Anne Morrow Lindbergh Quotes

Oh, my God, my thirties blew! Forties are great.

Turning 50 is a little bit of a 'taking stock' moment. I feel probably a little dumber. I don't think I'm as sharp as I was when I was younger, but I'm definitely wiser and less likely to make gigantic blunders of an intellectual, spiritual, emotional or physical type.

I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity.

Fifty is the new forty. I always thought my best work would come in the years forty to sixty, if I was fortunate enough to hang around - and it is hard to stick around.

As you get older, you come to a place in life where you can't just live in the present.

I believe that life begins at 50.

The signs that presage growth, so similar, it seems to me, to those in early adolescence: discontent, restlessness, doubt, despair, longing, are interpreted falsely as signs of decay. In youth one does not as often misinterpret the signs; one accepts them, quite rightly, as growing pains. One takes them seriously, listens to them, follows where they lead. ... But in the middle age, because of the false assumption that it is a period of decline, one interprets these life-signs, paradoxically, as signs of approaching death.

I warn people, your 40s will require massive amounts of humor and humility.

There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

People always talk about how time flies; it's become sort of a colloquialism now. You don't really understand it until you reach your late 30s and early 40s - and I'm sure time will move even faster as I get older.

If you've never been 40, you don't understand how it feels.

Turning 40 didn't, as a number, scare me or throw me off at all.

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 always had the street mentality, but when you're older, you get more mature.

When you're young - I probably still am at 23, though I don't feel so young anymore - you have your ups and downs.

Your priorities change when you get older.

I used to think 63 was old.

I think in your 30s you can still pretend you're in your 20s, or at least maintain some semblance of youth. Forty is when you've got to stop denying the inevitable.

When you are five, you know your age down to the month. Even in your twenties, you know how old you are. I'm twenty-three you say, or maybe twenty-seven. But then in your thirties, something strange starts to happen. It is a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I'm--you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you are not. You're thirty-five. And then you're bothered, because you wonder if this is the beginning of the end. It is, of course, but it's decades before you admit it.

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

My mother had demonstrated that the best way to defeat the numbing ambivalence of middle age is to surprise yourself - by pulling off some cartwheel of thought or action never even imagined at a younger age.

For the complete life, the perfect pattern includes old age as well as youth and maturity.

The problem is I'm older now, I'm 40 years old, and this stuff doesn't change the world. It really doesn't.

Middle Age At forty-five, What next, what next? At every corner, I meet my Father, My age, still alive.