Word: frail
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Laurence Olivier stood in the wings of Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall waiting to receive the acclaim of 2,500 New Yorkers who had gathered two weeks ago to celebrate his 53 years of achievement in the movies. Olivier is a frail 75 now, and his body has played grudging host to enough illnesses to wipe out the entire Royal Shakespeare Company. So backstagers looked on with pain but not surprise as he momentarily lost his balance and slumped against the doorway. Then the crowd rose, and with it the applause. Olivier took his cue and went...
Remarkably few tears are shed in Sister Age, but those that fall linger in the memory. In Moment of Wisdom, a tired, frail old man, as "dry as a ditch weed," comes calling at the homestead outside Whittier with Bibles for sale. The twelve-year-old girl who answers the door refuses a Bible but offers a glass of water. As the old man walks away, the child is astonished to find her eyes filling up. She thinks: "If I could have given him something of mine . . . If I had next week's allowance and had not spent this...
...very person debunks the myths about aging," says Jack Ossofsky of the National Council on the Aging. "Concern about the elderly, the poor and the frail has characterized his entire career...
...literature cannot be easy to acquire. A teacher of books must learn to live before becoming good at his work, since literature demands that one know a great deal about life-not to have settled Life's problems, but at least to recognize and accept the wide, frail world in which those problems have a home. The achievement of such perspective involves a penalty too. He who has gained that generous view inevitably moderates the books in his charge, domesticates their subversiveness, puts out the fire. As moderator he becomes a caricature, as teachers of English in fiction...
...disturbing effect on the public. From Baby Doe's birth on Jan. 10, he was seen and discussed as a piece of inferior merchandise, an imperfect creature come into the world as damaged goods. The mother disavowed motherhood; the father said "Not mine." Yet there was the child, frail but present. Deposited on the doorstep, he had to belong to someone...