Patrick O'Brian Quotes

I would agree on the aging thing. Because, at a certain point, once you start noticing it, it is your subject. And I know young that people, when they get to 30, say, "Oh, I'm so old." But actually, around 50, you do become conscious of it.

I see a guy getting old. I try to not look in the mirror too much.

You watch yourself age and it's hard to feel like a sex symbol.

When you're a fledgling youth-type adult, it appears that all people in their 40s look old enough to be in a painting hanging on the wall of a stately home in England. It's not until you limp into your 70s that people in their 40s look too young to vote, and college cheerleaders closely resemble Yorkshire terriers.

Nobody ever said that growing old would be easy. Just having to hold the newspaper out in your forties and then hair growing out of unusual parts of your body in your fifties. It's tough on the ego.

I remember the moment I first became aware of aging. I was 30. I looked down at my knees, and the skin above them had become a little loose. And I thought, 'And so it begins!'

I attempted various types of plastic surgery, minutely but enough to stave off this encroaching middle-aged body. And every time I did, something went wrong. I felt misshapen, just not natural any more.

My dad had this philosophy that if you tell children they're beautiful and wonderful then they believe it, and they will be. So I never thought I was unattractive. But I was never one of the girls at school who had lots of boyfriends.

When you're 21, you think, 'Oh God, when I'm 36, oh God, that's nearly 40 and I'll look really old and wrinkly by then.' And actually, I quite like the way I look.

I still feel 29. Maybe I should act my age more, but I just can't.

One of the few advantages to not being beautiful is that one usually gets better-looking as one gets older; I am, in fact, at this very moment, gaining my looks.

I don't write so much now. I'm getting on 33, pot belly and creeping dementia.

I usually say I left puberty at 58.

I started to take care of my body after I turned 50. I never liked how I looked physically because I was too cute, short, with coloring only on my cheeks, the perfect little nose, and then the blue eyes. I was a hit with girls, who told me it was like I was in Technicolor.

When you hit your 40s, you're walking around, and you realize, 'Oh, my God, men don't look at me anymore.' Or sometimes you can feel really good, and then you look in the mirror, and you're like, 'Oh, Jesus, that's my face now!' But I have tell you that something happened and shifted inside of me.

You get to be a certain age - I am 58 - and it becomes tricky not to become a caricature of yourself.

My body - it's become, as I get older... not my friend.

I don't love the fact that gravity is winning as I get older, but there's also a calmness that comes with it, which I'm secretly enjoying.

As you get older, you become more vain. But as your looks slowly deteriorate, your eyesight worsens, so it all balances out.

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosohpically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.

You ask if there is no doctrine of sorrow in my philosophy. Of acute sorrow I suppose that I know comparatively little. My saddestand most genuine sorrows are apt to be but transient regrets. The place of sorrow is supplied, perchance, by a certain hard and proportionately barren indifference. I am of kin to the sod, and partake of its dull patience,--in winter expecting the sun of spring.

I looked into the mirror and saw this middle-aged woman who keeps invading my face.

Eat as much as you'd like. My philosophy has always been that all women desire to be as fat as myself but just have a great fear of doing so. Because they think they won't get any men, but you will. You'll get more men, and better men.

I'm now in my mid-thirties, so I look in the mirror and my face is changing, and I have a different relationship all of a sudden with myself. Your face changes, things change - that's just kind of what happens. It's hard, though, in this industry, because I think so much importance is put on how you look, and I'm not brave enough to be like, "You know what? I'm just going to let it happen. Whatever. I'm so cool with every line on my face."

The discovery of a grey hair when you are brushing out your whiskers of a morning—first fallen flake of the coming snows of age—is a disagreeable thing.... So are flying twinges of gout, shortness of breath on the hill-side, the fact that even the moderate use of your friend's wines at dinner upsets you. These things are disagreeable because they tell you that you are no longer young—that you have passed through youth, are now in middle age, and faring onward to the shadows in which, somewhere, a grave is hid.