W.H. Auden, from his “Reading” essay in The Dyer’s Hand:

Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes … When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, “I know what I like,” he is really saying “I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu,” because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.

Lorrie Moore, from her novel Anagrams (via Vintage & Anchor):

Basically, I realized, I was living in that awful stage of life from the age of twenty-six to thirty-seven known as stupidity. It’s when you don’t know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don’t even have a philosophy about all the things you don’t know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight.

Borges, talking to the Paris Review, 1967:

You know, English is a beautiful language, but the older languages are even more beautiful: they had vowels. Vowels in modern English have lost their value, their color. My hope for English — for the English language — is America. Americans speak clearly. When I go to the movies now, I can’t see much, but in the American movies, I understand every word.

Lorrie Moore, mercilessly, in her short story “How to Become a Writer”:

Insist you are not very interested in any one subject at all, that you are interested in the music of language, that you are interested in — in — syllables, because they are the atoms of poetry, the cells of the mind, the breath of the soul. Begin to feel woozy. Stare into your plastic wine cup.

“Syllables?” you will hear someone ask, voice trailing off, as they glide slowly toward the reassuring white of the dip.

Lorrie Moore sometimes scares me. From “Willing”: She was trying to tease him, but it came out wrong, like a lizard with a little hat on.

A raincloud of tantruming toddlers and aggressively colicky carry-on infants now seems to follow me around no matter what airport I’m in or what airplane I’m on. Horrid little brat-shaped air-raid sirens shrieking their germs into the bored faces of their parents, who are lucky enough to be able to tune the sound out. Something about contemporary aviation must be extra upsetting to the 21st-century young — perhaps the TSA’s ramped-up X-rays are agitating their Nerfy fontanelles. (Nice baby.) Last week’s quotations involving DFW’s and Z. Smith’s comments on M. Amis remind me of what Smith told Lorrie Moore regarding DFW: I want to meet him so much it’s giving me a hernia. Raincloud notwithstanding, on Black Friday I make respectable if not overly substantial progress through Amis’s Money and Elizabeth Crane’s All This Heavenly Glory while in the airports and on the planes, en route back home to the proper cold and proper dismal. In Money I hit the line “Selina and I get on like a house on fire” only shortly after noting that Thisbe Nissen’s blurb on the back cover of Heavenly Glory begins: “Elizabeth Crane writes like a house on fire!” (Which is true.)