Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes

Self-acceptance has been a blessed by-product of middle age.

Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.

I love being middle-aged in general. I'm more at peace with myself now. I still have tormented times, but they are few and far between. You don't feel you have to be the centre of your world when you get older. Becoming a mother had been a turning point which stopped me from being the centre of my world.

I'm very comfortable in my own skin now. I started just being myself more and more. For women, this happens as you get older. I loved my 40s - I thought they were fantastic. And I'm loving my 50s. I'm going to love everything because you're either older or dead!

We're both getting older, our children are starting to leave home. But I can say that I'm just as passionate a songwriter now in my 50s as I was in my 20s. But instead of talking about the general kind of angst that I felt as a teenager, I'm writing about more specific issues.

I think I have aged gracefully.

Don't let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don't worry about losing your "personality," as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.

One might define adulthood as the age at which a person learns that he must die ...and accepts his sentence undismayed.

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

Man reaches the highest point of lovableness at 12 to 17 - to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of 70 to 90

To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion.

I am what I am - which is I have aged.

When you're 16, you think 28 is so old! And then you get to 28 and it's fabulous. You think, then, what about 42? Ugh! And then 42 is great. As you reach each age, you gain the understanding you need to deal with it and enjoy it.

In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you.

Growing old is compulsory - growing up is optional.

When you're younger, you tend to be reckless about trying to find out who you are and what you can do and should do. But as you get older you become more accepting of yourself, and with that comes greater contentment.

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.

The understanding that we reach a point where we stop becoming something and start ending as something. That comes at different times in different points in different people's lives, and obviously there are lots of people who experience the presence of death much more keenly and much earlier than I did. But we all come to grips with it eventually.

But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

She has the gift of accepting her life.

Understanding and love require a wisdom that comes only with age.

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.

Love makes its record in deeper colors as we grow out of childhood into manhood; as the Emperors signed their names in green ink when under age, but when of age, in purple.

I've passed the age of consciousness and righteous rage. I found that just surviving was a noble fight.

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