Bonnie Raitt Quotes

You make your own kinds of mistakes, and I’m sure you’ll have your share of regrets in life. But commitment was never your problem, sweetie. You have a better chance of making this work than most forty-year-olds I know. My little middle-aged child. Luckily, you seem to have found another old soul.

I'm older, and I wish that a lot of things that I did in my life, I didn't do, but I'm able to talk about it.

If I'd trusted myself and listened to myself all the times that I ignored myself, I would have been fine. But everyone has to learn their lesson, and now I've got it.

Recently I read the stories I wrote in my early 20s, to put in a volume. And here is this brittle young woman, writing about marriage as, not the worst thing, but the most boring thing that could happen to a person. Now I think I was wrong. I like to be proven wrong.

I've done a lot of growing up since the age of 16 and I really wanted that to be reflected in my music.

My advice would be not to write until after 35. You need some experience, and for life to knock you about a bit. Growing up is so hard you probably won't have much emotion to spare anyway.

I suspect I was not the first 21-year-old who thought he knew more than he did. And one of the virtues of age, one of the virtues of getting married and becoming a father, is it often leads one to take a more measured approach to life.

I lived a very isolated life. When you start at 20, you have a lot of nonsense to work out of your system.

Oh my gosh, I'd give so much advice to a younger version of myself. I would say it really does get better as you get older. The things that mean so much, the things that seem like, you know, it's going to cause the end of the world, are all things that I've already forgotten.

When you're young, you just go banging about, but you're more sensitive as you grow older.

If I had one regret in life... it's that I was not more humble at an earlier age.

The advantage of age is that you swap youth for wisdom. You're so full of insecurities when you're young. 'Who am I? What do I have to do for people to like me?' You get caught up in things. You get very emotional about things.

I think I can see more clearly now - about how the pattern of past experiences has shaped who I am and the characters I have played - and I'm grateful for that.

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

I don't feel like a very nostalgic person. I think about the past much more clinically. When I look back and wonder, 'Why was I doing that? Was it a waste of time?' I don't beat myself up. Instead, I say, 'I'm so glad I did that, because now I really know what matters to me.'

I don't know how you get to be 40 without having a whole bunch of regrets.

The feelings we all have as 50-year-olds are different than the feelings we all have as 30-year-olds. That informs everything we do.

I think that when I got to a certain age, it was important to me to sort of analyze my relationship with myself and my past.

I had a lot of friends, but none of them I felt super close with. Now that I'm older, I can look back on my teenage self and kind of see the things I did wrong and the things I did right, what affect they had on me, and what affect they had on other people. I can look at it in a much more conducive way to storytelling.

The good part about getting older is you stop trying to prove anything to anyone, including yourself. All you are in the pursuit of is collecting experiences - beautiful, fragile little soap bubbles that you store in your heart, and every once in a while you pull one out and gaze at the delicate pictures it shows you.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.

At thirty, man suspects himself a fool; Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan.

It's a good thing I learned some humility and perspective as I got older.

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

I wish I had been more self-aware earlier, but I think that just comes with age.