Florida Scott-Maxwell Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Florida Scott-Maxwell's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Playwright Florida Scott-Maxwell's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 37 quotes on this page collected since September 14, 1883! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
All quotes by Florida Scott-Maxwell: Age Old Age Pain Solitude more...
  • I grow more intense as I age.

  • 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.

    Florida Scott-Maxwell (2013). “Measure of My Days”, p.23, Knopf
  • It sometimes looks as though woman would not be woman unless man insisted upon it, since she tends so markedly to be just a human being when away from men, and only on their approach does she begin to play her required role.

  • Is life a pregnancy? That would make death a birth.

  • I wonder why love is so often equated with joy when it is everything else as well. Devastation, balm, obsession, granting and receiving excessive value, and losing it again. It is recognition, often of what you are not but might be. It sears and it heals. It is beyond pity and above law. It can seem like truth.

    Florida Scott-Maxwell (2013). “Measure of My Days”, p.41, Knopf
  • Order, cleanliness, seemliness make a structure that is half support, half ritual, and - if it does not create it - maintains decency.

    Florida Scott-Maxwell (2013). “Measure of My Days”, p.78, Knopf
  • 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 . . .

  • One cannot be honest even at the end of one's life, for no one is wholly alone. We are bound to those we love, or to those who love us, and to those who need us to be brave, or content, or even happy enough to allow them not to worry about us. So we must refrain from giving pain, as our last gift to our fellows.

  • Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age.

    Florida Scott-Maxwell (2013). “Measure of My Days”, p.11, Knopf
  • 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 (2013). “Measure of My Days”, p.21, Knopf
  • To know another, and to be known by another--that is everything.

  • I wonder if living alone makes one more alive. No precious energy goes in disagreement or compromise. No need to augment others, there is just yourself, just truth - a morsel - and you.

    Florida Scott-Maxwell (2013). “Measure of My Days”, p.22, Knopf
  • Difficulties are what makes it honorable and interesting to be alive.

  • Difference of opinion has never been sufficiently appreciated. It is the unexpected, the unknowable, the divine irrationality of life that saves us.

  • Admiration is one of the chief delights of living.

    Florida Scott-Maxwell (2013). “Measure of My Days”, p.37, Knopf
  • Life does not acommodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to, and it couldn't do it better. Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition.

    Florida Scott-Maxwell (2013). “Measure of My Days”, p.40, Knopf
  • I feel most real when alone, even most alive when alone. Better to say that the liveliness of companionship and the liveliness of solitude differ, and the latter is never as exhausting as the former.

    Florida Scott-Maxwell (2013). “Measure of My Days”, p.11, Knopf
  • She [a mother] never outgrows the burden of love, and to the end she carries the weight of hope for those she bore. Oddly, very oddly, she is forever surprised and even faintly wronged that her sons and daughters are just people, for many mothers hope and half expect that their new-born child will make the world better, will somehow be a redeemer. Perhaps they are right, and they can believe that the rare quality they glimpsed in the child is active in the burdened adult.

  • Our age is so gregarious that there is at present a marked prejudice against anyone being alone. It is looked down on, and a need to be alone is almost considered a fault, a weakness, as though if one cannot endure - more - enjoy being with other people every minute one is aloof, unreal, and somehow to be pitied.

  • 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?

    Florida Scott-Maxwell (2013). “Measure of My Days”, p.27, Knopf
  • Anger must be the energy that has not yet found its fight channel.

    Florida Scott-Maxwell (2013). “Measure of My Days”, p.76, Knopf
  • No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.

    Measure of my Days (1968) p. 16
  • 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.

  • love at any age takes everything you've got.

    Florida Scott-Maxwell (2013). “Measure of My Days”, p.11, Knopf
  • 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?

  • 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.

    Florida Scott-Maxwell (2013). “Measure of My Days”, p.17, Knopf
  • 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."

  • 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.

    Florida Scott-Maxwell (2013). “Measure of My Days”, p.19, Knopf
  • Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting, and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age. To my own surprise I burst out with hot conviction. Only a few years ago I enjoyed my tranquility; now I am so disturbed by the outer world and by human quality in general that I want to put things right, as though I still owed a debt to life. I must calm down. I am far too frail to indulge in moral fervor.

    Florida Scott-Maxwell (2013). “Measure of My Days”, p.11, Knopf
  • Making those we love happy sounds innocent as a dove, but it can be as destructive as a lion.

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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 37 quotes from the Playwright Florida Scott-Maxwell, starting from September 14, 1883! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
    Florida Scott-Maxwell quotes about: Age Old Age Pain Solitude