Kindness and intelligence are the preoccupations of age. Being cruel and thoughtless is far more fascinating when you're twenty.
Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can't understand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation's clothes and hair suddenly retro.
"You're saving cocoons." That's what he'd say. "Corsets, in a way, you can never fit again. So why save them? You can't really prove you were ever young. Pictures? No, they lie. You're not the picture."
"Affidavits?"
"No, my dear, you're not the dates, or the ink, or the paper. You're not these trunks of junk and dust. You're only you, here, now— the present you."
— I'm thirty-five!
— Oh, shut the fuck up, I'm a hundred and forty.