Florida Scott-Maxwell Quotes

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.

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.

No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.

Making those we love happy sounds innocent as a dove, but it can be as destructive as a lion.

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.

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.

Difficulties are what makes it honorable and interesting to be alive.

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

I grow more intense as I age.

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.

We must find out for ourselves, otherwise it wouldn't be discovery.

Anger must be the energy that has not yet found its fight channel.

We who are old know that age is more than a disability. It is an intense and varied experience, almost beyond our capacity at times, but something to be carried high.

To know another, and to be known by another--that is everything.

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

Claim the events of your life! When you posses all you have been and done, you are fierce with reality.

Is there any stab as deep as wondering where and how much you failed those you loved.

Admiration is one of the chief delights of living.

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 . . .

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.

love at any age takes everything you've got.

Order, cleanliness, seemliness make a structure that is half support, half ritual, and - if it does not create it - maintains decency.

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.

You need to claim the events in 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.

We who are old know that age is more than a disability. It is an intense and varied experience almost beyond our capacity at times but something to be carried high.

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.

It is not easy to be sure that being yourself is worth the trouble but [we do know] it is our sacred duty.

No matter how old a mother is she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.

No matter how old a mother is she still watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.

Is there any stab as deep as wondering where and how much you failed those you loved?

It is as though God said, "You think to create order? Here is the appropriate disorder, since they are one.

This is what creation is. The might and marvel of forever creating out of opposition.

...[T]here are days when emptiness is spacious, and non-existence elevating.