Age proverbs

Page 4

◆ I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.

- Madeleine L'Engle99

◆ Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe99

◆ Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.

- Arthur Golden99

◆ I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.

- Sherman Alexie99

◆ You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories.

- Garrison Keillor99

◆ Age is a terrible thief. Just when you're getting the hang of life, it knocks your legs out from under you and stoops your back. It makes you ache and muddies your head and silently spreads cancer throughout your spouse.

- Sara Gruen99

◆ Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

- Henry Ford99

◆ Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

- Francis Bacon99

◆ Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.

- Eleanor Roosevelt99

◆ You can't help getting older, but you don't have to get old.

- George Burns99

◆ As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.

- Andrew Carnegie99

◆ Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.

- Stanislaw Jerzy Lec99

◆ True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

- Kurt Vonnegut99

◆ Men are like wine - some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age.

- Pope John XXIII99

◆ Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

- Mark Twain99