c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If greed was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, the surely rationality was the driver. The theory states, in part, that competition in the marketplace requires that the buyer not only knows what is good for him but also what is good. If the seller produces nothing of value, as determined by a rational marketplace, then he loses out. It is the assumption of rationality among buyers that spurs competitors to become winners, and winners to keep on winning. Where it is assumed that a buyer is unable to make rational decisions, laws are passed to invalidate transactions, as, for example, those which prohibit children from making contracts...Of course, the practice of capitalism has its contradictions...But television commercials make hash of it...By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama--a mythology, if you will--of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claim are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.
— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. One may see this even in the case of idiots, with IQs below 20 and the extremest motor incompetence and bewilderment. Their uncouth movements may disappear in a moment with music and dancing—suddenly, with music, they know how to move. We see how the retarded, unable to perform fairly simple tasks involving perhaps four or five movements or procedures in sequence, can do these perfectly if they work to music—the sequence of movements they cannot hold as schemes being perfectly holdable as music, i.e. embedded in music. The same may be seen, very dramatically, in patients with severe frontal lobe damage and apraxia—an inability to do things, to retain the simplest motor sequences and programmes, even to walk, despite perfectly preserved intelligence in all other ways. This procedural defect, or motor idiocy, as one might call it, which completely defeats any ordinary system of rehabilitative instruction, vanishes at once if music is the instructor. All this, no doubt, is the rationale, or one of the rationales, of work songs.
— Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of DenmarkIs by a forged process of my deathRankly abused: but know, thou noble youth,The serpent that did sting thy father's lifeNow wears his crown.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Because you know that's all I needs, all I wants, is for you to try to run, to turn your back on me and run. I know you aint going to. Because all you got to beat is me. I got to beat old Carothers. Get your pistol.""No," the other said. "Go home. Get out of here. Tonight I will come to your house-----""After this?" Lucas said. "Me and you, in the same country, breathing the same air even? No matter what you could say, what you could even prove so I would have to believe it, after this? Get your pistol.
— William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses
They said her duck recipe and the Chinese music were so dramatic everything else sounded anemic.
— Frank McCourt, Teacher Man
I say haven’t we had enough of just tossing our children in jail? Make them do community service, I say!
— Jacquel Chrissy May, The Summer of Our Discontent
Listen to me, Ember. I couldn’t hurt you. I can’t.” Hayden settled his eyes on me. They were softer than I’d ever seen. “I love you— I’ve loved you since the first time I saw you.
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, Cursed
Don’t ever touch her again,” Hayden growled.Kurt looked up, eyes wide. “Are you threatening me— over her? I’m like your brother, Hayden!” “Not anymore.
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, Cursed
Em, you have a soul.”“How can you be so sure of that, Hayden? How many people die and come back?”“No one dies and comes back. You did because of your sister, and you have a gift. Maybe that played a role in your coming back, but you have a soul. You aren’t evil. There’s nothing you can say that will make me think that.” I looked up and our gazes locked. “And there’s nothing you can say to make me feel differently.” He lowered his eyes. Thick lashes fanned his cheeks. “I know you do, because I wouldn’t want to… to kiss you if you didn’t have a soul.” I froze.“You… you want to kiss me?
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, Cursed
Ember, he’s not going to—” I pushed off the car. “Please. Hayden, please don’t tell him. I’m all Olivia really has. Please.” My voice cracked, and I looked away, embarrassed. “She’s all I have.” Hayden made a soft noise deep in his throat. Then he clasped my elbows and pulled me right up against him. His arms carefully snaked around my waist, trapping me in a hug. It could have been the bunny. Hell, it could’ve been the last two years that suddenly made me want to stay in Hayden’s embrace. Surely— surely not the way his heat thawed the ice encasing my entire body. Or how hard his chest felt under the sweater… or how perfectly I fit against him. And he was a chivalrous type of guy. Right? He wanted to help me control my gift, as ridiculous as that sounded. Comfort— he offered comfort, and I needed to remember that. His arms around my waist made it hard, really hard to keep that in mind, though. “Okay.” Hayden’s breath stirred the hair around my ear. “Even though I think I should tell him, I won’t. But I will figure out who did this.
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, Cursed
Kat and I talked about Jacob in our own private code."Are you baking cookies yet?" she said. That was standard for : have you fucked?"Oh yeah. We've made a couple dozen by now.""What kind?" In other words, was Jacob any good."Chocolate-chip," I said. "And he not only likes to bake them, he likes to eat them, too.""Congratulations.
— Tiffanie DeBartolo, God-Shaped Hole
A young girl needs to spread her wings, but a young woman needs roots.
— Sydney Logan, Lessons Learned
But more importantly, know I love you more than I can say with simple words. Poets have attempted for centuries to find the perfect combination, and I don’t imagine I shall have more luck than they.
— Lissa Bryan, Ghostwriter
If you stand at the window where I stood, if you read the books that I read, if we can be with each other even just like that...then lets, count that as us being together. I'll miss you alot. I love you. I love you...
— T.O.P
LARRY--(with increasing bitter intensity, more as if he were fighting with himself than with Hickey) I'm afraid to live, am I?--and even more afraid to die! So I sit here, with my pride drowned on the bottom of a bottle, keeping drunk so I won't see myself shaking in my britches with fright, or hear myself whining and praying: Beloved Christ, let me live a little longer at any price! If it's only for a few days more, or a few hours even, have mercy, Almighty God, and let me still clutch greedily to my yellow heart this sweet treasure, this jewel beyond price, the dirty, stinking bit of withered old flesh which is my beautiful little life! (He laughs with a sneering, vindictive self-loathing, staring inward at himself with contempt and hatred. Then abruptly he makes Hickey again the antagonist.) You think you'll make me admit that to myself?
— Eugene O'Neill, The Iceman Cometh
Whom the gods love dies young
— Menander, Menander: The Plays and Fragments
God knows of love
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
[bookcover:Lessons Learned|13578440] Another shot, and for some reason, I’m the only one who can’t move. Who can’t scream. Who can’t do anything but watch as the young man’s body slumps over his tray. Finally, I find my voice and scream his name.
— Sydney Logan, Lessons Learned
The accent was warm and soft and undeniably Northern. When I turned around, I was staring into a pair of beautiful crystal-blue eyes. “Wow,” I whispered. I scanned the paint swatches, wondering if such a shade of blue would look good on the exterior of my house. “Mr. Johnson said you might need help selecting paint.” “It’s impossible,” I muttered. “I just wanted to buy some blue paint. Why is this so complicated?” The handsome man stepped closer to my side. “It isn’t, really. Just pick what you like.” I like crystal-blue. Luckily, I didn’t say those words aloud.
— Sydney Logan, Lessons Learned
And we all know how ladies get minks . . .”Popsy and Sandra chorused the answer together. “The same way minks get minks!
— Suzy Duffy, Wellesley Wives
You fellows are amazing,' the sweaty cook roared over the stoves. 'Everything happens to you only. Each time you come here, you have a new adventure story to entertain us
— Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance
Had I ever truly been free? Though I wasn’t shipped off to different countries did that make me any less of a prisoner?
— Kay Harding
So, what's the story?""No story. Just a nightmare.”“Meaning?”“Meaning, heavy compression lines in his cartilage, severe bruising on his kidneys, liver and lower intestines. Fracture marks on his collar bone, tibia, radius, humerus, scapular, femur and every single one of his ribs have been broken. Don't even get me started on the concussive damage to his skull and brain tissue. Twenty-three percent of this boys body is scared for life. And yet, every organ is functioning normally and his neurological activity is above average. He's eighteen years old and he weights about two bills but remove the scar tissue and he'd weigh about a buck-ten. All in all, I say he lived inside a hydraulic car press, went through the Napoleonic wars and was on board the Hindenburg when it went down in flame and yet he's okay...this boy just refuses to die.
— S.L.J. Shortt, Revelations
Come on up, boys-I'm dead.
— Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood
I'm trying to keep your safe!" Puck exploded, whirling on me. His eyes feverish, and I shrank back. "This isn't a game, Meghan! The shit is about to hit the fan, and you're right in the middle of it without knowing enough to duck!
— Julie Kagawa, The Iron Daughter
I mean, he was something that happened to me, you know? But before he was this minor figure in the drama of my life he was - you know, the central figure in the drama of his own life.
— John Green, Paper Towns
It's said that there's three sides to a story: yours, mine, and the truth. Check out God in Wingtip Shoes and The Prison Plumb Line to explore all three.
— Yvonne J. Medley
We know that those things to which we have an emotional connection stick with us better than those for which we have none. Dramatization is a way to get your intellectual ideas across to your audience emotionally.
— Brian McDonald
Life and death; there is no bridge between the two; they are stuck to each other! Death is only a step away from us, no more, only one step!
— Mehmet Murat ildan, William Shakespeare
A bird without wings and a man without art are both condemned to wander in low places
—  they can never soar up to those unrivalled heights.
Laws are man-made! They can be faulty, they can be childish, they can be ridiculous, they can be silly and they can even be utterly devilish! Anything man made is open to all the possibilities except perfection!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
We live in a crowded and stifling world, my dear sir; just to be able to walk, we have to push and shove others willy nilly!
— Mehmet Murat ildan, William Shakespeare
Ignorant voters of the democracies are always a great threat to the progression of humanity, simply because they give their votes to the people who look like themselves!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Enter the streets that you have never been to for the sake of the concealed beauties and the hidden truths!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
I think this man is a bit crazy, but aren’t we all a little crazy anyway?
— Mehmet Murat ildan, William Shakespeare
A big city is a big ocean
—  the one who doesn’t know how to swim finds himself at its bottom!
What we call debt is a hump on our backs; it is an awkward load that crushes one; and loads are carried only by stupid animals, by camels, mules, and donkeys; the back of an intelligent person is flat!
— Mehmet Murat ildan, William Shakespeare
How can you get giants out of a dwarf, my good chap? Can a thrush lay eagle’s egg? Can a dolphin give birth to a whale?
— Mehmet Murat ildan, William Shakespeare
What you do when nobody is there is your true you!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
For God must have more important universal matters to attend to than keeping himself busy with us, people! God is not interested in local matters!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
When chasing a hare, you must have more than one greyhounds about you; when one of them has failed, my dear neighbour, you call to the next ‘Get it!
— Mehmet Murat ildan, William Shakespeare
Between birth and death, neighbour, there is no business that is not risky; drinking water in a sitting position included! . . The gist of the matter is to do everything with fine tuning as an acrobat does when walking a tight rope, like a carpenter measuring everything meticulously!
— Mehmet Murat ildan, William Shakespeare
We should extinguish not candles, but torches, my good neighbour; we should fell not shrubs but trees: we should kill one giant instead of ten dwarfs!.. When there is an ostentatious cock crowing all over the place, what is the use of killing one insignificant chick? In a war you have to kill the king first; thus you can put an end to the battle more quickly!
— Mehmet Murat ildan, William Shakespeare
Like a butcher without a knife, a knight without a sword, and a farrier without a hammer, you cannot have a town without rules; if there were a town like that, a great big anarchy would reign there, just as in the realm of animals!
— Mehmet Murat ildan, William Shakespeare
If the quality of the people got better as they aged, how good that would be, don’t you think so? Then we would put all the swindlers, crooks, usurers, robbers, hucksters, and gamblers we could find into a barrel and wait for some years, until their characters could leave an exquisite taste on all palates.
— Mehmet Murat ildan, William Shakespeare
In the middle of the North Pole, anything hot gives the feeling like touching the hand of the God!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
An empty street sucks your fullness
—  a full street fills your emptiness!
Find a place forgotten and make it feel that it is remembered! Find someone forgotten and make him feel that he is remembered!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
No war has ever won in the history, because people died in every single war! Where there are deaths, there is no victory!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Help is not in the sky, help is within you, in your mind; help is your reason! Turn your face to your reason not to the sky!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
There are only two options for a ship: Either to sail to the sea and fight with the waves or rot in a port! The same is valid for the man!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Wise man is a wing; stupid man is a hole! You meet a wise man, you rise, you meet a stupid man, and you fall!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The nicest thing about creating ideas is that even when you finish your travelling, they continue their journey!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Science says that there are many more universes apart from ours. In that case, even when we think universally, we still think locally!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
If you are not afraid of rising, you will see that wings start growing in your body!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Due to many cosmic and worldly reasons, we will surely lose our planet one day! Till that dark day comes, let us give our profound affection to our beloved earth!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
When something bad happens, this often opens the ways for some good things to happen!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Help your brother; and as regards helping, everyone is your brother!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Make walks in the nights to benefit from the education of silence!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
If you live at the same time as great contemporaries, you become a flower getting rain live.
— Mehmet Murat ildan
By just looking at the dark side of life, you cannot make it bright!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
In life, there are many hills and valleys to pass and you cannot avoid them! The most important thing you need is to know this: You must pass them!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
When the sky is clear, when the sea is calm and the full moon is rising, whatever you are doing, leave it; go to the seaside; sit and watch it! You will then reach the land where there is no thinking; the land of pure wisdom!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
When a good change is flowing towards you, don’t stand like the river stones before it!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
When the sleep appears like a ghost, all the reality disappears!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
In the middle of tranquillity, think about the people inside the storms! In your happy times, remember the unhappy!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
If a man is not aware of the existence of the moon, what can the moon do for him except continue sending its lights upon him?
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Wise man is a good Sherpa
—  he takes you to the highest places!
A man who gets up very early creates a new day within the same day!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
If a man gives you a harsh winter, give him back something unexpected: The warm spring!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Those who found nothing on the plains will find nothing on the summits of mountains!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Walk aimlessly in the streets
—  this is a good meditation! Walk aimlessly in the forests
If a fish feels sad when a fisherman’s boat is sinking, and that fish owns a priceless treasure: The compassion! Have compassion, even for your enemies!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.
— Robert Frost
And the beauty of a woman, with passing years only grows!
— Audrey Hepburn
When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun—that "life" is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays—whenever. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, 'Well then, exactly what was it I was having—that interlude—the scrambly madness—all that time I had before?
— Douglas Coupland, Life After God
Keeping up the appearance of having all your marbles is hard work, but important.
— Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants
You don't stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing.
— George Bernard Shaw
I want to grow old without facelifts... I want to have the courage to be loyal to the face I've made. Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you'd never complete your life, would you? You'd never wholly know you.
— Marilyn Monroe
The curse of mortality. You spend the first portion of your life learning, growing stronger, more capable. And then, through no fault of your own, your body begins to fail. You regress. Strong limbs become feeble, keen senses grow dull, hardy constitutions deteriorate. Beauty withers. Organs quit. You remember yourself in your prime, and wonder where that person went. As your wisdom and experience are peaking, your traitorous body becomes a prison.
— Brandon Mull, Fablehaven
Wisdom comes with winters
— Oscar Wilde
I'm not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naive and romantic and idealistic - the part of you that you treasure most - to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact?
— Kenneth Cain, Emergency Sex: And Other Desperate Measures
I grow old … I grow old …
— I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
To all, I would say how mistaken they are when they think that they stop falling in love when they grow old, without knowing that they grow old when they stop falling in love.
— Gabriel García Márquez
Never tease an old dog
—  he might have one bite left.
I don't see why there should be a point where everyone decides you're too old. I'm not too old, and until I decide I'm too old I'll never be too fucking old.
— Lemmy Kilmister
It is lovely to meet an old person whose face is deeply lined, a face that has been deeply inhabited, to look in the eyes and find light there.
— John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you'll grow out of it.
— Doris Day
Maybe it's true that life begins at fifty. But everything else starts to wear out, fall out, or spread out.
— Phyllis Diller
Janey accuses me of chasing jailbait. She bursts into angry tears, asking if it's because she's getting older. It's true. She's aging more noticeably every day—while I am standing still. I prefer the stillness here. I am tired of Earth. These people. I am tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives.
— Alan Moore, Watchmen
Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.
— May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
Books aren’t eggs, you know. Simply because a book has aged a bit doesn’t mean it’s gone bad.” There was now an edge to Monsieur Perdu’s voice too. “What is wrong with old? Age isn’t a disease. We all grow old, even books. But are you, is anyone, worth less, or less important, because they’ve been around for longer?
— Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop
For after all we make our faces as we go along...
— May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.
— May Sarton, The Poet and the Donkey: A Novel
I am thinking about the way that life can be so slippery; the way that a twelve-year-old girl looking into the mirror to count freckles reaches out toward herself and that reflection has turned into that of a woman on her wedding day, righting her veil. And how, when that bride blinks, she reopens her eyes to see a frazzled young mother trying to get lipstick on straight for the parent/teacher conference that starts in three minutes. And how after that young woman bends down to retrieve the wild-haired doll her daughter has left on the bathroom floor, she rises up to a forty-seven-year-old, looking into the mirror to count age spots.
— Elizabeth Berg, What We Keep
But if we are truly happy inside, then age brings with it a maturity, a depth, and a power that only magnifies our radiance.
— David Deida, Intimate Communion
Today I am 65 years old. I still look good. I appreciate and enjoy my age. A lot of people resist transition and therefore never allow themselves to enjoy who they are. Embrace the change, no matter what it is; once you do, you can learn about the new world you're in and take advantage of it. You still bring to bear all your prior experience, but you are riding on another level. It's completely liberating.
— Nikki Giovanni
She is leaving him, not all at once, which would be painful enough, but in a wrenching succession of separations. One moment she is here, and then she is gone again, and each journey takes her a little farther from his reach. He cannot follow her, and he wonders where she goes when she leaves.
— Debra Dean, The Madonnas of Leningrad
OctoberO love, turn from the changing sea and gaze,Down these grey slopes, upon the year grown old,A-dying 'mid the autumn-scented hazeThat hangeth o'er the hollow in the wold,Where the wind-bitten ancient elms infoldGrey church, long barn, orchard, and red-roofed stead,Wrought in dead days for men a long while dead.Come down, O love; may not our hands still meet,Since still we live today, forgetting June,Forgetting May, deeming October sweet? - - Oh, hearken! hearken! through the afternoonThe grey tower sings a strange old tinkling tune!Sweet, sweet, and sad, the toiling year's last breath,To satiate of life, to strive with death.And we too -will it not be soft and kind,That rest from life, from patience, and from pain,That rest from bliss we know not when we find,That rest from love which ne'er the end can gain?- Hark! how the tune swells, that erewhile did wane!Look up, love! -Ah! cling close, and never move!How can I have enough of life and love?
— William Morris
You remember having friends who used to lampoon the world so effortlessly, crouching at the verge of every joke and waiting to pounce on it, and you remember how they changed as they grew older and the joy of questioning everything slowly became transformed into the pain of questioning everything, like a star consuming its own core.
— Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer
I'm growing fonder of my staff; I'm growing dimmer in my eyes; I'm growing fainter in my laugh; I'm growing deeper in my sighs; I'm growing careless of my dress; I'm growing frugal of my gold; I'm growing wise; I'm growing--yes,-- I'm growing old.
— John Godfrey Saxe
My friends scoffed at my anxiety and said dumb things like, 'Fifty is the new forty!' Which just made me realize that there are a whole lot of other people who suck at math as bad as I do. No. Fifty is fifty.
— Celia Rivenbark, You Can't Drink All Day If You Don't Start in the Morning
Instead, he sat in the parlor of his family's Fifth Avenue mansion, growing older by the minute just like everybody else.
— Anna Godbersen, Rumors
Old is always fifteen years from now.
— Bill Cosby
Just because you’re grown up and then some doesn’t mean settling into the doldrums of predictability. Surprise people. Surprise yourself. (281)
— Victoria Moran, Younger by the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body and Revitalize Your Spirit
I think she is going to find you too old... Yes that was it, the moment she said it I knew it was true, and the revelation caused me no surprise, it was like the echo of a dull, not unexpected shock. The age difference was the last taboo, the final limit, all the stronger for the fact that it remained the last and had replaced all the others. In the modern world you could be a swinger, bi, trans, zoo into S&M, but it was forbidden to be old.
— Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island
•	Judge less–or at least later.•	Give new ideas and images a chance.•	Understand that everyone has his own truth or her own.•	Remember: you are not married to any belief, opinion, or ideology.•	Expect to discover something delicious every day. (260)
— Victoria Moran, Younger by the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body and Revitalize Your Spirit
Sometimes I want to clean up my desk and go out and say, “Respect me; I’m a respectable grown-up!" and other times I just want to jump into a paper bag and shake and bake myself to death.
— Wendy Wasserstein
Too-lateness, I realized, has nothing to do with age. Too-lateness is potentially every moment. Or not, depending on the person and the moment. Perhaps there even comes a time when it's no longer too late for anything. Perhaps, even, most times are too early for most things, and most of life has to go by before it's time for almost anything and too late for almost nothing. Nothing to lose, the present moment to gain, the integration with long-delayed Now.
— Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary
Sometimes the monotony of bingo and sing alongs, ancient dusty people parked in the hallway in wheelchairs makes me long for death, particularly when -- remember that I'm one of the ancient dusty people, filed away like some worthless chotski. 
— Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants
I am persuaded that feminism is not at the root of political correctness. The actual source is much nastier and dares not speak its name, which is simply hatred for old people. The question of domination between men and women is relatively secondary—important but still secondary—compared to what I tried to capture in this novel, which is that we are now trapped in a world of kids. Old kids. The disappearance of patrimonial transmission means that an old guy today is just a useless ruin. The thing we value most of all is youth, which means that life automatically becomes depressing, because life consists, on the whole, of getting old.
— Michel Houellebecq
The older I grow, the more I listen to people who don't talk much.
— Germain G. Glidden
Before forty, you think that exhaustion is something like a long-lasting hangover. But at forty you learn all about it. Even your passions exhaust you.
— Kevin Barry
I should like to ask you: -- Does your childhood seem far off? Do the days when you sat at your mother's knee, seem days of very long ago?" Responding to his softened manner, Mr. Lorry answered: "Twenty years back, yes; at this time of my life, no. For, as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of the kind smoothings and preparings of the way. My heart is touched now, by many remembrances that had long fallen asleep, of my pretty young mother (and I so old!), and by many associations of the days when what we call the World was not so real with me, and my faults were not confirmed with me.
— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
One of the many troubles of growing older is that it gets progressively harder to find a famous historical figure who hadn't yet amounted to anything by the time he was your age.
— Sebastian Horsley
The key to successful aging is to pay as little attention to it as possible.
— Judith Regan
When Mama starts to move across a room, people pay attention. You can never be sure she's not going to grab you by the top of the head to steady herself. And she's pretty free with that walking stick, too.
— Bailey White, Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living
I Didn't Ask to Be a Senior Citizen (I Was Drafted)
— Doug Jensen, Looking in the Rear View Mirror
A twenty-three-year-long study in Ohio determined that people who saw growing older as something positive lived a whopping seven and a half years longer than those who didn’t. (356)
— Victoria Moran, Younger by the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body and Revitalize Your Spirit
I'm getting old, thought Eileen Calder. Old and worn out and cynical. And being cynical is a lot worse than being old or worn out.
— Charles Sheffield, Brother to Dragons
It's finished. Everything went past, without me.
— Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
90/93-year-old Jacob wonders as he gazes at his aged reflection, 'When did I stop being me?
— Sara Gruen
When you're a young man like yourself, life is full of wonders. Everything new. Everything an adventure. But as the years roll on, things become ordinary. Colors lose their vibrance. Stars lose their glitter. You become less in awe of the world. It loses its magic.I don't see this as a painful thing. I think it's a mercy. I believe it's all just so it makes it easier to let the whole thing go when it's our time to pass on. But when you've lived as long as I have, the weight of the years and the tarnished luster of the world can break you down. And it's hard to be alive and be so broken.
— Eric Powell
It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
It has been my face. It's got older still, or course, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It's scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn't collapsed, as some with fine feature have done. It's kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste.
— Marguerite Duras, The Lover
But I knew it was pure masturbation, because down in my gut I wanted nothing more than a clean bed and a bright room and something solid to call my own at least until I got tired of it. There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detatched.
— Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary
The problem with aging is not that it's one damn thing after another—it's every damn thing, all at once, all the time.
— John Scalzi, Old Man's War
Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.
— John Banville, The Sea
That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.
— Michael   Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
I'm not opposed to aging - even though society is kinder on men than women when it comes to getting old. How can I look at aging as the enemy? It happens whether I like it or not and no one is set apart from growing old; it comes to us all. Youth passes from everyone, so why deny it? I'm proud of my age. I'm proud that I've survived this planet for as long as I have, and should I end up withered, wrinkled and with a lifetime of great wisdom, I'll trade the few years of youth for the sophistication of a great mind...for however long it lasts.
— Donna Lynn Hope
There comes a time in every Salome's life when she should no longer be dropping the last veil.
— Harvey Fierstein, La Cage Aux Folles
Over the last few years, my comfort level with how I look has improved. My age has helped. You get used to yourself and accept yourself.
— Lynn Redgrave
They had painted a lady leaning her arms on the sill of the window. This lady was waiting for a husband. Her flesh was slack and she was some forty-five years old. Perhaps she had been waiting since she was fifteen. A rose and mauve lady that had not yet gathered her flesh and her beauty into dark clothes, and still waited, like a rose stripped of its petals, with her faded colors and her artificial smile, bitter as a grimace.
— Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanui
It is coincidence, I decide, and I am getting old and batty, thinking the universe revolves around me.
— Katherine Dunn, Geek Love
It paid barely a living wage, but he stayed with it—gradually and in the end gratefully arriving at the point in life when you understand there are no great changes ahead.
— Ann Packer
I need to stop saying LMAO because that is precisely what's happening; I wish I could rewind time by two decades, immortalize my derriere in wax, and then kiss it goodbye.
— Donna Lynn Hope
I have to start loving what comes next and stop hating I won't be a part of it.
— Linda  Robinson, Chantepleure
A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. Another question: why do some people remain open and elastic into extreme old age, whereas others become rigid and unproductive before they're fifty?
— Aldous Huxley, Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews
The older I get, the better I was.
— Van Dyke Parks
[O]ver the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying--in the supermarket, these old ladies won't get out of my way--but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.
— Donald Hall
One of the many problems with aging is that you begin to think of yourself as a slob because your birthday suit can never be cleaned or pressed no matter how spotted or wrinkled it gets
— Bob     Smith
For youth, sexual love is whim; for the aged, luxury. 
— Bill Gaede, Why God Doesn't Exist
... we absolutely mustn't forget it. We mustn't forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don't want to think about (so it is to retirement homes that they entrust the care of accompanying their parents to the threshold, with no fuss or bother). And where's the joy in these final hours they ought to be making the most of? They're spent in boredom and bitterness, endlessly revisiting memories. We mustn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you're twenty and the next day you're eighty.
— Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
More and more, he heard his spine playing stick games through his skin, singing old dusty words, the words of all his years.
— Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
...our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood.
— Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
They say that your powers of memory are at their peak when you're 26, and it's all downhill after that.
— Lisa Jewell, One-Hit Wonder
I find no reason to think that aging is genetically determined. Genes do not provide information for the development of the individual beyond growth and the reproductive process in which the genes are transmitted to the next generation. Once past the reproductive stage, the individual has served the purposes of preservation of the species, and then he is on his own. The wrinkled human face is the victim of gravity and of cumulative errors in the reproduction of cells. Since aging is not programed, but is a badly improvised interference with youthful beauty, we have improvised an operation to counteract its effects. Aging is a form of misinformation. If we get the facts right, you will be able to read it in our faces. ("Motherhood")
— William S. Wilson, Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka
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
The woman who undergoes this operation can sense the morphogenetic field at work in her face. She can feel the lines of force as they guide the embryonic cells into the patterns they must form. Why should a woman let her life be determined by tired collagens or by a shortage of zinc which weakens her electromagnetic field, the matrix of life? The goal of life is living. Life is a field of opportunity, guiding the individual forward along paths created by the meshed forces or objective possibilities as they interweave with a person's own potentialities. And this philosophy of life is now bodied forth in the faces of beautiful women. ("Motherhood
— William S. Wilson
this one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood" "Normal Time" in New California Writing
— Michael Chabon
The problem, Paulinus, is not that we have a short life, but that we waste time. Life is long and there is enough of it for satisfying personal accomplishments if we use our hours well. But when time is squandered in the pursuit of pleasure or in vain idleness, when it is spent with no real purpose, the finality of death fast approaches and it is only then, when we are forced to, that we, at last, take a good hard look at how we have spent our life- just as we become aware that it is ending. Thus the time we are given is not brief, but we make it so. We do not lack time; on the contrary, there is so much of it that we waste an awful lot
— Seneca the elder
I think: by the time I'm old, nobody will be able to die any more.
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
But now I remember, of course, I'm never going to be old.
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
How did I go from being the maiden in a fairy tale to a wretched old maids so quickly? It happened almost without my realizing it...
— Christina Baker Kline, A Piece of the World
Hi,’ Jake said. ‘I met you earlier today, but you were a lot younger then.’ ‘I was a lot younger ten minutes ago.
— Stephen King, The Waste Lands
But I suppose it's part of being old to feel that way, half in one world and half in the other, all of it mixed together in my mind. No one's left who even knows my name. Folks call me Auntie, on account of I never could have children of my own, and I guess that suits me fine. Sometime it's like I've got so many people inside of me I'm never alone at all. And when I go, I'll be taking them with me.
— Justin Cronin, A Passagem - Volume I
Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.""Yes! It's like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won't ever be back.
— Andrew Sean Greer, Less
Where have the years gone, Ruby Rose? Sometimes I have to stop and think about how old I am. When I wake up in the morning, before I move this tired old body or look in the blasted mirror, I swear I'm still a young man. It just feels like yesterday. I don't know how it's gone so fast.
— Lea Davey, Silkworm Secrets
This is exactly the sort of thing that makes traveling wonderful for me, the reason I defied everyone. The two of us together like we have always been, not saying anything, not doing anything special, just on vacation. I know nothing lasts, but even when you know that things are just about over, sometimes you can run back and take a little bit more and no one will notice.
— Michael Zadoorian, The Leisure Seeker
Here we are, alone again. It's all so slow, so heavy, so sad. . . I'll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They've talked. They haven't said much. They've gone away. They've grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world.
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan
I remember a new heaviness in my body, but maybe that's the work of time and my looking back.
— Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir
I tan the easy way. I just wait for my liver spots to connect.
— Martha Bolton
She went out socially with him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays with us to the end.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Charlotte views her younger selves with a certain detachment. They are herself, but other incarnations, innocents going about half-forgotten business.
— Penelope Lively, How It All Began
We are no longer awkward younglings. Our enemies may be fearsome, but so are we. It is time we remind them of that.
— Christopher Paolini, Inheritance
To what nadir of paltriness , pettiness, and squalor a man can sink! How could he change so! But is this really true to life? ---It is, it's all true to life, for anything can happen to a man. Your ardent youth of today would recoil in horror if you were to show him his own portrait as an old man. Once you set off on life's journey, once you take your leave of those gentle years of youth and enter the harsh, embittering years of manhood, remember to keep with you all your human emotions, do not leave them by the wayside, for you will not pick them up again! Grim and terrible is the old age which awaits us, and nothing does it give in return! The grave itself is more merciful than old age, for at least on the gravestone you will find written the words: 'Here a man lies buried!' but in the cold, unfeeling features of inhuman old age you can read nothing.
— Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
Know this: even if you’re like us and still doddering around above ground, someone out there from your past is probably pretty sure that you’re dead by now. (p.125 )
— Michael Zadoorian, The Leisure Seeker
After a while, just staying alive becomes a full-time job. No wonder we need a vacation.
— Michael Zadoorian, The Leisure Seeker
They had waited for too long, and the result was this hiatus, and the reflection that time and patience may bring poor rewards, that time itself, if not confronted at the appropriate juncture, can play sly tricks, and more significantly, that those who do not act are not infrequently acted upon.
— Anita Brookner, A Private View
Aging is scary but fascinating, and great talent morphs in strange and often enlightening ways.
— Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run
Why is it amazing that I don’t act my age? Why should I act my age? Or more to the point, how is someone my age supposed to act? Old age is part fact, part state of mind, part luck, and wholly something best left for other people to ponder, not you or me. Why waste your time? I don’t.
— Dick Van Dyke, Keep Moving: And Other Truths About Living Well Longer
Old age robs you of every last illusion, even the belief in your own goodness.
— Jill Ciment, Heroic Measures
She resolved, at forty-some, that since she herself must die, she would do it as gracefully as possible, as free as possible from vomitings, moans, the ignominy of basins, bedsores, and enemas, not to mention the intenser ignominious dependence of weak knees and various torments of the troubled mind.
— M.F.K. Fisher, Sister Age
..why sit on the sidelines of life at any age?
— Dick Van Dyke, Keep Moving: And Other Truths About Living Well Longer