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“Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so 'safe,' and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Četrdeset mi je godina, ružno doba: čovjek je još mlad da bi imao želja a već star da ih ostvaruje. Tada se u svakome gase nemiri, da bi postao jak navikom i stečenom sigurnošću u nemoći što dolazi. A ja tek činim što je trebalo učiniti davno, u bujnom cvjetanju tijela, kad su svi bezbrojni putevi dobri, a sve zablude korisne koliko i istine. Šteta što nemam deset godina više pa bi me starost čuvala od pobuna, ili deset godina manje pa bi mi bilo svejedno. Jer trideset godina je mladost, to sad mislim, kad sam se nepovratno udaljio od nje, mladost koja se ničega ne boji, pa ni sebe.”
― Meša Selimović, Death and the Dervish

“Middle age is when you're sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you.”
― Ogden Nash

“I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you'll grow out of it.
”
― Doris Day

“Seven Ages: first puking and mewling
Then very pissed-off with your schooling
Then fucks, and then fights
Next judging chaps' rights
Then sitting in slippers: then drooling.”
― Robert Conquest

“Awakened at midnight
by the sound of the water jar
cracking from the ice”
― Basho

“I just wish moments weren’t so fleeting!' Isaac called to the man on the roof, 'They pass so quickly!'
'Fleeting?!' responded the tilling man, 'Moments? They pass quickly?! . . . Why, once a man is finished growing, he still has twenty years of youth. After that, he has twenty years of middle age. Then, unless misfortune strikes, nature gives him twenty thoughtful years of old age. Why do you call that quickly?' And with that, the tilling man wiped his sweaty brow and continued tilling; and the dejected Isaac continued wandering.
'Stupid fool!' Isaac muttered quietly to himself as soon as he was far enough away not to be heard.”
― Roman Payne, Hope and Despair

“The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.”
― Núria Añó

“There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws that are constant. It has no rules.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“The first indication of menopause is a broken thermostat. It's either that or your weight. In any case, if you don't do something, you could be dead by August.

God, middle age is an unending insult.”
― Dorothea Benton Frank, Sullivan's Island

“Just as in the second part of a verse bad poets seek a thought to fit their rhyme, so in the second half of their lives people tend to become more anxious about finding actions, positions, relationships that fit those of their earlier lives, so that everything harmonizes quite well on the surface: but their lives are no longer ruled by a strong thought, and instead, in its place, comes the intention of finding a rhyme.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“ I'd Better Not--

A man leaned over to a man in a pub
And said in a voice
‘I used to be thirty seven but now I’m fifty one��.
And that’s how the years go.
In handfuls.
Like somebody is almost at the end of a bag of crisps
And they tip the bag up
And it’s as though they’re drinking crisps.
That’s how the years go.”
― Ian McMillan, I Found This Shirt: Poems and Prose from the Centre

“I did a research assignment on life in the Middle Ages only last year. I found the era fascinating, all that chivalry and court romance. But I never pictured anything as poor as this village. This is the pits. There's no romance here, definitely no chivary. And it stinks--of sweat and smoke and sewage.”
― Marianne Curley, Old Magic

“You know what it's like, finding eight middle-aged guys having tantric sex with ostriches?”
― Warren Ellis, Crooked Little Vein

“No matter how you tell yourself
It's what we all go through
Those lines are pretty hard to take
When they're staring back at you
Oh, scared you'll run out of time
When did the choices get so hard
With so much more at stake
Life gets mighty precious
When there's less of it to waste”
― Bonnie Raitt, Nick of Time

“It was easy, terribly easy, to become with time a middle-aged spinster with a sharp tongue. She would have to guard against this.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Sunday Philosophy Club

“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

“It’s only in your twenties and in your seventies and eighties that you do the greatest work. The enemy of society is the middle class, and the enemy of life is middle age.”
― Orson Welles

“Nobody's looking at me. Nobody does look at middle-aged women.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Night Side of the River

“Not a mid-life crisis
But a mid life, "Who am I?”
― Lowrey E. Gray, 42

“He smiles and his wavy haired, bright eyed head scoops me in but quickly lands on Mimi. It lingers a bit long, his chest frozen as if the breath's been knocked out; he already loves her. Mothers know these things. It's the kind of love that springs from awe, attraction, intellectual curiosity, and finding a woman mom approves of... the girl next door with exciting fangs. I wonder if their offspring will have fangs.”
― Penelope Przekop, Centerpieces

“He smiles and his wavy haired, bright eyed head scoops me in but quickly lands on Mimi. It lingers a bit long, his chest frozen as if the breath's been knocked out; he already loves her. Mothers know these things. It's the kind of love that springs from awe, attraction, intellectual curiosity, and finding a woman mom approves of... the girl next door with exciting fangs. I wonder if their offspring will have fangs. - Holly Carter”
― Penelope Przekop, Centerpieces

“These old women gossips quite forgot how charming certain middle-aged men had appeared when they were girls; those recollections having been effaced by more recent memories of how middle-aged men had appeared when they themselves were middle-aged.”
― T.S. Stribling, The Store

“Durante los primeros años de la Edad Media no puede sobreestimarse la importancia del espíritu cristiano de la caridad, en especial hacia los grupos estigmatizados como los de las personas severamente afectadas en sus facultades mentales.”
― Irwin G. Sarason, Abnormal Psychology: The Problem Of Maladaptive Behavior

“The queens danced and Veronica danced, and their dancing said, World, kiss my fat middle-aged butt.”
― Mary Gaitskill;, Veronica

“She liked books that seemed to begin again at the middle, the way life so often did, the way a day or an evening or a conversation or a song or a long, worthwhile idea so often did. The way love so often did.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“Dante's path can be understood as a metaphor for the condition of medieval man, before the advent of the Renaissance: in a state of sin (Hell), passing through sincere repentance and forgiveness (Purgatory), and finally reaching communion with the fullness of the divine (Paradise). It is a search for truth through faith. Initially, the poet relies on the help of Virgil, a representative of classical pagan culture, and then follows the guidance of true love and holiness, which lead him to the very essence of the divine. This journey is not limited to the search for true love, although this is, naturally, the initial motivation. True love is transmuted into Divine Grace, which, through the contemplation of love and beauty, grants the poet a reflection of divine perfection. Human reason leads the soul to the threshold of faith, where Beatrice, the personification of divine love, takes over. In modern times, the path would be analogous, but the object of love would become reason. The search for truth would then be carried out through rational means. From ignorance (the “dark forest��), through reflection and the practice of virtues, man would arrive at knowledge, so that reason would guide him to the supreme truth. Both in the Middle Ages and in later periods, the search for the meaning of the absolute continued, whether through perfect faith or perfect reason.”
― Geverson Ampolini

“I still matter. I can’t believe I’m even having to tell myself that.”
― Cate Ray, The Younger Woman

“Middle age isn’t about filling out, but thinning. I’m going to have to find ways of plumping it, like blowing up a tyre.”
― Cate Ray, The Younger Woman