Forty Quotes - Page 16

• When your life has been spent in one war after another for forty-five years, you have to be pretty handy to survive.

  David Gemmell

  War, Years, Handy

  "Legend, Pt 1: Against the Horde". Book by David Gemmell, Ch. 7, 1984.

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• How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting!

  May Sarton

  Passion, Love Is, Views

  May Sarton (2014). “Journal of a Solitude”, p.63, Open Road Media

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• I may be forty, but every morning when I get up, I feel like a twenty-year-old. Unfortunately, there's never one around.

  Robert Orben

  Morning, Years, Twenties

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• Now, to tell my story--if not as it ought to be told, at least as I can tell it,--I must go back sixteen years, to the days when Whitbury boasted of forty coaches per diem, instead of one railway, and set forth how in its southern suburb, there stood two pleasant house side by side, with their gardens sloping down to the Whit, and parted from each other only by the high brick fruit-wall, through which there used to be a door of communication; for the two occupiers were fast friends.

  Charles Kingsley

  Wall, Book, Communication

  Charles Kingsley (1860). “Two years ago ... Third edition”, p.18

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• After forty years of marriage we still stood with broken swords in our hands.

  Enid Bagnold

  Marriage, Hands, Years

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• [Hospitalized and pressing the nurse's button before dictating letters to her secretary:] This should assure us of at least forty-five minutes of undisturbed privacy.

  Dorothy Parker

  Nurse, Buttons, Letters

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• At twenty, a man feels awfully aged and blasé; at thirty, almost senile; at forty, "not so old"; and at fifty, positively skittish.

  Helen Rowland

  Men, Twenties, Fifty

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• Near yonder copse, where once the garden smil'd,
  And still where many a garden flower grows wild,
  There, where a few torn shrubs the place disclose,
  The village preacher's modest mansion rose.
  A man he was to all the country dear,
  And passing rich with forty pounds a year;
  Remote from town's he ran his godly race,
  Nor e'er had chang'd nor wish'd to change his place;
  Unskilful he to fawn, or seek for power,
  By doctrines fashion'd to the varying hour;
  Far other aims his heart had learn'd to prize.
  More bent to raise the wretched than to rise.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Country, Fashion, Flower

  Oliver Goldsmith (1856). “The Miscellaneous Works: Poems. Miscellaneous pieces. Dramas. Criticism relating to poetry and the belles-lettres”, p.69

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• Forty is ... an age at which people have histories and options. At thirty, they had perhaps less history. At fifty, perhaps fewer options.

  Ellen Goodman

  People, Age, Fifty

  Ellen Goodman (1981). “At Large”

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• My generation is the first in my species to have put fitness next to godliness on the scale of things. Keeping in shape has become the imperative of our middle age. The heaviest burden of guilt we carry into our forties is flab. Our sense of failure is measured by the grade on a stress test.

  Ellen Goodman

  Fitness, Stress, Guilt

  Ellen Goodman (1990). “Making Sense”, Penguin Group USA

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• Now that I am in my forties, she [my mother] tells me I'm beautiful; now that I am in my forties, she sends me presents and we have the long, personal and even remarkably honest phone calls I always wanted so intensely I forbade myself to imagine them. How strange. Perhaps Shaw was correct and if we lived to be several hundred years old, we would finally work it all out. I am deeply grateful. With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.

  Marge Piercy

  Beautiful, Mother, Grateful

  Marge Piercy (2013). “Braided Lives: A Novel”, p.418, PM Press

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• As we reach midlife in the middle thirties or early forties, we are not prepared for the idea that time can run out on us, or for the startling truth that if we don't hurry to pursue our own definition of a meaningful existence, life can become a repetition of trivial maintenance duties.

  Gail Sheehy

  Meaningful, Running, Ideas

  Gail Sheehy (1977). “Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life”, Bantam

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• My forties are the best time I have ever gone through.

  Elizabeth Taylor

  Gone, Best Times

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• certain very old people reach an age where every funeral becomes some sort of insane confirmation of strength, rather than of vulnerability, as it is when we are in our thirties or forties and our friends die.

  Erica Jong

  People, Funeral, Insane

  Erica Jong (2013). “Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice”, p.136, Open Road Media

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• In civilized places idleness, once the prerequisite for abstract thought, poetry, religion, philosophy, and falling in love, has become a character flaw. In America we've managed to stamp it out almost completely, and few people under forty can remember a single moment of it, even in earliest childhood. The phrase 'spare time' has vanished from the land.

  Barbara Holland

  Falling In Love, Philosophy, Single Mom

  Barbara Holland (1999). “Wasn't the Grass Greener?: A Curmudgeon's Fond Memories”, Harcourt

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• Parents and children cannot be to each other, as husbands with wives and wives with husbands. Nature has separated them by an almost impassable barrier of time; the mind and the heart are in quite a different state at fifteen and forty.

  Sara Coleridge

  Husband, Children, Heart

  Sara Coleridge Coleridge (1873). “Memoir and Letters”, p.65

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• Certainly the effort to remain unchanged, young, when the body gives so impressive a signal of change as the menopause, is gallant; but it is a stupid, self-sacrificial gallantry, better befitting a boy of twenty than a woman of forty-five or fifty. Let the athletes die young and laurel-crowned. Let the soldiers earn the Purple Hearts. Let women die old, white-crowned, with human hearts.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Stupid, Athlete, Heart

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.5, Grove Press

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• Moss grows where nothing else can grow. It grows on bricks. It grows on tree bark and roofing slate. It grows in the Arctic Circle and in the balmiest tropics; it also grows on the fur of sloths, on the backs of snails, on decaying human bones. ... It is a resurrection engine. A single clump of mosses can lie dormant and dry for forty years at a stretch, and then vault back again into life with a mere soaking of water.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Lying, Years, Circles

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2013). “The Signature of All Things”, p.169, A&C Black

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• At its very core the story of Easter has nothing to do with angelic announcements or empty tombs. It has nothing to do with time periods, whether three days, forty days, or fifty days. It has nothing to do with resuscitated bodies that appear and disappear or that finally exit this world in a heavenly ascension.

  John Shelby Spong

  Easter, Religion, Three

  John Shelby Spong (2009). “Resurrection: Myth or Reality?”, p.21, Harper Collins

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• Up to forty a woman has only forty springs in her heart. After that age she has only forty winters.

  Arsene Houssaye

  Spring, Heart, Winter

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• Women of forty always fancy they have found the Fountain of Youth, and that they remain young in the midst of the ruins of their day.

  Arsene Houssaye

  Women, Fancy, Ruins

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• Forty-seven is nothing at all, nor is any age unless you're a cheese.

  Billie Burke

  Age, Cheese, Seven

  Billie Burke, Cameron Shipp (2016). “With Powder on My Nose”, p.160, Pickle Partners Publishing

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• We must shed the illusion that we can deliberately "create the future of mankind." This is the final conclusion of the forty years which I have now devoted to the study of these problems

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Years, Finals, Study

  "Law, Legislation and Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Ch. 18 : The Containment of Power and the Dethronement of Politics, 1973.

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• I know some good old gals in their 50s and 60s. All these women tell me, 'Forty to 50. Those are the hot times.' So far, you couldn't prove it by me. But hell, I'm only two years in.

  Lauren Hutton

  Years, Two, Hot

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• At twenty, men love woman; at thirty, a woman; and at forty, women.

  Myrtle Reed

  Men, Twenties, Thirty

  Myrtle Reed (2012). “The Spinster Book”, p.38, tredition

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