Raped at age nine by a relative and pregnant at 14 Oprah Winfrey,like many others have experienced the wickedness and brutality ofour society. Sadly, it’s an environment where blood lines no longerhold.

The panther that has stalked yousince you were a childis old now. No longer wild,and tired of guarding the treasureyou yourself left behind - blind and deaf, she will give it all to youif you just let her go.

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.

Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray.

Time was a dazzling lie, a magician worth a bird in his hat. The truth, I felt certain, was that everything happened at once. How old was I? I was every age at the same time. All the days of our lives were today.

NW" is full of split selves, people alienated from the very things they thought defined them. Their nostalgia -- for old movies, old songs, buses they don't ride anymore -- is less a salve than a form of pain.

It just happens that a lot of us have been through too much that is even too less than our age..and what happens is we cannot but remember it and all we think about is how to make now and after better than before.

Allan Emmanuelle Karlsson closed his eyes and felt perfectly convinced that he would now pass away for ever. It had been exciting, the entire journey, but nothing lasts for ever, except possibly general stupidity.

Son front, quoique peu ridé, semble porter le sceau d'une myriade d'années. Ses cheveux gris sont des archives du passé et ses yeux, plus gris encore, sont des sibylles de l'avenir.

And there was this sweet-looking little old lady with her white hair in a bun and everything, the typical grandmother type, and she was swearing her head off. I guess Alzheimer's had brought out her inner sailor.

You must find a boy your own age. Someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered. Someone whose fingers are a poem.

What they don't understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you're eleven, you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one.

You get to be about eleven or twelve and everything's old hat. They've drummed the miraculous out of you, but you don't want it to be like that. You want the miraculous. You want everything to still be new.

The very old and the very young have something in common that makes it right that they should be left alone together. Dawn and sunset see stars shining in a blue sky; but morning and midday and afternoon do not, poor things.

She had to live in this bright, red gabled house with the nurse until it was time for her to die... I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people. Children we understand, their fears and hopes and make-believe.