Florida Scott-Maxwell Quotes

26 Sourced Quotes

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

Florida Scott-Maxwell
Life does not accommodate 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
Is there any stab as deep as wondering where and how much you failed those you loved?

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

Florida Scott-Maxwell
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
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
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.

Florida Scott-Maxwell
Admiration is one of the chief delights of living.

Florida Scott-Maxwell
The crucial task of age is balance, a veritable tightrope of 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
Making those we love happy sounds innocent as a dove, but it can be as destructive as a lion.

Florida Scott-Maxwell
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.

Florida Scott-Maxwell
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
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
Dr. Johnson said that telling one's troubles was asking for pity or praise.... But it is more than that. You ask to be met at the point of your reality.

Florida Scott-Maxwell
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
You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all that you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality.

Florida Scott-Maxwell
As we age we are more alive than seems likely, convenient, or even bearable. 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?

Florida Scott-Maxwell
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.

Florida Scott-Maxwell
Anger must be the energy that has not yet found its right channel.

Florida Scott-Maxwell
One hardly dares to say that love is the core of the relationship, though love is sought for and created in relationship; love is rather the marvel when it is there, but it is not always there, and to know another and to be known by another — that is everything.

Florida Scott-Maxwell
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.

Florida Scott-Maxwell
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. If it is a long defeat it is also a victory, meaningful for the initiates of time, if not for those who have come less far.

Florida Scott-Maxwell
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. The others must vanish into their expected role.

Florida Scott-Maxwell
As I do not live in an age when rustling black skirts billow about me, and I do not carry an ebony stick to strike the floor in sharp rebuke, as this is denied me, I rap out a sentence in my note book and feel better. If a grandmother wants to put her foot down, the only safe place to do it these days is in a note book.

Florida Scott-Maxwell
What a boon disparity is — difference of opinion has never been sufficiently appreciated. It is the unexpected, the unknowable, the divine irrationality of life that saves us.

Florida Scott-Maxwell