Andre Gide Quotes

Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older.

It was like that part of my life, was just gone. It was almost too easy, for something I once thought had meant everything.

I miss the grasshoppers much, but suppose it is all for the best. I should become too much attached to a trotting world.

The older I get the more things I gotta leave behind.

It took me a lifetime to realizethings don't get lost if they don't have value- you don't miss what you don't care about.

You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter.

For years I have been mourning and not for my dead, it is for this boy for whatever corner in my heart died when his childhood slid out of my arms.

I'm bad at letting go of things.

Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.

I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.

It can make you sad to look at pictures from your youth. So there's a trick to it. The trick is not to look at the later pictures.

For me, the past is dead. Can't go back.

I had many decades of me time and now I just don't have that anymore. There are days when I rail against it.

You can't really go back to where you came from. I don't think any of us can.

All changes are more or less tinged with melancholy, for what we are leaving behind is part of ourselves.

The best years are behind me.

If I've learned one thing in life, it's you can never go back.

I thoroughly object to getting old. If you could let me be 16 again, I'd give you everything I've got and everything I'll ever have.

Your past is something you cannot change. You can't live it; it's dead.

The notion of time bothers me. You look at thirty-year-old photographs and realize how the time has passed.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

Nothing is so dear as what you're about to leave.

The mind that is wise mourns less for what age takes away; than what it leaves behind.

Only with a new ruler do you realize the value of the old.

The want to return to the fold doesn't mean you can repeat history.