Florida Scott-Maxwell Short Quotes

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Admiration is one of the chief delights of living.

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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