Middle Aged Quotes - Page 6

• I tell you old and young are better than tired middle-aged, nothing is so dead dead-tired, dead every way as middle-aged.

  Gertrude Stein

  Tired, Age, Way

  Gertrude Stein (1946). “Brewsie and Willie”

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• Young people...have more compassion and tenderness toward the elderly than most middle-aged adults. Nothing--not avarice, not pride, not scrupulousness, not impulsiveness--so disillusions a youth about her parents as the seemingly inhumane way they treat her grandparents.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Pride, Compassion, Elderly

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• Middle-aged life is merry, and I love to lead it.

  Ogden Nash

  Life Is, Middle, Merry

  Ogden Nash, “Peekabo, I Almost See You”

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• One could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there?

  Virginia Woolf

  Eye, Wrinkles, Ideas

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• It is difficult for a statesman who still has a political future to reveal everything that he knows: and in a profession in which one is a baby at 50 and middle-aged at seventy-five, it is natural that anyone who has not actually been disgraced should feel that he still has a future.

  George Orwell

  Baby, Political, Natural

  George Orwell (1968). “The collected essays, journalism, and letters of George Orwell”

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• [Among the Arapeh... both father and mother are held responsible for child care by the entire community...] If one comments upon a middle-aged man as good-looking, the people answer: 'Good-looking? Ye-e-e-s? But you should have seen him before he bore all those children'.

  Margaret Mead

  Mother, Children, Father

  "Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies". Book by Margaret Mead, p. 55, 1935.

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• Middle-aged adolescents are a libel on the real thing.

  Mason Cooley

  Real, Age, Middle

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• Fate isn't some middle-aged man with a squint who won't recognize you if you change your clothes.

  Meg Rosoff

  Fate, Men, Clothes

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• Don't seek approval. This may be the toughest suggestion for you to follow -- and the most important. Whether you'te a teenager seeking approval from your peers, a middle-aged parent seeking the approval of your kids, or a man or woman seeking the approval of a partner, it all amounts to the same thing. You're giving your personal power away every time you seek validation from someone else for who you are.

  T. J. MacGregor

  Teenager, Kids, Men

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• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion. Fifty years on, I don't associate the book with anything that ever happened to me, save for one wordless encounter at London airport when a worn-out, middle-aged military kind of man in a stained raincoat slammed a handful of mixed foreign change on to the bar and in gritty Irish accents ordered himself as much Scotch as it would buy. In that moment, Alec Leamas was born. Or so my memory, not always a reliable informant, tells me.

  John le Carre

  Memories, Military, Book

  "John le Carré: 'I was a secret even to myself'". www.theguardian.com. April 12, 2013.

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• We should, if possible, prove a teacher to posterity, instead of being the pupil of by-gone generations. More shall come after us than have gone before; the world is not yet middle-aged.

  Herman Melville

  Teacher, Generations, Gone

  Herman Melville (1850). “White-jacket: or, The world in a man-of-war”, p.151

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• There are three things to beware of through life: when a man is young, let him beware of his appetites; when he is middle-aged, of his passions; and when old, of covetousness, especially.

  Confucius

  Life, Passion, Men

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• Congress is a middle-aged, middle-class, white male power structure ... no wonder it's been so totally unresponsive to the needs of this country.

  Bella Abzug

  Country, White, Class

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• By the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young; but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression.

  Edmund Burke

  Moving, Fall, Race

  Edmund Burke (1999). “The Portable Edmund Burke”, p.405, Penguin

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• The young person isn't certain that love can be real; the middle-aged man is only discovering that it is; and the older person seems so sure of it. I was interested in the way that many of us go through the whole of our lives staying with someone just out of complacency, because leaving isn't easy.

  Conor McPherson

  Real, Men, Leaving

  "So there's these three Irishmen". Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. February 4, 2001.

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• I'm not always in that good with middle-aged heterosexual men.

  Kathy Griffin

  Men, Middle

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• Life is about more than earning a living, and if you're not in the habit of thinking about it, you can end up middle-aged or even older and shocked to realize that your life seems empty.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Thinking, Earning, Realizing

  Source: www.neh.gov

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• Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old.

  John Ciardi

  Love, Relationship, Romance

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• A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

  Aldous Huxley

  Education, Children, Teaching

  Aldous Huxley, Robert S. Baker, James Sexton (2000). “Complete Essays: 1920-1925”, Ivan R Dee

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• If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women who have become old without ever having been middle aged: a little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs.

  Doris Lessing

  Dog, People, One Day

  Doris Lessing (1973). “The Grass is Singing”, p.46, Heinemann

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• And Grace calls out, 'You are not just a disillusioned old man who may die soon, a middle-aged woman stuck in a job and desperately wanting to get out, a young person feeling the fire in the belly begin to grow cold. You may be insecure, inadequate, mistaken or potbellied. Death, panic, depression, and disillusionment may be near you. But you are not just that. You are accepted.' Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery that you really are accepted.

  Brennan Manning

  Jobs, Insecure, Men

  Brennan Manning (2008). “The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out”, p.19, Multnomah

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• Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Every one is born a king, and most people die in exile.

  Oscar Wilde

  Time, Kings, People

  Oscar Wilde (2004). “The Best of Oscar Wilde: Selected Plays and Writings”, p.142, Penguin

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• I don't judge people by their bodies. Even when I was a young girl I liked men for their minds. Now that I'm middle-aged I see how right I was.

  Jane Bowles

  Girl, Men, People

  Jane Bowles (2014). “My Sister's Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles”, p.78, Macmillan

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• All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.

  Doris Lessing

  Women, People, Focus

  "An Uncommon Scold". Book by Abby Adams, 1989.

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• I am a middle-aged opera queen in loafers that makes out I am a 16 year old death metal skater... It's all fake! My hair is fake, my body is fake and my teeth are kind of fake

  Rick Owens

  Queens, Hair, Years

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