c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Eight: the age of exploration, of ghosts and secret forays; the age at which a mystery lurks behind every curtain and every armoire opens into a magical world, which you may enter at any time, but who knows when you will return.
— Carmen Posadas, Little Indiscretions
Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese
— Luis Buñuel
You're seventeen now. You can do...absolutely nothing you couldn't already
— Abby McDonald, Getting Over Garrett Delaney
Want to forget that you’re growing older? Walk across green grass with bare feet.
— Toni Sorenson
He was one of those who are not born handsome, but develop charming features with age by continuously engaging their brains with intelligent thoughts.
— Pawan Mishra, Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy
She had short curls and her face had so many wrinkles it looked as if someone had been trying to draw her for a very long time and every line put in had made the face more like her.
— L.M. Boston, The Children of Green Knowe
As I have aged, I’ve been lucky never to reach old. Old is always at least five or ten years beyond my current calendar stage.
— Dan Groat, An Enigmatic Escape: A Trilogy
Growing gray hair is the glory of life.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
As long as your life is a succession of love stories, you can never grow old.
— James Marquess
A person gets built and stands for a few years and then nature’s demolition team comes in.
— Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants
How old are you, anyway?""How old are you?""Seventeen."I raise a brow."Almost. I'll be seventeen in two weeks. You?"Part of me doesn't want to tell her. She'll be horrified. But part of me wants to know what she will do when she knows the truth. "How old do you think I am?"She lifts a slender shoulder. "At first I thought maybe eighteen, but now I'm thinking at least nineteen. Maybe even twenty?""why's that?""You seem very ... experienced."I nod. "You're close. Today's my birthday. I'm thirteen.
— Darynda Jones, Brighter Than the Sun
[T]hat's the way of torturers of every age, to put the blame on the victim, especially when he strikes back.
— Orson Scott Card
The wisdom of age is bitter when those you have failed have gone.
— Conn Iggulden, Khan: Empire of Silver
As his boots walked towards the old station, he felt as though he were hallucinating. Scary apprehension increased the beat of his heart and the sweat upon his forehead was cold. The reality of where he stood created a sinking feeling inside of him.  An old man everyone called Uncle Tucker once owned this place. His sole existence behind the counter all of the time, day and night. He could have been a creature out of a fairy tale, with his long white beard and equally long white hair. Merlin. The overalls and the ball cap perched upon his head, along with the half-smoked cigar with an endless burning orb positioned in his mouth. It made him a fixture in time. He wondered if Tucker would still be alive. Tucker with his endless stories of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and flower children. A man that never left a country thousands of miles away where bicycles filled the capital. A man who never left those fields where killing occurred.
— Jaime Allison Parker, The Delta Highway
One endured with humble dignity the consequences of youthful folly.
— Glen Cook, The Black Company
When you enter heaven you shall find Him there bearing the dew of His youth; and through eternity the Lord Jesus shall still remain the perennial spring of joy, and life, and glory to His people.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Morning and Evening, Based on the English Standard Version
Multiplying my age by 2 in my head/I'm a grandfather. Or Dead.
— Fred Chappell, River: A Poem
If you are old enough to feel angst about how a holiday “feels,” you are very likely no longer in the target demographic.
— Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring
An old, tired man. That is what I am. What became of the old fire, drive, ambition? There were dreams once upon a time, dreams now all but forgotten. On sad days I dust them off and fondle them nostalgically, with a patronising wonder at the naivete of the youth who dreamed them.
— Glen Cook
The elderly become invisible sooner than we would hope.
— Nadia Hashimi, When the Moon is Low
She'd never been one to think in terms of years, anyway. A person was what they were, and many a man at forty was sixty in his ways and many another was twenty and would never grow past it.
— Louis L'Amour, Ride the Dark Trail
Whatever this is that I am, it is a little flesh and breath, and the ruling part. Throw away thy books; no longer distract thyself: it is not allowed; but as if thou wast now dying, despise the flesh; it is blood and bones and a network, a contexture of nerves, veins, and arteries. See the breath also, what kind of a thing it is, air, and not always the same, but every moment sent out and again sucked in. The third then is the ruling part: consider thus: Thou art an old man; no longer let this be a slave, no longer be pulled by the strings like a puppet to unsocial movements, no longer be either dissatisfied with thy present lot, or shrink from the future.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Always educate yourself regardless of how old you are.
— Eraldo Banovac
Life wears us down around the edges. The stress of life and its neces­sities cracks things. We learn to protect ourselves. We learn not to let so much of the world in, because some­times it’s all too much, and we don’t have the resilience we need to survive it. When we’re six, we make best friends easily. When we’re fifty, we don’t. That’s age and expe­rience for you.But books are different. We can let books in. We can wrap them up in our hearts. We can approach them as if we’re still young and open. Even so, it’s not as simple. Because we’re not as simple.(Source: State of the Writer, sort of, September 2015 - blog post)
— Michelle Sagara
HYMN OF THE DIVINE DANDELION I am born as the sun, But then turn into the moon, As my blonde hairs turn Grayish-white and fallTo the ground, Only to be buried again, Then to be born again, Into a thousand suns And a thousand Moons. Suzy Kassem
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
When asking about ones age the question asked is how old are you.I would hereby like to advocate rephrasing this as - how young are you?
— Amit Abraham
The signature of our eyes, in other words, the way we look never changes even at the age of hundred!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
...for she too is spending time in her life only in order to be alive.
— Erpenbeck Jennie Visitation
When you push your stroller past a group of elderly women, you'll see in the turning gladness of their bodies a glimpse of the children they had been, turning toward the tin music of the ice cream van.
— Beth Ann Fennelly
The young man, who does not know the future, sees life as a kind of epic adventure, an Odyssey through strange seas and unknown islands, where he will test and prove his powers, and thereby discover his immortality. The man of middle years, who has lived the future that he once dreamed, sees life as a tragedy; for he has learned that his power, however great, will not prevail against those forces of accident and nature to which he gives the names of gods, and has learned that he is mortal. But the man of age, if he plays his assigned role properly, must see life as a comedy. For his triumphs and his failures merge, and one is no more the occasion for pride or shame than the other; and he is neither the hero who proves himself against those forces, nor the protagonist who is destroyed by them. Like any poor, pitiable shell of an actor, he comes to see that he has played so many parts that there no longer is himself.
— John  Williams
All your convictions come back to mock you when you reach a certain age.
— Christopher Bollen, Orient
I sold my first short story to Pyramid Press, where it was chiseled onto fifteen slabs of granite, and for which I was paid nine goats.
— Frank Tuttle
Chronologically she is twelve but emotionally she is older, and intellectually older still.
— Dean Koontz, Odd Interlude: A Special Odd Thomas Adventure
One grey hair appeared on my headI plucked it out with my hand.It answered me: "You have prevailed against me alone -What will you do when my army comes after me?
— Yehuda HaLevi
I’ve always looked like this—in between. Is there ever an age when a person looks exactly like themselves?
— Christopher Bollen, Orient
it does not count a day if you do not learn something new from it ,its not nice to become old in years while your true age is only a few days
— alaa zabaneh
in our age there is no such thing as " keeping out of politics " all issues are political issues , and politics itself is a mass of lies , evasions , folly , hatred and .
— George Orwell
How can you possibly reconcile the great inequities of gender – coupled with the perversions of age and the randomness of everything?
— Kate Walbert, The Sunken Cathedral
Even in your twenties you know how old you are. I'm twenty-three, you say, or maybe twenty-seven. But then in your thirties something strange starts to happen. It's a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I'm – you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you're not. You're thirty-five. And then you're bothered, because you wonder if this is the beginning of the end. It is, of course, but it's decades before you admit it.
— Sara Gruen
It was the kind of building that remembered things, deep-down things, things that rode tears into the world, telling them back to anyone old enough or wise enough to know how to listen with their eyes.
— Charles M. Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones
Age may catch up with you, just never let it over take you.
— Benny Bellamacina, Philosophical Uplifting Quotes volume 2
People twenty-five and up just sat around waiting to die. That was what I'd thought.So while I was waiting to die, I looked at bras. The last thing on my mind was comfort. It seemed to be the last thing on Victoria's Secret's mind, too.
— Susan Richards, Chosen by a Horse
How is it possible for me to feel so young and so old at the same time?
— Nancy E. Turner
Unattached and aimless, these old men are always infatuated with little certainties and regularities such as those that ordered the life of Mr. Krupper as seen from outside. Habit is living. Anything unexpected reminds them of death.("Hard Candy")
— Tennessee Williams, Hard Candy
Overall, she seems to be doing well for her age, but she looks like one of those dried apple dolls and my nursing gut tells me she is one good sneeze away from a rapid response team.
— Annelise Ryan, Board Stiff
Age does not count. It’s what you know about football that matters.
— David Peace, The Damned Utd
Though I should have known better, I had to ask. "What is furniture disease?"She looked at me like I had the IQ of a grape. "It's when your chest falls into your drawers. Get ready for it, honey, because with that rack of yours, you'll be using them as knee pads before you know it.
— Annelise Ryan, Board Stiff
You look extremely young," said Miss Nightingale...."Age isn't really a matter of years, I find," returned Phemie. "I know people twice my age who will never be as old as I am now.
— Frances Murray, The Burning Lamp
The person contained hundreds of years, but they overlapped, as if the person experienced any number of times at once. I was just thinking, the person said in a silvery voice, I was just thinking that I am not very many years old, but that I am a century wide. I think that I have my literal age but am surrounded in a radius of years. I think that these years of days, this near century of years, is a gift from you. Thank you.
— Paul Harding
I am half child, half ancient.
— Björk
Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image. He still saw himself, in his mind's eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed ... Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went.
— Philip K. Dick, A Maze of Death
Never judge a woman by her age.
— A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar
Love has no age, race, wealth, ethnic bakground, gender, or appearence. Love is love and that's the way it's supposed to be.
— TheKatAttack
Then Treece realized a remarkable thing. He understood in a flash that everyone in the world was the same age -no one younger or older than anyone else. He could not understand it, but he knew it to be true. Was there something in the air of the world that made people appear to be old or middle-aged or young?
— P.K. Page
Being your age is hard enough without having to act it.
— P.K. Shaw
Never get old. It's a ridiculously uncomfortable process Ath Creator should be made to find a cure for.
— Janny Wurts, The Ships of Merior
Adventures are important things in our life, to forget about our aging.
— Nagendra Kumar Y
Now, how do the young prepare to meet the old? The same way the old prepare to meet the young: with a little condescension; with low expectation of the other’s rationality; with the knowledge that the other will find what they say hard to understand, that it will go beyond them (not so much over the head as between the legs); and with the feeling that they must arrive with something the other will like, something suitable.
— Zadie Smith, White Teeth
I am quite content to be in my thirties, and nothing affirms that more than being around people in their late teens and early twenties.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
I don't act my age, I act my personality.
— Khaya Dlanga
Age had nothing to do with how well my brain worked.
— Ann Aguirre, Outpost
I went closer this time and touched him. He let out a deafening shriek, as if something had pierced into his heart. I held his hand and sat there, admiring the intricate network of life on them. The creases and folds in his body were testament to the cruelty that he had been subjected to in this world. The watery eyes screamed of the pain, the agonising wait to leave this godforsaken place forever, that had given him nothing but pleadings for mercy.
— Ashay Abbhi
Everyone dies young.
— Marty Rubin
There is a very great difference between older and old, the former being desirable and the latter being inevitable.
— Michelle Franklin
And you? What brings you here? I shrugged my shoulders. No idea? Hm, you’re still young. Eighteen? I froze. Nineteen? Twenty? Incredible, so young. You have everything before you. No past. He sighed. Incredible, to have been so young once myself. Although what does that mean? There is only one age for anyone. I was and am, will always be fifty-eight. But you. Be careful what age you end up. It sticks to you. It seals you shut. The age you choose is like glue, it sets around you. This wisdom is not mine, you know. I got it from a book. A movie. I’m not sure. You notice things. It’s incredible. Your whole life you notice things.
— Milena Michiko Flašar, I Called Him Necktie
Courage has no age.
— Anne Fortier, The Lost Sisterhood
I might be old and ugly now, but you started that way, Jack.
— Regina Sirois, On Little Wings
Age does not mean wisdom, Do not follow the old man off the cliff.
— James Pedigo
If youth was sold in a bottle of hair dye, we would all get in line.
— Jan Rogers
Raven, holding Joshua's chin, asks him how old he is.Joshua, folding in the pinky and the thumb on his left hand, while leaning on Raven's legs, raises three middle fingers into the air."That's what I thought. You're three.
— Giorge Leedy, Uninhibited From Lust To Love
It happened to some people, that obsession with throwing their clothes off at an age when it would be best to keep them on.
— Philip Hensher, King of the Badgers
The wisdom of my 45 years has met and joined simplicity and it has drawn a long and merry smile:)
— J.S. Riley
Beauty for wisdom, lust for love, youth for happiness, anger for understanding and denial for acceptance are all things I gladly trade on my journey through life. Who say's getting old is a bad thing?
— J.S. Riley
I was born at a very early age. As I grew up, I got older... So far though, this is the oldest I've ever been.
— Rebecca Hurley
What they don't understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you're eleven, you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one.
— Sandra Cisneros
Age has taught me that what other people think of me is none of my business.
— Jane Tara, The Happy Endings Book Club
I was grown up long before the grown ups were the grown ups.
— Aporva Kala, Life... Love... Kumbh...
I mean, my age is just a number. So what if you were born in the era when they still used rotary phones and cassette tapes? I think it’s cute.
— T.S. Krupa, Safe & Sound
Nobody knows anything when they are in their midtwenties.
— Matthew Quick, The Good Luck of Right Now
You are only old once, but you can be immature forever.
— Anonymous
You can only be twice someone’s age once.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups
I do what he says and I close my eyes and open my mouth and the next thing I know he's got his twenty-eight-year-old tongue in my thirteen-year-old mouth and all I can think is that I don't think the hero is supposed to be doing this.
— Andrea Portes, Hick
Age does not matter in most relationships, but in marriage, it matters a lot. If you marry a younger you have to baby sit, and if you marry an older, you have to follow orders.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
...A mirror can trick you day by day into thinking you remain looking and existing in one way forever. But a photograph presents you with the truth: it freezes you eternally, existing as a reminder that you can never, ever go back to any one moment again- that you are always changing, hour by hour, cell by cell, in tiny fragments that build skyscrapers overnight.
— Kels Adeline Sapp
Beauty is not the flawless perfection of youth, but the fine lines, scars, and wisdom which only living can give you.
— Reyna Pryde, Unique: A New Breed
[A]lthough wisdom is built on life experience, the mere accumulation of years guarantees nothing.
— Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World
Age doesn’t protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
— Jeanne Moreau
Time slipped and slid around him, unanchored by any fact that could be verified. Perhaps it did not matter. 'Where does our story take place, and when?' asked Cocteau at the start of Orphée. 'It's the privilege of legends to be ageless. Comme il vous plaira. As you please.
— Ann Wroe, Orpheus: The Song of Life
And our ages never bothered her from the very beginning. I was married, but that didn’t matter, either. She seemed to consider things like age and family and income to be of the same a priori order as shoe size and vocal pitch and the shape of one’s fingernails. The sort of thing that thinking about won’t change one bit. And that much said, well, she had a point.
— Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes
Two or three years from now thirty won't look so senile.
— Warner Fabian, Flaming Youth
...real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here and sullen there, warm asymmetrical streaks on a rosewood cabinet from where a slant of sun had struck it while the other side was as dark as the day it was cut.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
As age changes with each moment, we become that little bit more of a distant memory to the person we are currently.
— Tammy-Louise Wilkins
He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.
— John  Williams, Stoner
Beirut is the Elizabeth Taylor of cities: insane, beautiful, falling apart, aging, and forever drama laden.She'll also marry any infatuated suitor who promises to make her life more comfortable, no matter how inappropriate he is.
— Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
I am old now, or at least, I am no longer young, and everything I see reminds me of something else I’ve seen, such that I see nothing for the first time. A bonny girl, her hair fiery red, reminds me only of another hundred such lasses, and their mothers, and what they were as they grew, and what they looked like when they died. It is the curse of age, that all things are reflections of other things.
— Neil Gaiman, The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains
If a woman tells you she's twenty and looks sixteen, she's twelve. If she tells you she's twenty-six and looks twenty-six, she's damn near forty.
— Chris Rock
She realizes she doesn't know as much as God but feels she knows as much as God knew when he was her age.
— Dorothy Parker
I will age for you, if it pleases you. I will match you, wrinkle for wrinkle, grey hair for grey hair, crease for crease, wrinkle for wrinkle. You will be so beautiful when you are old.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless
The sudden surge of hormones at teenage age will continue to play an important part in the life of young people
— Oche Otorkpa, The Unseen Terrorist
You aren't really old until nothing is fun enough to make you forget the weather.
— Robert Quillen
The panther that has stalked yousince you were a childis old now. No longer wild,and tired of guarding the treasureyou yourself left behind - blind and deaf, she will give it all to youif you just let her go.
— Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets in: Writing as a Spiritual Practice
But old fools is the biggest fools there is.
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
But at what age are you forgiven your trespasses?
— Rodney Ross, The Cool Part of His Pillow
One Life With Many Names, Childhood, Boyhood, Manhood And Old, Then? Then! All Unknown, Uncertain Destination....
— Muhammad Imran Hasan
The older I get the more I realize how simple life is and how complicated we make it...
— James A. Murphy
Age is a funny thing. So are appearances. Neither is relevant to what one knows, in my opinion.
— Darren T. Patrick, The Cloudstone Key
No mathematician should ever allow him to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game. … Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty. There have been men who have done great work later; … [but] I do not know of a single instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty. … A mathematician may still be competent enough at sixty, but it is useless to expect him to have original ideas.
— G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
The day you lose your sense of wonder is the day you grow old.
— Marty Rubin
I don't ever want to get old. Spare me that. Have you the power? No, even you don't have the power, alas.
— Julian Barnes, Talking It Over
Ultimately, what really matters is not just the experiences you have at a young age, but whether or not you are equipped-by your parents, by your genetics, by your education-to survive and deal with them.
— Jenna Jameson, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale
They also knew that there was a string of DNA at the end of each chromosome called a telomere, which shortened a tiny bit each time a cell divided, like time ticking off a clock. As normal cells go through life, their telomeres shorten with each division until they’re almost gone. Then they stop dividing and begin to die. This process correlates with the age of a person: the older we are, the shorter our telomeres, and the fewer times our cells have left to divide before they die. By the early nineties, a scientist at Yale had used HeLa to discover that human cancer cells contain an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds their telomeres. The presence of telomerase meant cells could keep regenerating their telomeres indefinitely. This explained the mechanics of HeLa’s immortality: telomerase constantly rewound the ticking clock at the end of Henrietta’s chromosomes so they never grew old and never died.
— Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
I have fallen behind time, and am too old to catch it again. Even the noise it makes a long way ahead confuses me.
— Chareles Dickens
His age was indeterminate. But in cynicism and general world weariness, which is a sort of carbon dating of the personality, he was about seven thousand years old.
— Terry Pratchett
We cannot know what time will do to us with its fine, indistinguishable layers upon layers, we cannot know what it might make of us. It advances stealthily, day by day and hour by hour and step by poisoned step, never drawing attention to its surreptitious labours, so respectful and considerate that it never once gives us a sudden prod or a nasty fright. Every morning, it turns up with its soothing, invariable face and tells us exactly the opposite of what is actually happening: that everything is fine and nothing has changed, that everything is just as it was yesterday--the balance of power--that nothing has been gained and nothing lost, that our face is the same, as is our hair and our shape, that the person who hated us continues to hate us and the person who loved us continues to love us.
— Javier Marías, Los enamoramientos
The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.
— George Bernard Shaw
It really doesn't bother me," she said. "I've always thought it stupid to try to hide your age, or to pretend to be younger than you are. Denying your age is like denying your life.
— Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Fencing Master
Old age is not just for grown up's
— Benny Bellamacina, Philosophical Uplifting Quotes and Poems
My parents are like younger, urchinlike brothers and sisters whose faces are dirty and who blurt out humiliating things that can neither be anticipated nor controlled. I sigh and make the best of it. I feel I’m older than they are, much older. I feel ancient.
— Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
A man who lives long enough will be a boy twice.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I walked past her, thinking: Is this what happens to the youth of women? Those whom we have met in the past, if suddenly we desire to see them again, have they become old? Is the young woman whom we desire like a character on the stage, when, unable to secure the actress who created the part, the management is obliged to entrust it to a new star? But then it is no longer the same.
— Marcel Proust, The Captive: Part 1
I trust that age doth not wither nor custom stale my infinite variety.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Return of Sherlock Holmes
How old are you?""About fifteen, I think. Though I still feel the same as I always did," Bod said, but Mother Slaughter interrupted, "And I still feels like I done when I was a tiny slip of a thing, making daisy chains in the old pasture. You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it.
— Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
A face-lift is a woman’s attempt to lower the odds of the next person accurately guessing her age.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It’s not that I’m particularly worried about growing old. Nor am I all that bothered about wrinkles, grey hair and all that. BUT. Major but. I don’t like the idea of dying – not when i have so much left to do! That, people, is the rather unwelcome realisation that strikes me now and then, namely that the number of years ahead of me are fewer than the ones behind me, and while I have ticked off a lot of items on that mental list of mine, there are so many things left. Like riding through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in my hair, to mention one.
— Anna Belfrage
Umm, how old are you?” Alexis asked, a little hesitant to answer before making sure he wasn’t a minor.“Twenty-one, but age is just a number,” the guy responded.
— Lindsay Chamberlin, The Shoreline
Age isn't triggered by wrinkles,nor by the reduction of strong footing,for the true youth exists effectively in your heart,brightens through your smile and beats slow when your heart is right, innocent like that of a child
— Nwilliams S C
I don't know yet. I might be. Age sixteen totally sucks when it comes to absolutes.
— T.M. Goeglein, Code Sara
Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.
— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Allan Emmanuelle Karlsson closed his eyes and felt perfectly convinced that he would now pass away for ever. It had been exciting, the entire journey, but nothing lasts for ever, except possibly general stupidity.
— Jonas Jonasson, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared
If we are to use the words ‘childish’ and ‘infantile’ as terms of disapproval, we must make sure that they refer only to those characteristics of childhood which we become better and happier by outgrowing. Who in his sense would not keep, if he could, that tireless curiosity, that intensity of imagination, that facility of suspending disbelief, that unspoiled appetite, that readiness to wonder, to pity, and to admire?
— C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
Almost any age is better than twenty-two.
— David Rakoff, Fraud: Essays
He may be old now, but he is still a hero in their eyes
— Loretta Livingstone, Hopes, Dreams and Medals
Loghain shook his head in disbelief. "Maker's breath, man, aren't you suppose to have some dignity? Somewhere?""Me? Dignity?""Being the supposed future King and such.""I think Rowan took my dignity."She snorted derisively, folding her arms. "There was nothing else worth having.
— David Gaider, The Stolen Throne
Granny Trill and Granny Wallon were traditional ancients of a kind we won’t see today, the last of that dignity of grandmothers to whom age was its own embellishment. The grandmothers of those days dressed for the part in that curious but endearing uniform which is now known to us only through music-hall. And our two old neighbours, when setting forth on errands, always prepared themselves scrupulously so. They wore high laced boots and long muslin dresses, beaded chokers and candlewick shawls, crowned by tall poke bonnets tied with trailing ribbons and smothered with inky sequins. They looked like starlings, flecked with jet, and they walked in a tinkle of darkness.Those severe and similar old bodies enthralled me when they dressed that way. When I finally became King (I used to think) I would command a parade of grandmas, and drill them, and march them up and down - rank upon rank of hobbling boots, nodding bonnets, flying shawls, and furious chewing faces. They would be gathered from all the towns and villages and brought to my palace in wagon-loads. No more than a monarch’s whim, of course, like eating cocoa or drinking jellies; but far more spectacular any day than those usual trudging guardsmen.
— Laurie Lee, Cider With Rosie
Me dad planted that tree,’ she said absently, pointing out through the old cracked window.The great beech filled at least half the sky and shook shadows all over the house.Its roots clutched the slope like a giant hand, holding the hill in place. Its trunk writhed with power, threw off veils of green dust, rose towering into the air, branched into a thousand shaded alleys, became a city for owls and squirrels. I had thought such trees to be as old as the earth, I never dreamed that a man could make them. Yet it was Granny Trill’s dad who had planted this tree, had thrust in the seed with his finger. How old must he have been to leave such a mark? Think of Granny’s age, and add his on top, and you were back at the beginning of the world.
— Laurie Lee, Cider With Rosie
At last he said, "Did you come out of the big mountains?"Gitano shook his head slowly. "No, I walked down the Salinas Valley."The afternoon thought would not let Joey go. "Did you ever go into the big mountains back there?"The old dark eyes grew fixed, and their light turned inward on the years that were living in Gitano's head.
— John Steinbeck, The Red Pony
The thing to know about my brother was that even though he was fifteen, he looked to be about the same age as me. Only, I'm not sure if that was because he looked older or I looked younger. I like to think it was a healthy mixture of both.
— John Corey Whaley, Where Things Come Back
The women ranged in age, but they were all old enough to know that in the currency of friendship, empathy is more valuable than accuracy.
— Erica Bauermeister, Joy for Beginners
It was him, thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, & forty watts too dim maybe, but him.
— Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue
In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual «There!» yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings — younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older...
— Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
When you're young you can't work out the age of an adult - they're just quite old, old, or very old.
— Michael Morpurgo, Alone on a Wide Wide Sea
Age brings maturity, experience ripens it.
— Vimal Athithan
Mamma says she is quite certain that "how old is too old?" is not a question known to the Lord.
— Annette Bridges, The Gospel According to Mamma
Old age isn't a battle
—  old age is a massacre.
Things wrote with labor deserve to be so read and will last their age.
— Ben Johnson
He felt, and not for the first time today, that he had not made a good decision in his personal or professional life since 1989.
— Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue
Prettiness fades after a few years, but elegance only increases with age.
— Anne Gracie
Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.
— Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion
I felt suddenly very young - or perhaps I felt my age: an almost childlike twenty-two, rather than that permanent middle-age that attaches itself to the man who lives alone and supports himself by wearing a suit in a city not of his birth.
— Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
One day you're something, so promising and full o' dares, so big the world's too small a place to hold you. Then, 'fore you know it, you're old, and you realise all them things you had in mind you'll never get to. All them doors you felt too big to fit through have already shut. Only one left open and it leads to nothing but nothing.
— Joe Abercrombie, Red Country
Like the culture that created me, I am receding into the past at a rate of knots. Soon I'll need a whole row of footnotes if anybody under thirty-five is going to comprehend the least thing I say.
— Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories
Rather I think that a man who ... is willing ... to value learning as long as he lives, not supposing that old age brings him wisdom of itself, will necessarily pay more attention to the rest of his life.
— Plato, Laches
When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better--her husband; money; his books. But for her own part she would never for a single second regret her decision, evade difficulties, or slur over duties
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
What is Time, O sister of similar features, that you speak of it so subserviently? Are we to be the slaves of the sun, that secondhand overrated knob of gilt, or of his sister, that fatuous circle of silver paper? A curse upon their ridiculous dictatorship!
— Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan
What shall I do to be for ever known,And make the age to come my own?
— Abraham Cowley
...summer softens lines that winter cruelly shows...
— John Geddes
She has built her whole life on the foundation of beauty: each chiseled plane, each sloping dimple, each soft curve as crucial as keystones in the cathedral of her body.
— Nenia Campbell, Wishing Stars: Space Opera Fairytales
I guess when you'd lived as long, and pondered as much, as Old Tom had...a game of hopscotch could be more profound than village politics or gossip.
— Linda Medley, Castle Waiting, Vol. 2
...You won't age? I promise you this - your hands will go shiny and transparent and at the slightest bruise they'll bleed...
— John Geddes
...all she wanted was a button she could push to pause her age, just for a little while, a few years, while she got used to the idea.
— Emma Straub, Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures
NW" is full of split selves, people alienated from the very things they thought defined them. Their nostalgia -- for old movies, old songs, buses they don't ride anymore -- is less a salve than a form of pain.
— Christian Lorentzen
Death was constant, unprejudiced to age, race, or creed.
— Jessica Fortunato, The Sin Collector: Thomas
I hope to have one more boxing match at the age of 55. Given that demographic at the age of 55 to 65, you've got to make a statement with your life. Otherwise, you are just existing.
— George Foreman
People tend to find books when they are ready for them.
— Neil Gaiman
It doesn't matter if you're 20, 40, 60, 80, or 100. Embrace your sexy-ass self and express it!
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
I am seventeen. The good things about seventeen is that you’re not sixteen. Sixteen goes with the word sweet, and I am so far from sweet.
— Francine Pascal, Fearless
Though most expect young men to be fools, I've noticed that just a little bit of age can make a man far more foolish than he was as a child.
— Brandon Sanderson, The Final Empire
A man doesn't grow old because he has lived a certain number of years. A man grows old when he deserts his ideal. The years may wrinkle his skin, but deserting his ideal wrinkles his soul.
— Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out
His parents called him Youngster. They did this in the subconcious hope that he might take the hint. Wensleydale gave the impression of having been born with a mental age of 47.
— Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
To think things out properly and fairly, a fellow's got to be calm and old and toothless: When you're an old gaffer with no teeth, it's easy to say: 'Damn it, boys, you mustn't bite!' But, when you've got all thirty-two teeth...
— Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
You are old and grey,” she teased.“And you’re never too immortal for a spanking,” he shot back...
— Dianna Hardy, The Demon Bride
It is very easy to grow tired at collecting; the period of a low tide is about all men can endure. At first the rocks are bright and every moving animal makes his mark on the attention. The picture is wide and colored and beautiful. But after an hour and a half the attention centers weary, the color fades, and the field is likely to narrow to an individual animal. Here one may observe his own world narrowed down until interest and, with it, observation, flicker and go out. And what if with age this weariness becomes permanent and observation dim out and not recover? Can this be what happens to so many men of science? Enthusiasm, interest, sharpness, dulled with a weariness until finally they retire into easy didacticism? With this weariness, this stultification of attention centers, perhaps there comes the pained and sad memory of what the old excitement was like, and regret might turn to envy of the men who still have it. Then out of the shell of didacticism, such a used-up man might attack the unwearied, and he would have in his hands proper weapons of attack. It does seem certain that to a wearied man an error in a mass of correct data wipes out all the correctness and is a focus for attack; whereas the unwearied man, in his energy and receptivity, might consider the little dross of error a by-product of his effort. These two may balance and produce a purer thing than either in the end. These two may be the stresses which hold up the structure, but it is a sad thing to see the interest in interested men thin out and weaken and die. We have known so many professors who once carried their listeners high on their single enthusiasm, and have seen these same men finally settle back comfortably into lectures prepared years before and never vary them again. Perhaps this is the same narrowing we observe in relation to ourselves and the tide pool—a man looking at reality brings his own limitations to the world. If he has strength and energy of mind the tide pool stretches both ways, digs back to electrons and leaps space into the universe and fights out of the moment into non-conceptual time. Then ecology has a synonym which is ALL.
— John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez
... but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she's looked that way ever since she was two.
— Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride
It’s really difficult to talk about dead people, but it’s even harder to talk about dead young women. It’s because from the time they die, they’ll be young forever. On the other hand, for us, the survivors, every year, every month, every day, we get older.Sometimes, I feel like I can feel myself aging from one hour to the next. It’s a terrible thing, but that’s reality.
— Haruki Murakami, Hear the Wind Sing
He really had experienced every tiniest increment of time in the four decades since then, and yet here he was surprised to be suddenly old and crippled. Turned out the rope didn't care if you noticed every daisy on the path to the gallows.
— Chris Cleave, Gold
This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can’t get fresh fruit in the shops.
— Geoff Ryman, Paradise Tales: and Other Stories
When Lytle was born, the Wright Brothers had not yet achieved a working design. When he died, Voyager 2 was exiting the solar system. What does one do with the coexistence of those details in a lifetime’s view? It weighed on him.
— John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead
My age and the ages of my children are imaginary numbers.
— Carol L. Covin
If you believe getting close to being 50 is bad... wait to see how one feels when getting far crom that age
— Luispa
Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible.
— Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence
People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us. And yet—
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Someday when you're twenty, maybe, I'll see you again. You'll be this hot soccer star at some great school, with a million guys more interesting than I am chasing you down. And you know what? I'll see you and I'll pray you want me still.
— Ann Brashares, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
I’m thirty-six years old, but I don’t feel like it. Some days I feel like I’m twenty-one, some days I feel like I’m pushing sixty.
— Sarah Colonna, Life As I Blow It: Tales Of Love, Life & Sex . . . Not Necessarily In That Order
A man's life is all he has. When you're old, it's all you'll ever have.
— Miguel Syjuco
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
— Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978
When I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better. 
— Mae West
A sex symbol becomes a thing. I hate being a thing.
— Marilyn Monroe
I knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn't identify with any of the guys at all. None of them liked art or music. They just wanted to fight and get laid. It was many years ago but it gave me this real hatred for the average American macho male.
— Kurt Cobain
I am a rare species, not a stereotype.
— Ivan E. Coyote
I started to be really proud of the fact I was gay even though I wasn't
— Kurt Cobain
Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking.
— Derek Jarman
He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows.
— Don DeLillo, Mao II
After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn’t say, "I fuck therefore I am".
— Jeanette Winterson, Art & Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd
Weren't you wearing a purity ring when we got here? Aren't you supposed to be saving yourself?" Shanti asked. "Yeah," Mary Lou answered. "And then I thought, for what? You save leftovers. My sex is not a leftover, and it is not a Christmas present.
— Libba Bray, Beauty Queens
I felt that if he touched me, I'd die. and then the thought crawled into my brain that if he didn't touch me, I'd die.
— Kitty Thomas, The Auction
I want to be the victim of his errors.
— Marquis de Sade
I've had more difficulty accepting myself as bisexual than I ever did accepting that I was a lesbian. It felt traitorous. A few years ago, I admitted to myself that I was still interested in men in more than a "Brad Pitt is slick hot sexy" kind of way. But I worried whatmy friends, exes, and the Community would think. I never even broached the subject with my parents. Because what bothered me the most was that people would think that being a lesbian had been a phase for me, when that was so very not the case. What I feared was that I would no longer be part of a community, that I might be seen with my boyfriend and not be recognized as something not the same. 
— R. Gay, First Person Queer: Who We Are
It is the mind that speaks a woman's heart, not the vaginal walls.
— Mary Roach, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex