Lost Vitality Quotes

Maybe in my 20s I was a little more lively. But I'm done with that.

To live a life half dead, a living death.

Does a dragon still sing from within a withered tree?

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

Let me not live, after my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff of younger spirits.

People "died" all the time. . . . Parts of them died when they made the wrong kinds of decisions-decisions against life. Sometimes they died bit by bit until finally they were just living corpses walking around. If you were perceptive you could see it in their eyes; the fire had gone out. . . you always knew when you made a decision against life. The door clicked and you were safe inside-safe and dead.

Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated.

I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes.

I knew that to find and to feel Yoav again would be terribly painful, because of what had become of him, and because of what I knew he could ignite in me, a vitality that was excruciating because like a flare it lit up the emptiness inside me and exposed what I always secretly knew about myself: how much time I'd spent being only partly alive, and how easily I'd accepted a lesser life.