To be young is all there is in the world. The rest is nonsense—and cant. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes)Mbut it’s all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing.... Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.
ATTRIBUTION:
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), U.S. poet. Letter, March 21, 1907, to his future wife Elsie Moll. Letters of Wallace Stevens, ch. 5, ed. Holly Stevens (1967).
