Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old... - Wang Lung
In war, our elders may give the orders...but it is the young who have to fight.
With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.
I was tired of seeing the Graces always depicted as beautiful young things. I think wisdom comes with age and life and pain. And knowing what matters.
By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself.
Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.
With all due respect, if you’re forty-three, then I’m a fetus.
But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.
You must find a boy your own age. Someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered. Someone whose fingers are a poem.
How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, Stol'n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!
I am ashes where once I was fire...
Things aren't what they used to be' is the rallying cry of small minds. When men say things used to be better, they invariably mean they were better for them, because they were young, and had all their hopes intact. The world is bound to look a darker place as you slide into the grave.
I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now. From the back pages
Old age ain't no place for sissies.
As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.
Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.
The older you get, the more you understand how your conscience works. The biggest and only critic lives in your perception of people's perception of you rather than people's perception of you.
It's paradoxical that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn't appeal to anyone.
By the time you read this, you'll be older than you remember.
And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.