24 May 2011

Youth

Flipping through The Telegraph the other day, I stumbled across the following quote by Richard Halliburton from The Royal Road to Romance, first published in 1925. Well worth thinking about:
Youth — nothing else worth having in the world... And I had youth, the transitory, the fugitive, now, completely and abundantly. Yet what was I going to do with it? Certainly not squander its gold on the commonplace quest for riches and respectability, and then secretly lament the price that had to be paid for these futile ideals. Let those who wish have their respectability — I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the Earth for the beautiful, the joyous and the romantic.

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