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“Now answer me, sincerely, honestly, who lives past forty? I'll tell you who does: fools and scoundrels.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

“The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“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

“The best thing about being 40 is that you can appreciate 25-year-old men more.”
― Colleen McCullough

“And the view was suddenly clear to me. The world opened out to its grim beyonds and I realized that, at forty, one must learn the rigors of acceptance. Capitalize it: Acceptance. I needed to accept what was put before me--be it a watery grave in Ireland's only natural fjord, or a return to the city and its grayer intensities, or a wordless exile in some steaming Cambodian swamp hole, or poems or no poems, or children or not, lovers or not, illness or otherwise, success or its absence. I would accept all that was put in my way, from here on through until I breathed my last.”
― Kevin Barry

“The secret of happiness is to ignore your reflection in mirrors once you’re over forty.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“It must be remembered that the forty hour work week until age sixty five was designed by governments and corporations and not the medical profession.”
― Steven Magee

“It was a truth universally acknowledged that by age forty I was supposed to have a certain kind of life, one that, whatever else it might involve, included a partner and babies. Having acquired neither of these, it was nearly impossible, no matter how smart, educated, or lucky I was, not to conclude that I had officially become the wrong answer to the question of what made a woman's life worth living. If this story wasn't going to end with a marriage or a child, what then? Could it even be called a story?”
― Glynnis MacNicol, No One Tells You This

“I nearer than I was yesterday and further than I am today, tomorrow I'll be square one.”
― Racquel McDonnell

“This is your success and this is the magic hour, the golden time before the time. Just be in it. You earned it. Don't spread it and don't pull on it and don't push it and don't share it and don't examine it. This is it.”
― Caroline Kepnes, Hidden Bodies

“Wow. Forty, getting divorced, and out of a job. It's like you're the poster girl for sadness.”
― Lucy Sykes, Fitness Junkie

“I could live this way indefinitely and I'd be all right ... I've done enough living and can now spend my time holding up the memories for contemplation, determining what it all meant. Images flood in: cities I've passed through; rooms where I've slept; friends who put me up or put up with me. In a couple of years I'll turn forty. Schopenhauer wrote that the first forty years are the text, the rest is the commentary. I see that, and yet I feel that I'm somehow at the start of a life, on the cusp, facing a future that's strange and turbulent but not entirely hopeless.”
― Rob Doyle, Autobibliography

“I have never been more relieved than on the morning of my fortieth birthday...it felt like I'd been released.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, No One Tells You This

“Many people over forty have at least one health condition that affects their ability to work a forty hour work week effectively. Human Resources (HR), doctors and governments have known this fact for decades.”
― Steven Magee

“Guillam was exhausted. Forty is a difficult age at which to stay awake, he decided. At twenty or at sixty the body knows what it's about, but forty is an adolescence where one sleeps to grow up or to stay young.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“She leaned in and placed her hand reassuringly on mine. "And don't worry, dear," she said conspiratorially. "I know it will still happen for you. There's still time."

There it was.

...But much to my surprise, I didn't need to lean on my collective self to navigate around this nice woman who thought she was providing me comfort by assuring me that, despite my age, I appeared to be someone to whom things could still happen...For a minute I felt all the old defense mechanisms go up, like metal toward a magnet. I took a deep breath and prepared to deliver my well-rehearsed responses...all the things I was used to saying to get out of this conversation and make the other person feel more comfortable. Instead, I found myself resisting the urge to laugh. Not at her. At the suddenly absurd idea that I was running out of time. I was no longer running, I realized. I was off the clock.

"I have to tell you," I said, making sure there was not one ounce of defensiveness in my voice, "I think it's going to be pretty great even if it doesn't happen.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, No One Tells You This

“It's been almost forty years that we have been
separated and I still cannot get over you,
You were my first love.
I miss you very much
MY SWEET BARBADOS!!”
― Charmaine J Forde

“If you have ran out of lung ventilators, please give mine to someone under forty with COVID-19.”
― Steven Magee

“At forty a woman's inside comes out on her outside, gradually like the skin has been turned over, and her face reveals at forty what her heart was at twenty.”
― Mantaranjot Mangat, Plotless

“Forty is a fat fort.”
― Mantaranjot Mangat, Plotless

“I told her not to worry and to go back to sleep. There was nothing she could do. Our dreams were part of our destiny, and they would run their course as God willed it. Besides, there must be a reason, I thought, that every night for the last forty days I had been having the same dream.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love