The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the p… - Susan Sontag

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.

"Work is experienced as discipline — the background of which is ascesis — even though it also gives pleasure. One is allowed to become "depersonalized" in work, to forget the self (to lose contact with its most intimate feelings and needs) — indeed all that is necessary if one is to give oneself fully to the work."

Everyone else not real-very distant, small figures. I would have to swim a thousand miles to reach the margin of the relationship, on the other side of which might lie other people, and it was too far, I was too tired.
The almost infinitely extending network of that relationship; its dense weave That's what held me-

The desire for reassurance. And, equally, to be reassured. (The itch to ask whether I’m still loved; and the itch to say, I love you, half-fearing that the other has forgotten, since the last time I said it.)