Betty Friedan Quotes

I think I may have to grow up without growing old. I think we're going to have to define differently what I'm going to be. We're going to have to define my growing up differently.

It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it.

Aging is not just decay, you know, its growth.

Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.

Teenagers ultimately don't mind belonging to a group, because there's always the opportunity to eventually become someone new. The elderly, by definition, are running out of opportunities for reinvention.

I'm a beginning, not an end.

I don't look the same as I did 20 years ago, nor should I.

As you grow older, you change.

I'm not an aging gracefully type. But I do believe in aging with grace.

As you grow and get older, you evolve.

Once you reach a certain age, you're either slowly dying or slowly being reborn. I want to choose the latter.

Aging does not need to be hidden or denied, but can be understood, affirmed and experienced as a process of growth by which the mystery of life is slowly revealed to us.

The most important thing is growing old gracefully.

The truth is, aging can be your realest opportunity to decide how best to live - and the best incentive for getting you to do just that.

If you think hitting 40 is liberating, wait until you hit 50; and I was surprised at how liberating it was. The anticipation of something is always much worse than the reality.

There is no such thing as maturity. There is instead an ever-evolving process of maturing. Because when there is a maturity, there is a conclusion and a cessation. That’s the end. That’s when the coffin is closed. You might be deteriorating physically in the long process of aging, but your personal process of daily discovery is ongoing. You continue to learn more and more about yourself every day.

I say, when your hair turns gray and your children think they know who you are, do the thing that shakes up who you think you are, even who you had prided yourself on being. When all those around you say they simply don't recognize you any longer, that's the real compliment.

I'm not getting old I'm evolving.

Watch yourself. Every minute we change. It is a great opportunity. At any point, we can step out of our frozen selves and our ideas and begin fresh.

Looking back at my younger self, that I'm not so different than I am now. I was always a seeker. I wanted very ambitiously to be a writer and what happened between now and then is that I continually threw myself in the way of those things that would help me become that, of doing and finding and learning from things that altered me along the way.

Well, I'd like to think I am, and I'd also like to think that we're all having a lot more fun getting older than we pretend. It was interesting to me when I first started working on this book that I'd mentioned that I was writing a memoir about aging and everybody would moan and groan and carry on.

The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his decision

Life is an ongoing, never-ending process of re-creation.

Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution.

When I first met him, he did not care if a friend did not fit into his world, because at that time his world had not been born yet.