniques.
American educationist and philosopher Sidney Hook (1902-89)
I expect you’ll be becoming a school- master, sir. That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.
Evelyn Waugh (1903-66), Decline and Fall
Don’t laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find a face of his own.
Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946), Afterthoughts
Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), Conquest of Happiness, 1930
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends.
Elizabeth Bowen (1891-1973), Death of the Heart
He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.
Anthony Burgess (1917-93), Inside Mr Enderby
Reading about sex in yesterday’s novels is like watching people smoke in old films.
Fay Weldon (b. 1931), in the Guardian 1 December 1989
When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
Attributed to Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910), whose father died when Twain was 11 years old
At home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be — and whenever I look up there will you be.
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), Far from the Madding Crowd
In all the important preparations of the mind she was complete; being prepared for matrimony by a hatred of home, restraint and tranquillity; by the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to marry.
Jane Austen (1775-1817), Mansfield Park
If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t get married.
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
All the same, you know, parents — especially step-parents — are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don’t fulfil the promise of their early years.
Anthony Powell (1905-2000), A Buyer’s Market
I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source [the family] than from any other — I mean from the attempt to prolong family connections unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so.
Samuel Butler (1835-1902), The Note- books of Samuel Butler
My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved.
Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, 1873-1954), Break of Day
It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won’t save us any more than love did.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), The Crack-Up
In England, you see, age wipes the slate clean … If you live to be 90 in England and can still eat a boiled egg, they think you deserve the Nobel Prize.
Alan Bennett (b.1934), An Englishman Abroad
To my deafness I’m accustomed,
To my dentures I’m resigned,
I can manage my bifocals,
But O, how I miss my mind.
Alec Douglas Home (1903-95)
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me,
And I shall spend my pension on brandy
and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money
for butter.
Jenny Joseph (b. 1932), New Poems
Senescence begins
And middle age ends
The day your descendants
Outnumber your friends.
Ogden Nash (1902-71), Marriage Lines
Growing old is like being increasingly penalised for a crime you haven’t committed.
Anthony Powell (1905-2000), Temporary Kings
That was a good career move.
Gore Vidal (b. 1925) on hearing of the death of his friend and rival, Truman Capote, in 1984
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