Paul McCartney Quotes

I used to love getting older.

The problem with time, I've learned, whether it's those first two weeks I got to spend with you, or the final two months I got to spend with him, eventually time always runs out. I have no idea where you are out there in the world, John. But I understand that I lost the right to know these things long ago. No matter how many years go by, I know one thing to be as true as ever was - I'll see you soon then.

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.

I long for the time of no more departures. It has something to do with age, probably.

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

I can't believe I've turned into a typical old man. I can't believe it. I was young just minutes ago.

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.

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.

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.

I'm quite disappointed that I'll never relive my teenage years.

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

No generation has escaped it - one morning, your skill with the eight-track or the record player or the cotton gin suddenly ceases to impress. It's just one of those inevitable disappointments that come with growing up, like the realization that Santa doesn't exist or the way that music always takes a turn for the worse after you turn 30.

My brother and I have a profound nostalgia for our youth, and I think people need to come to terms with things leaving and being gone.

It’s part of growing up, I suppose…you always have to leave something behind you.

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, ‘Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!’ This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.

He is already past the high point in his life and coming down on the other side. By next week he'll be nostalgia. He's 12 years old, and it's over for him.

Outgrowing things we love is never a pleasant process.

What was lost was lost. There was no retrieving it, however you schemed, no returning to how things were, no going back.

Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death.

Alas! the fleeting years, how they roll on!

The jovial party broke up next morning. Breakings-up are capital things in our school-days, but in after life they are painful enough. Death, self-interest, and fortune's changes, are every day breaking up many a happy group, and scattering them far and wide; and the boys and girls never come back again.

We're captive on the carousel of time, we can't return we can only look behind.

Oh, September! It is so soon for you to lose your friends to good work and strange loves and high ambitions. The sadness of that is too grown-up for you. Like whiskey and voting, it is a dangerous and heady business, as heavy as years. If I could keep your little tribe together forever, I would. I do so want to be generous. But some stories sprout bright vines that tendril off beyond our sight, carrying the folk we love best with them, and if I knew how to accept that with grace, I would share the secret.

But fate ordains that dearest friends must part.