you might as well fall on your face as lean over too far backwards - James Thurber

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.

At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher.

Man has always assumed that his is the highest form of life in the universe. There is, of course, nothing at all with which to sustain this view.