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

Walk your own path and be yourself

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

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...

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...

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...

Youth, I didn’t want that illness. Luckily I recovered just in time for middle age. Now I can focus on more important things, like love, a relationship, and my upcoming existential crisis.

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...

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...

I’d Better Not–A man leaned over to a man in a pubAnd said in a voice‘I used to be thirty seven but now I’m fifty one’.And that’s how the years go.In handfuls.Like somebody is almost...

Jules told them, “I used to be a camper here myself,” but she was confronted with a squeal of feedback, and even when she repeated her words, she saw that it didn’t matter to them...

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...

The first door in the hall leads to youth, the second door leads to middle age, and the third door leads to the bathroom. But knock first, because I think grandpa’s in there.

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...

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,...

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

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

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...

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

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...

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

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...

Middle school is for being like everyone else; middle age is for being like yourself. (430)

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...

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.

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

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...

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

You could have heard a bee fluff

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