The music critic Harold Schonberg goes further: Mozart, he argues, actually “developed late,” since he didn’t produce his greatest work until he had been composing for more than twenty years.

But George is getting old. Won't it very soon be too late?

Never use those words to George. He won't listen. He daren't listen. Damn the future. Let Kenny and the kids have it. Let Charley keep the past. George clings only to Now. It is Now that he must find another Jim. Now that he must love. Now that he must live....

في مرحلة ما من هشاشة نسميها نضجا لا نكون متفائلين ولا متشائمين
أقلعنا عن الشغف والحنين وعن تسمية الأشياء بأضدادها من فرط ما التبس علينا الأمر بين الشكل والجوهر
ودربنا الشعور على التفكير الهادئ قبل البوح
وإذ ننظر إلى الوراء لنعرف أين نحن منا ومن الحقيقة
نسأل كم ارتكبنا من الأخطاء ، وهل وصلنا إلى الحكمة متأخرين
لسنا متأكدين من صواب الريح
فماذا ينفعنا أن نصل إلى أي شيء متأخرين
حتى لو كان هنالك من ينتظرنا على سفح الجبل ويدعونا إلى صلاة الشكر لأننا وصلنا سالمين
لا متفائلين ولا متشائمين ، لكن متأخرين

...if he could only break away from this pseudo-modernity, and pseudo-intellectualism; if he could just once defy his own age, instead of defying the dead Victorians; if he could only shock the vicar (who reads Proust) by quoting Longfellow (one doesn't put him on the mountaintops, of course, but there's better stuff than Proust ever dreamed of in the sonnets on Dante); I should feel that he was really his own self, instead of a variation on a current theme. It seems to me that if you really like a person, you want him above everything to be his own self
...
One does get so sick of the notion of the present moment — that, because its conventions aren't those of the last century, it has no conventions of its own. The conventionalists of today all seem to forget that the conventions of yesterday were equally different from those of the day before yesterday.

ان الاحداث المعاصرة لم تكن سوى امور قديمة في روح زوربا ما دام هو نفسه قد تجاوزها ولا شك ان البرق والمراكب البخارية وسكك الحديد والاخلاق السائدة والوطن والدين كانت تبدو في عقله كبنادق عتيقة صدئة
لقد كانت روحه تتقدم باسرع مما يتقدم العالم

He would set up as a mild eccentric, discursive, withdrawn, but possessing one or two lovable habits such as muttering to himself as he bumbled along pavements. Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.

Last month, coming out of the Rue d'Athènes, where they were showing <em> Le Sang d'un Poète</em>, I told Gide that I couldn't bear to see the film again because each shot is so slow. He replied that I was wrong, that this slowness was a rhythm, and that these slow shots coming one after another formed a special tempo, my tempo, a procedure of my own.
No doubt he's right, and it would be dangerous to upset a rhythm that comes from within oneself, through fear of this rhythm, and to impose another, artificial, one which would not suit it.

El artista es hijo de sus tiempos, pero desdichado de él si, a la vez, es su alumno o incluso su favorito.

The words 'bad timing' came to be ghosts haunting our every move in Birmingham. Yet people who used this argument were ignorant of the background of our planning...they did not realize that it was ridiculous to speak of timing when the clock of history showed that the Negro had already suffered one hundred years of delay.

"In a way, what Tarantino has done with the French New Wave and with David Lynch is what Pat Boone did with rhythm and blues: He's found (ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged and distinctive and menacing about their work and homogenize it, churn it until it's smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption. Reservoir Dogs, for example, with its comically banal lunch chatter, creepily otiose code names, and intrusive soundtrack of campy pop from decades past, is a Lynch movie made commercial, i.e., fast, linear, and with what was idiosyncratically surreal now made fashionably (i.e., "hiply") surreal [...] D. Lynch is an exponentially better filmmaker than Q. Tarantino. For, unlike Tarantino, D. Lynch knows that an act of violence in an American film has, through repetition and desensitization, lost the ability to refer to anything but itself. A better way to put what I just tried to say: Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear."

"I've wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it, and yet we didn't see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned perhaps into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was just boring hinterland. It was a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away. I'm looking for the truth." And so it goes away. Puzzling."

But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

The revolution had come too late for him. He was in his midforties when the Civil Rights Act was signed and close to fifty when its effects were truly felt.

He did not begrudge the younger generation their opportunities. He only wished that more of them, his own children, in particular, recognized their good fortune, the price that had been paid for it, and made the most of it. He was proud to have lived to see the change take place.

He wasn't judging anyone and accepted the fact that history had come too late for him to make much use of all the things that were now opening up. But he couldn't understand why some of the young people couldn't see it. Maybe you had to live through the worst of times to recognize the best of times when they came to you. Maybe that was just the way it was with people.

He who moves not forward, goes backward.