I walked out this evening to the bottom of the garden and smoked a cigarette. Last week I planted an acer in the furthest bed from the house, in honour of our new baby. The sapling is as tall as me and, by all accounts, it can grow forty feet tall. So, in thirty year's time, if we're still here I can come back and see this tree in its maturity. But the thought depresses me: in thirty years' time I'll be in my mid-sixties and I realize that these forward projections that you make, so unreflectingly, in your life are beginning to run out. Suppose I'd said in forty years' time? That would be pushing it, Fifty? I'll probably be gone by then. Sixty? Dead and buried, for sure. Thank Christ I didn't plant an oak. Is that a good definition of of marking the ageing watershed? That moment when you realize-quite rationally, quite unemotionally-that the world in the not-so-distant future will not contain you: that the trees you planted will continue growing but you will not be there to see them. William Boyd
Some Similar Quotes
  1. It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not. - Unknown
  2. Just when you think it can't get any worse, it can. And just when you think it can't get any better, it can. - Nicholas Sparks
  3. The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person. - Chuck Palahniuk
  4. Where there is love there is life. - Mahatma Gandhi
  5. It hurts to let go. Sometimes it seems the harder you try to hold on to something or someone the more it wants to get away. You feel like some kind of criminal for having felt, for having wanted. For having wanted to be wanted.... - Henry Rollins
More Quotes By William Boyd
  1. The wounded, the incomplete, the unbalanced, the malfunctioning, the ill seek each other out: like attracted to like.
  2. Lysander saw that they were displaying all the timeworn and conventional feints and poor disguises of lovers meeting in a public place and hoping the real nature of their relationship would be invisible.
  3. I walked out this evening to the bottom of the garden and smoked a cigarette. Last week I planted an acer in the furthest bed from the house, in honour of our new baby. The sapling is as tall as me and, by all accounts,...
  4. He needed the security of other bodies.
  5. Meeting Hettie again made him achingly conscious once more of the irrefutable nature of his obsession with her. Obsession - or love? Or was it something more unhealthy - a kind of craving, an addiction?
Related Topics