Brian Dennehy Quotes

Things change when you get to 40. I'm embarrassed even that I'm going through it. In a very morbid way, at 40 you become aware of how long you've been on Earth and you start to question what you're going to use the remaining time doing.

Turning 60 was not a happy time. I didn't think 'I'm falling apart,' but I did re-examine my priorities.

For many of us, we set out thinking there will be time in the future, and then suddenly we find ourselves at a moment when we have to acknowledge that the future isn't infinite.

I feel prematurely old. I'm actually having this major belated quarter-life crisis. I'm turning 30 in a couple of weeks. I've been thinking a lot about mortality. A lot about what I'm going to do with my life and how to enjoy it. One of the things I'm going to work on is being more spontaneous, letting go, embracing the beauty of come-what-may.

Men regret their life has been ill-spent, but this does not always induce them to make a better use of the time they have yet to live.

Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, 'Why not?' and the other, 'Why bother?'

Everyone takes pause at 40. It's the age you have to assess everything in your life. It's the fictitious marker that's always coming up when you're young. The world really does look at you to kind of have it together by 40, and be successful by 40. Whatever success means.

When I passed the age of 50, I learned how to control my emotions.

I think every guy that hits his 40s has a little bit of a wake-up call and wants to just keep things real, as they say, and just to push yourself.

I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.

You do get to a certain point in life where you have to realistically, I think, understand that the days are getting shorter, and you can't put things off thinking you'll get to them someday. If you really want to do them, you better do them. There are simply too many people getting sick, and sooner or later you will.

When you talk to people who are old, some wish they had enjoyed themselves more, but not many wish they had wasted more time.

When you're in your 40s, you become more conscious of life being of limited duration and that you need to create memories and go on little adventures from time to time.

You reach a point at which you have to view your life through the things you've spent so much time doing. The alternative is a perilous feeling of waste.

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.

I think there is something very relatable in the idea that you hit a certain age, later in your life, where you realize you have to pick up the rug and see what's underneath it and deal with stuff.

I'm forty four; I'm way closer to dead than I am life of the party.

Approaching forty, I had a singular dream in which I almost grasped the meaning and understood the nature of what it is that wastes in wasted time.

Turning 50 gives me more yesterdays than tomorrows.

I'm turning 58, and you get that kind of weird, old-guy feeling of you don't have an infinite number of years left and if there's anything you want to say or represent, it's time to try it.

The only real change in life comes with the consciousness of old age.

What we know for sure from our work and from others' is that mice have a life span of 1,000 days, dogs have 5,000 days, and we humans have 29,000 days. Recognizing that the duration is limited, and aging is inevitable, focus the attention on enhancing the quality of the days you have.

You know, let a few years go by until I hit my midlife crisis. Then that can be documented on film.

At a certain age it just became apparent to me that this was probably the work that I would have to do.

All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific.