P. D. James Quotes

You walk around feeling like a teenager and immortal your whole life, and suddenly there isn't much time left.

When you're a kid, you have this feeling like you're indestructible. Your mortality doesn't even occur to you. But as time goes by, you realize, 'I better cut this out or that out if I want to continue to exist.'

In your twenties, you think you are immortal. In your thirties, you hope you are immortal.

Once in a while, when I'm alone, I think about my age. I think, How many more years do I have on this earth? But I can't really conceive of dying. Somehow, in my head, I don't think I'll die. I know that everybody dies, of course. I just think that it'll never come to me. It's crazy, but there it is.

Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you're forced to.

In your teens and twenties, death doesn't exist. In your thirties, you glance down the road occasionally. But then in your forties, it becomes a full-time job looking the other way.

I think most of us who live into our 50s have had a few experiences with death. You know, we see people we know start to die. We realize it's getting closer and closer for us.

In your mid-20s, you think you'll go on for eternity. Then a point comes where you realise that's not going to be the case.

You're immortal, aren't you, until you get a little peek over the precipice. The thought of death...You're not supposed to start pondering it until you're old. And there's nothing like being told you've got a life-threatening disease to concentrate your mind on that.

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.

For the first fourteen years for a rod they do while for the next as a pearl in the world they do shine. For the next trim beauty beginneth to swerve. For the next matrons or drudges they serve. For the next doth crave a staff for a stay. For the next a bier to fetch them away.

We never thought we could ever get old.

age is nothing but death that is conscious.

O what a thing is age! Death without death's quiet.

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.

Youth is like a long weekend on Friday night. Middle age is like a long weekend on Monday afternoon.

The first thing I think of when I wake up is how close I am to death. But then it gets better during the day.

We really feel the fact of our mortality after we turn forty years old.

I have never yet heard any middle-aged man or woman who worked with his or her brains express any regret for the passing of youth.

he who has nothing to lose can afford all risks.

When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself.

There are three things to beware of through life: when a man is young, let him beware of his appetites; when he is middle-aged, of his passions; and when old, of covetousness, especially.

In childhood, death stirred me not; in middle age, it pursued me like a prowling bandit on the road; now, grown an old man, it boldly leads the way, and ushers me on.

Turning 50 gives me more yesterdays than tomorrows.