Ann Brashares Quotes

I just think age is meaningless. It's a system we've all agreed to that supposedly signals when we should develop, reach our peak and go downhill, as they say. It interferes with our natural growth.

The only thing some people do is get older.

Getting old is horrible, but it is interesting . . . one of the things I've realized is that growing old is compulsory, but growing up is optional.

You can almost measure where you are in life by the degree to which you have begun looking back rather than ahead.

I think the interesting aspect of life is that you're always sort of in the middle. You're never the youngest and you're never the oldest.

Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.

Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It's more often a succession of jerks.

You know, there's chronological age, there's biological age, and there's psychological age. Chronological age, there's nothing you can do about, which is I'm 52. You set that number aside.

Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives.

We're all born, and if you're going to live to be elderly, you'll have gone through a life journey different than anyone else's. It's unique to you, but you'll have some common themes.

Years do not always make age.

I am not old, but my young way was never the way to age.

Old age transfigures or fossilizes.

The truth is I'm getting old, I said. We already are old, she said with a sigh. What happens is that you don't feel it on the inside, but from the outside everybody can see it.

Age is just a number, not a state of mind or a reason for any type of particular behaviour.

A man's diary is a record in youth of his sentiments, in middle age of his actions, in old age of his reflections.

Age is not based on chronology, but psychology.

For Age is not alone of time, or we should never see men old and bent at forty and men young at seventy-three.

I don't love the years going by. I'd just as soon stay forty-five. But it's OK because I feel a whole lot better than I did at thirty-five.

As a woman, when you embrace where you are in life, then I think the struggle [life] isn't so hard. If you're 42 and still think you're an ingenue, then you've got a problem.

I think time just goes faster and faster. I'm saying this a few months away from my fortieth birthday. I don't know when and if one's identity ever does catch up with one's actual age. Personally I feel like I just got the hang of thirty-five.

Growth provides novel experiences for youth; decay the same, alas, for age.

With regard to the duration of human life, there does not appear to have existed from the earliest ages of the world to the present moment the smallest permanent symptom or indication of increasing prolongation.

... as we age we have not only to readdress earlier developmental crises but also somehow to find the way to three affirmations that may seem to conflict. ... We have to affirm our own life. We have to affirm our own death. And we have to affirm love, both given and received.