Age Quotes

“By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“In war, our elders may give the orders...but it is the young who have to fight.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“But merely being tradition does not make something worthy, Kadash. We can't just assume that because something is old it is right.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

“Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old...

- Wang Lung”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth

“People tend to find books when they are ready for them.”
― Neil Gaiman

“When humans were young, they were pushed around in strollers. When they were old, they were pushed around in wheelchairs. In between, they were just pushed around.”
― Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

“You don't stop laughing because you grow old. You grow old because you stop laughing.”
― Michael Pritchard

“we are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay..., from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction, and finally from our relations with other men... This last source is perhaps more painful to use than any other. (p77)”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

“For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Nemo enim est tam senex qui se annum non putet posse vivere.

(No one is so old as to think that he cannot live one more year.)”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Old Age, On Friendship & On Divination

“I think people would live a bit longer if they didn't know how old they were. Age puts restrictions on things.”
― Karl Pilkington

“It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.”
― Chuck Palahniuk , Fight Club

“While many find the new clothes of the emperor magnificent, some dare to say out loud, he is simply naked. If the clear sighted are constrained by the credulous and when the “followers” are browbeating the "knowers", the cat is among the pigeons and the age of obscuration is under way. Obviously "something wicked this way comes…" ("His master's voice" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Thank goodness for the first snow, it was a reminder--no matter how old you became and how much you'd seen, things could still be new if you were willing to believe they still mattered.”
― Candace Bushnell, Lipstick Jungle

“For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up,’ there is always an edge of disbelief—how could they ever be other than what they are?”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“At fifteen I set my heart upon learning.
At thirty, I had planted my feet firm upon the ground.
At forty, I no longer suffered from perplexities.
At fifty, I knew what were the biddings of Heaven.
At sixty, I heard them with docile ear.
At seventy, I could follow the dictates of my own heart; for what I desired no longer overstepped the boundaries of right.”
― Confucius

“Twenty-seven.”
His brow puckered, and he blinked over at her. “Twenty-seven hundred years, right?”
If he were speaking to Taliyah, yes. “No. Just twenty-seven plain, ordinary years.”
“You don’t mean human years, do you?”
“No. I mean dog years,” she said dryly, then pressed her lips together. Where was the filter that was usually poised over her mouth? Strider didn’t seem to mind, though. Rather, he seemed stupefied. Would Sabin have had the same reaction were he awake? “What’s so hard to believe about my age?” As the question echoed between them, a thought occurred to her and she blanched. “Do I look ancient?”
“No, no. Of course not. But you’re immortal. Powerful.”
― Gena Showalter, The Darkest Whisper

“Of all the Hathaway sisters,” Cam said equably, “Beatrix is the one most suited to choose her own husband. I trust her judgment.”
Beatrix gave him a brilliant smile. “Thank you, Cam.”
“What are you thinking?” Leo demanded of his brother-in-law. “You can’t trust Beatrix’s judgment.”
“Why not?”
“She’s too young,” Leo said.
“I’m twenty-three,” Beatrix protested. “In dog years I’d be dead.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Love in the Afternoon

“And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly, with desire. My old man's brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else's gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of helpless, selfless love, to behold itself, illuminated, in the golden light of another's eyes.”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was

“What's my age again?”
― Blink-182

“England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“Just because a person is young doesn’t mean that being loyal to someone isn’t important. And it still hurts if someone isn’t loyal to you.”
― C.C. Hunter, Awake at Dawn

“Dad, will they ever come back?"

"No. And yes." Dad tucked away his harmonica. "No not them. But yes, other people like them. Not in a carnival. God knows what shape they'll come in next. But sunrise, noon, or at the latest, sunset tomorrow they'll show. They're on the road."

"Oh, no," said Will.

"Oh, yes, said Dad. "We got to watch out the rest of our lives. The fight's just begun."

They moved around the carousel slowly.

"What will they look like? How will we know them?"

"Why," said Dad, quietly, "maybe they're already here."

Both boys looked around swiftly.

But there was only the meadow, the machine, and themselves.

Will looked at Jim, at his father, and then down at his own body and hands. He glanced up at Dad.

Dad nodded, once, gravely, and then nodded at the carousel, and stepped up on it, and touched a brass pole.

Will stepped up beside him. Jim stepped up beside Will.

Jim stroked a horse's mane. Will patted a horse's shoulders.

The great machine softly tilted in the tides of night.

Just three times around, ahead, thought Will. Hey.

Just four times around, ahead, thought Jim. Boy.

Just ten times around, back, thought Charles Halloway. Lord.

Each read the thoughts in the other's eyes.

How easy, thought Will.

Just this once, thought Jim.

But then, thought Charles Halloway, once you start, you'd always come back. One more ride and one more ride. And, after awhile, you'd offer rides to friends, and more friends until finally...

The thought hit them all in the same quiet moment.

...finally you wind up owner of the carousel, keeper of the freaks...

proprietor for some small part of eternity of the traveling dark carnival shows....

Maybe, said their eyes, they're already here.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“You couldn't be old and still be wrong about as many things as she'd been wrong about, and it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Men are most virile and attractive between the ages of 35 and 55. Under 35 a man has too much to learn, and I don't have time to teach him.”
― Hedy Lamarr

“I covet truth; beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson's Prose and Poetry

“You start out happy that you have no hips or boobs. All of a sudden you get them, and it feels sloppy. Then just when you start liking them, they start drooping.”
― Cindy Crawford