Middle Age Quotes

“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 and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Četrdeset mi je godina, ružno doba: čovjek je još mlad da bi imao želja a već star da ih ostvaruje. Tada se u svakome gase nemiri, da bi postao jak navikom i stečenom sigurnošću u nemoći što dolazi. A ja tek činim što je trebalo učiniti davno, u bujnom cvjetanju tijela, kad su svi bezbrojni putevi dobri, a sve zablude korisne koliko i istine. Šteta što nemam deset godina više pa bi me starost čuvala od pobuna, ili deset godina manje pa bi mi bilo svejedno. Jer trideset godina je mladost, to sad mislim, kad sam se nepovratno udaljio od nje, mladost koja se ničega ne boji, pa ni sebe.”
― Meša Selimović, Death and the Dervish

“Middle age is when you're sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you.”
― Ogden Nash

“The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you'll grow out of it.
”
― Doris Day

“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 took some of you with him.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“Seven Ages: first puking and mewling
Then very pissed-off with your schooling
Then fucks, and then fights
Next judging chaps' rights
Then sitting in slippers: then drooling.”
― Robert Conquest

“Awakened at midnight
by the sound of the water jar
cracking from the ice”
― Basho

“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 is finished growing, he still has twenty years of youth. After that, he has twenty years of middle age. Then, unless misfortune strikes, nature gives him twenty thoughtful years of old age. Why do you call that quickly?' And with that, the tilling man wiped his sweaty brow and continued tilling; and the dejected Isaac continued wandering.
'Stupid fool!' Isaac muttered quietly to himself as soon as he was far enough away not to be heard.”
― Roman Payne, Hope and Despair

“The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.”
― Núria Añó

“The first indication of menopause is a broken thermostat. It's either that or your weight. In any case, if you don't do something, you could be dead by August.

God, middle age is an unending insult.”
― Dorothea Benton Frank, Sullivan's Island

“There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws that are constant. It has no rules.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“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, positions, relationships that fit those of their earlier lives, so that everything harmonizes quite well on the surface: but their lives are no longer ruled by a strong thought, and instead, in its place, comes the intention of finding a rhyme.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“ I'd Better Not--

A man leaned over to a man in a pub
And 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 at the end of a bag of crisps
And they tip the bag up
And it’s as though they’re drinking crisps.
That’s how the years go.”
― Ian McMillan, I Found This Shirt: Poems and Prose from the Centre

“I did a research assignment on life in the Middle Ages only last year. I found the era fascinating, all that chivalry and court romance. But I never pictured anything as poor as this village. This is the pits. There's no romance here, definitely no chivary. And it stinks--of sweat and smoke and sewage.”
― Marianne Curley, Old Magic

“You know what it's like, finding eight middle-aged guys having tantric sex with ostriches?”
― Warren Ellis, Crooked Little Vein

“No matter how you tell yourself
It's what we all go through
Those lines are pretty hard to take
When they're staring back at you
Oh, scared you'll run out of time
When did the choices get so hard
With so much more at stake
Life gets mighty precious
When there's less of it to waste”
― Bonnie Raitt, Nick of Time

“It was easy, terribly easy, to become with time a middle-aged spinster with a sharp tongue. She would have to guard against this.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Sunday Philosophy Club

“The sandwich generation, they call us. I’d say it’s more like a kebab—lots of chunks skewered together. And we’re the thin wiry bit, holding it all together.”
― Cate Ray, Good Husbands

“I remember before I finally fell asleep feeling like there wasn't all that much to say about my life. I'd had several satisfying relationships, they hadn't amounted to much. I'd gotten better at my work and been rewarded for it, but I sometimes felt like life had run out of surprises for me. I did what I did and got the results I expected. I kept up my practice and it paid my way. My wheels made an agreeable noise when they spun.”
― John Darnielle, Devil House

“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 little consequence; but the years since his first entry into the Metropolis were now piled one on top of another, his youth was behind him, his chances of longevity, spite of the way he had striven to injure his constitution, quite as good as ever. He had come to that period of existence, to that narrow strip of tableland, whence the ascent of youth and the descent of age are equally discernible - when, simply because he has lived for so many years, it strikes a man as possible he may have to live for just as many more, with the ability for hard work gone, with the boon companions scattered, with the capacity for enjoying convivial meetings a mere memory, with small means perhaps, with no bright hopes, with the pomp and the circumstance and the fairy carriages, and the glamour which youth flings over earthly objects, faded away like the pageant of yesterday, while the dreary ceremony of living has to be gone through today and tomorrow and the morrow after, as though the gay cavalcade and the martial music, and the glittering helmets and the prancing steeds were still accompanying the wayfarer to his journey's end.
Ah! my friends, there comes a moment when we must all leave the coach with its four bright bays, its pleasant outside freight, its cheery company, its guard who blows the horn so merrily through villages and along lonely country roads.
Long before we reach that final stage, where the black business claims us for its own speecial property, we have to bid goodbye to all easy, thoughtless journeying and betake ourselves, with what zest we may, to traversing the common of reality. There is no royal road across it that ever I heard of. From the king on his throne to the laborer who vaguely imagines what manner of being a king is, we have all to tramp across that desert at one period of our lives, at all events; and that period is usually when, as I have said, a man starts to find the hopes, and the strength, and the buoyancy of youth left behind, while years and years of life lie stretching out before him.
The coach he has travelled by drops him here. There is no appeal, there is no help; therefore, let him take off his hat and wish the new passengers good speed without either envy or repining.
Behld, he has had his turn, and let whosoever will, mount on the box-seat of life again, and tip the coachman and handle the ribbons - he shall take that journey no more, no more for ever. ("The Banshee's Warning")”
― Charlotte Riddell

“Yeniçeri olmak ayrıcalıktı. Onlardan başka bir iş yapması beklenmiyordu. Her ay maaş alıyor, her mevsim yeni kıyafetler ediniyorlardı. Bunlara ek olarak her savaşta bahşiş ve giderleri içinde ek harçlık alıyorlardı. İşleri savaştı. Savaşla zenginleşiyorlardı.”
― Deniz Canan, Larende'nin Varisleri / Larende'nin Düşüşü 1. Kısım

“Here's the deal: structural fatigue
eventually causes breakdowns. I am 50
and chaos. My whole body groans.”
― Michael Kleber-Diggs, Worldly Things

“The greatest incidence of breast cancer in american women appears within the ages of 40 to 55. These are the very years when women are portrayed in the popular media as fading and desexualized figures. Contrary to the media picture, I find myself as a woman of insight ascending into my highest powers, my greatest psychic strengths, and my fullest satisfactions. I am freer of the constraints and fears and indecisions of my younger years, and survival throughout these years has taught me how to value my own beauty, and how to look closely into the beauty of others. It has also taught me to value the lessons of survival, as well as my own perceptions. I feel more deeply, value those feelings more, and can put those feelings together with what I know in order to fashion a vision of and pathway toward true change.”
― Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

“He does not want to reflect on whether they’re confusing love with loyalty at this point, or that the children who have been the glue are devolving into its antidote, or, and this is too cynical, he knows, that the two of them are held together by a deeply rooted laziness, an abhorrence to having to dismantle their cluttered, complicated household and divvy up all the useless and embarrassing suburban crap they’ve accumulated lo these many years.”
― Rebecca Hardiman, Good Eggs

“I don't know why weighing 140 pounds means I'm middle-aged, but it does. It is a magic number. A matronly number. More important than wishing young people would get their hair out of their eyes and more important than thinking Green Day sounds banal and that MTV is too sexist. If I could lose ten pounds, then maybe I could put off middle age for a while. But the thought of dieting, of thinking of food all the time, seems like too much to contemplate.”
― Maureen F. McHugh

“Past fifty, we learn with surprise and a sense
of suicidal absolution
that what we intended and failed
could never have happened—
and must be done better.”
― Robert Lowell

“But at night, when Nori sat at the kitchen table to eat the dinner that had gotten cold because he'd come home late once again from another company gathering, she waited for something to come, some insight, some feeling. As she watched him with his eyes locked to his rice bowl, she wanted to shake him, because in all her life she had never expected this kind of loneliness. Around that time, someone had handed her a cult pamphlet as she came out of the grocery store. On the flimsy cover, a middle-aged housewife was pictured as half skeleton and half flesh. On the bottom of the page it said, "Every day you are closer to your death. You are half-dead already. Where does your identity come from?" She tossed the pamphlet away almost as soon as she got it, but the picture stayed with her for a long while.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“Not a mid-life crisis
But a mid life, "Who am I?”
― Lowrey E. Gray, 42

“He smiles and his wavy haired, bright eyed head scoops me in but quickly lands on Mimi. It lingers a bit long, his chest frozen as if the breath's been knocked out; he already loves her. Mothers know these things. It's the kind of love that springs from awe, attraction, intellectual curiosity, and finding a woman mom approves of... the girl next door with exciting fangs. I wonder if their offspring will have fangs.”
― Penelope Przekop, Centerpieces

“He smiles and his wavy haired, bright eyed head scoops me in but quickly lands on Mimi. It lingers a bit long, his chest frozen as if the breath's been knocked out; he already loves her. Mothers know these things. It's the kind of love that springs from awe, attraction, intellectual curiosity, and finding a woman mom approves of... the girl next door with exciting fangs. I wonder if their offspring will have fangs. - Holly Carter”
― Penelope Przekop, Centerpieces