Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Caro

A quiet line from a man who has spent a lifetime proving that “new and wonderful” rarely arrives on schedule. Robert Caro’s work is built on the slow grind of access: doors that stay shut for years, sources who won’t talk until they’re ready, truths that only surface after you’ve worn down the silence. So when he admits that aging can make novelty feel scarce, it reads less like self-pity than like field notes from someone who knows how the world calcifies.

The intent is deceptively simple: to name a fear that’s both personal and professional. For writers, “new” isn’t just romance or adventure; it’s material, the sensation that there’s still an undiscovered room in the house of reality. Caro’s subtext is that time doesn’t merely pass, it narrows. Your routines get efficient, your social circle stabilizes, your expectations harden. Wonder becomes harder to stumble into because you’ve designed your life to avoid surprise.

Context matters: Caro is the biographer of power, and power is the ultimate anti-surprise machine. Institutions run on precedent; the powerful prefer predictability; history, in his telling, is often a story of systems closing ranks. That gives the line a second edge: aging isn’t the only force that makes the world feel less permeable. Experience teaches you how things really work, and that knowledge can be its own kind of disenchantment.

Still, the sentence leaves a crack of possibility. “Sometimes” and “feel” are doing moral work. He’s describing perception, not surrender. The wonder isn’t gone; it’s just harder to let in.