Quotes about middle-age

Erica Jong - Fear of Flying

Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you're going to die anyway.

John Davidson -

You’re young, and like anything new. It’s change you want. I’m middle-aged, and there’s nothing staler to me than change. Constant comfort and little luxuries as regular as the clock are fresher than change.

Lynda I Fisher -

As young adults, we were wearing the shoes of the new future. Our generation would soon be the ones to determine the political climate of our country, the constitution of a family, and the morality of man. What an awesome burden we carried.

Michel de Montaigne - The Complete Essays

The natural heat, say the good-fellows,first seats itself in the feet: that concerns infancy; thence it mounts into the middleregion, where it makes a long abode and produces, in my opinion, the sole true pleasures of human life; all other pleasures in comparison sleep; towards the end, like a vapor that still mounts upward, it arrives at the throat, where it makes its final residence, and concludes the progress.

Maria Semple - Today Will Be Different

As far as I’m concerned, the only thing sweeter than seeing a friend is that friend canceling on me.

Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so 'safe,' and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.

Roman Payne - Hope and Despair

I just wish moments weren’t so fleeting!' Isaac called to the man on the roof, 'They pass so quickly!' 'Fleeting?!' responded the tilling man, 'Moments? They pass quickly?! . . . Why, once a man is finished growing, he still has twenty years of youth. After that, he has twenty years of middle age. Then, unless misfortune strikes, nature gives him twenty thoughtful years of old age. Why do you call that quickly?' And with that, the tilling man wiped his sweaty brow and continued tilling; and the

Tom Perrotta - Mrs. Fletcher

Eve still marveled on a daily basis at the speed with which her own life had changed. A year ago, she'd been lost and flailing, and now she was found. She wanted to call it a miracle, but it was simpler than that, and a lot more ordinary; she'd met a kind and decent man who loved her.

Friedrich Nietzsche - All Too Human

Just as in the second part of a verse bad poets seek a thought to fit their rhyme, so in the second half of their lives people tend to become more anxious about finding actions, positions, relationships that fit those of their earlier lives, so that everything harmonizes quite well on the surface: but their lives are no longer ruled by a strong thought, and instead, in its place, comes the intention of finding a rhyme.

Bill Bryson - The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.

Peter Nichols - The Rocks

The likelihood of meeting anyone who wouldn't make him feel even lonelier seemed increasingly remote. Life was a dwindling process now, not a building proposition. He couldn't imagine being with someone new, opening up, feeling appreciated and understood, without having to explain his dubious non sequiturs and increasingly arcane or redundant frame of reference.

Doris Day -

The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you'll grow out of it.

Charlotte Riddell -

In good truth he had started in London with some vague idea that as his life in it would not be of long continuance, the pace at which he elected to travel would be of little consequence; but the years since his first entry into the Metropolis were now piled one on top of another, his youth was behind him, his chances of longevity, spite of the way he had striven to injure his constitution, quite as good as ever. He had come to that period of existence, to that narrow strip of tableland, whence

Meg Wolitzer - The Interestings

Though Jonah felt transfixed inside his own childhood, no one else saw him as a child. He was already over the hump of middle age, heading rapidly toward those year that no one like to speak of. The best parts had already passed for people Jonah's age. By now you were meant to have become what you would finally be, and to gracefully and unobtrusively stay in that state for the rest of your life.

Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending

When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself.

William Feather -

Setting a good example for children takes all the fun out of middle age.

Jenny Offill - Dept. of Speculation

Here is what happens in middle age: Some friends and acquaintances who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad.

J.B. Priestley -

She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.

Jed Diamond - Stress Relief for Men: How to Use the Revolutionary Tools of Energy Healing to Live Well

Middle age is such a low point for well-being it's at the bottom of a U-shaped curve that shows greater happiness among the younger and older people.

Pietros Maneos -

Isn't it enough to be middle-aged and impeccably beautiful? Why must one be economically useful?

Joanne Nussbaum - Learn and Grow...

Walk your own path and be yourself

S.W. Lothian - The Golden Scarab

You could have heard a bee fluff

Mehmet Murat ildan -

When you reach your middle age, you see a train far away and shortly after you watch that train passing rapidly in front of you and finally the train disappears in the horizon like a streak of lightning! And that train, my dear friend, is your life!

Mervyn Peake - Gormenghast

To say that the frozen silence contracted itself into a yet higher globe of ice were to under-rate the exquisite tension and to shroud it in words. The atmosphere had become a physical sensation. As when, before a masterpiece, the acid throat contracts, and words are millstones, so when the supernaturally outlandish happens and a masterpiece is launched through the medium of human gesture, then all human volition is withered at the source and the heart of action stops beating. Such a moment was

Bashō Matsuo -

Awakened at midnightby the sound of the water jarcracking from the ice

Robert Conquest -

Seven Ages: first puking and mewlingThen very pissed-off with your schoolingThen fucks, and then fightsNext judging chaps' rightsThen sitting in slippers: then drooling.

Elizabeth Strout - Amy and Isabelle

Through the trees there was a motion, a person walking on the road. Isabelle watched as the girl - it was Amy - moving slowly and with her head down, came up the gravel driveway. The sight of her pained Isabelle. It pained her terribly to see her, but why?Because she looked unhappy, her shoulders slumped like that, her neck thrust forward, walking slowly, just about dragging her feet. This was Isabelle's daughter; this was Isabelle's fault. She hadn't done it right, being a mother, and this yout

Mehmet Murat ildan -

Do something very praiseworthy in your youth or in your middle age so that you can spend all your time talking about it in your old age!

Tim Kreider - We Learn Nothing

Squandering time is a luxury of profligate youth, when the years are to us as dollars are to billionaires. Doing the same thing in middle age just makes you nervous, not with vague puritan guilt but the more urgent worry that you're running out of time, a deadline you can feel in your cells.

Bill Vaughn -

Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. Middle age is when you’re forced to.

Susan Choi - My Education

My youth was the most stubborn, peremptory part of myself. In my most relaxed moments, it governed my being. It pricked up its ears at the banter of eighteen-year-olds on the street. It frankly examined their bodies. It did not know its place: that my youth governed me with such ease didn't mean I was young. It meant I was divided as if housing a stowaway soul, rife with itches and yens which demanded a stern vigilance. I didn't live thoughtlessly in my flesh anymore. My body had not, in its fle

Barbara Leaming -

The word genius was whispered into my ear the first things I ever Heard while I was still mewling in my crib, laughs Orson (Welles), so it never occured to me that I wasn't until middle age

Stephen McCauley - Insignificant Others

We all have a central fiction about ourselves, a favored delusion about talent or untapped potential. Most of us hang on to it as if it were a lifesaver, even though the obsession with it is often the very thing that drags us down and prevents us from fulfilling some lesser but more obtainable goal.

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