"The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened"
About this Quote
Munro (better known as Saki) slips a blade into two sentimental myths at once: the romance of youth and the dignity of age. Youth, he suggests, isn’t a season of boundless possibility so much as a factory for unfulfilled scripts. Old age, meanwhile, doesn’t simply look back; it edits. The line turns time into a pair of unreliable narrators, each one constructing a self that reality stubbornly refuses to endorse.
What makes the aphorism work is its symmetry and its cruelty. “Aspirations” and “reminiscences” sound like noble nouns, the kind we’re trained to respect. Saki pairs them with “never,” twice, and the respect curdles into suspicion. The young are not condemned for failing; their very dreaming is framed as structurally destined to miss the landing. The old are not praised for wisdom; memory is exposed as a creative-writing exercise, a retrospective PR campaign where the plot gets tightened and the embarrassing subplots vanish.
The subtext is social, not merely psychological. In Edwardian Britain, “youth” and “age” were roles with scripts: ambition, decorum, legacy. Saki, a master of drawing-room satire, delights in puncturing the polite idea that time naturally confers authenticity. He implies that identity is always aspirational or revisionist: we reach forward into fantasies, then later reach backward to retrofit meaning. The joke lands because it’s recognizable and a little devastating: we don’t just live our lives; we draft them, misremember them, and call the drafts truth.
What makes the aphorism work is its symmetry and its cruelty. “Aspirations” and “reminiscences” sound like noble nouns, the kind we’re trained to respect. Saki pairs them with “never,” twice, and the respect curdles into suspicion. The young are not condemned for failing; their very dreaming is framed as structurally destined to miss the landing. The old are not praised for wisdom; memory is exposed as a creative-writing exercise, a retrospective PR campaign where the plot gets tightened and the embarrassing subplots vanish.
The subtext is social, not merely psychological. In Edwardian Britain, “youth” and “age” were roles with scripts: ambition, decorum, legacy. Saki, a master of drawing-room satire, delights in puncturing the polite idea that time naturally confers authenticity. He implies that identity is always aspirational or revisionist: we reach forward into fantasies, then later reach backward to retrofit meaning. The joke lands because it’s recognizable and a little devastating: we don’t just live our lives; we draft them, misremember them, and call the drafts truth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nostalgia |
|---|---|
| Source | Unverified source: Reginald at the Carlton (Hector Hugh Munro, 1903)
Evidence: The line appears in Saki’s (H. H. Munro’s) short piece “Reginald at the Carlton.” The earliest publication I can verify is in the Westminster Gazette on 24 March 1903 (as listed in The Annotated Saki’s first-publication table). The same wording (often with the following sentence about the middle-... Other candidates (1) The Mammoth Book of Great British Humour (Michael Powell, 2010) compilation95.0% ... The young have aspirations that never come to pass , the old have reminiscences of what never happened . Hector H... |
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