Margaret Deland Quotes

They say that “Time assuages” - Time never did assuage - An actual suffering strengthens As Sinews do, with age - Time is a Test of Trouble - But not a Remedy - If such it prove, it prove too There was no Malady

So if it seems that some of what I'll have to say in the pages to come doesn't reflect the mellowing of age, that's only because I've never found that life and memories respond to time the way that tobacco does.

I think that the worst unpleasantness of age is not its final fact ... but the tediousness of preparation, the accumulating number of defeats.

Age is just a number. It's totally irrelevant unless, of course, you happen to be a bottle of wine.

For the camera, particularly, I feel like - I think that, as human faces become older, they become more interesting.

The emotional passage of time is always a good thing.

I don't mind aging - I'm glad to be aging. I'll never die young.

I dread no more the first white in my hair, Or even age itself, the easy shoe, The cane, the wrinkled hands, the special chair: Time, doing this to me, may alter too My anguish, into something I can bear

Time cancels young pain.

Stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask.

I never have a thematic intention at the outset. The story informs the theme for me rather than the other way around. But as it happens... this is, at least to a degree, about getting old and the rapid passage of our lives.

Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.

Growing old becomes clear to you at a certain point. I think it's after the age of 70 you realize - you begin to actually be convinced - you're growing older.

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosohpically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.

On Being Old. It's not nice but take comfort that you won't stay that way for ever.

Where reason fails, time oft has worked a cure.

Age either transfigures or petrifies.

To become young again would seem to me an appalling prospect. Youth is a kind of delirium, which can be cured, if it is ever cured at all, by years of painful treatment.

When I cease to be indignant I will have begun my old age.

Young people, take heart: the older you get, the fewer commandments you will have the strength to break.

Old age was growing inside me. It kept catching my eye from the depths of the mirror. I was paralyzed sometimes as I saw it making its way toward me so steadily when nothing inside me was ready for it.

it sucks to get old...but there's always beer

To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content.

I remember the day I turned thirty. I was getting out of the shower and I stood in front of the mirror and stared at myself for a long time. I examined every inch of my body and appreciated the fact that I finally looked like a grown woman. I also assumed that this was how I was going to look for the rest of my life. The way I saw it, I was never going to age; I'd just look up one day and be old.

To me, young has no meaning. It's something you can do nothing about, nothing at all. But youth is a quality. And if you have it, you never lose it.