Quotes About Age

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next. RALPH WALDO EMERSON

He had the sourdough smell of age. His chest sagged into shrivelled teats; his lovemaking was unreliable, yet she found it strangely wholesome in a way that defied sense.

when you're young your opponent is the future; but when you're not young, your opponent's the past and everything you've done in it and the problem of getting away from it.

We are always the same age inside. —GERTRUDE STEIN

No matter what your age or your life path… it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.

When I make this point in teaching, I am met by instant, defensive hostility: "But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano/act/paint/write a decent play?" Yes … the same age you will be if you don't.

When I make this point in teaching, I am met by instant, defensive hostility: "But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano/act/paint/write a decent play?" Yes . . . the same age you will be if you don't. So let's start.

QUESTION: Do you know how old I'll be by the time I learn to play the piano? ANSWER: The same age you will be if you don't.

You're far too young for a governess,' mused Lizzie as she stirred cream into her tea. 'And the strain of behaving would probably kill you,' muttered Frank.

Is despair wrong? Isn't it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses indurate. Both go mouldy.

Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.

Strange how, when you are young, you owe no duty to the future; but when you are old, you owe a duty to the past. To the one thing you can't change.

Parece-me que pode ser esta uma das diferenças entre a juventude e a idade: quando somos jovens, inventamos futuros diferentes para nós; quando somos velhos, inventamos passados diferentes para os outros.

Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?

Why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?

The time-deniers say: forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on. I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.

forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on.

in this country shadings of class resist time longer than differentials in age

Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young, erode. We end up belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself. [p. 66]

Who was it said that the longer we live, the less we understand?

I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments.

The self-doubt of the young is nothing compared to the self-doubt of the old. And this, perhaps, was their final triumph over him. Instead of killing him, they had allowed him to live, and by allowing him to live, they had killed him. This was the final, unanswerable irony to his life: that by allowing him to live, they had killed him.

If you're an old geezer in his rocker on the porch, you don't play basketball with the kids. Old geezers don't jump. You sit and make a virtue of what you have. And what you do is this: you make the kids think that anyone, anyone can jump, but it takes a wise old buzzard to know how to sit there and rock.

strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.