I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends and my own best friends' mothers and from surrogates many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life even after their passing.

I see a wiser person than when I was younger: having babies and passing 30 were the turning points. What women in their 40s - I am 39 - lack in gorgeousness they make up for in wisdom. I love ageing despite the drawbacks - thinner drier skin.

Aging gracefully is supposed to mean trying not to hide time passing and just looking a wreck. Don't worry girls look like a wreck that's the way it goes.

My own time is passing fast enough without some national game to help it along.

Time is not a thing thus nothing which is and yet it remains constant in its passing away without being something temporal like the beings in time.

Young poets bewail the passing of love old poets the passing of time. There is surprisingly little difference.

Time is not measured by the passing of years but by what one does what one feels and what one achieves.

Time is a sort of river of passing events and strong is its current no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place and this too will be swept away.

IT is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom's Cabin was passing through its serial stage and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction.

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties passing from one step of success to another forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.