Age Fifty Quotes & Sayings

There is some unwritten code or law that all women or means must be into Hinduism or Mysticism or psychics by the time they reach fifty years of age. The male equivalent is ornate guns. All aging women find psychics, all aging males find gun cabinets and expensive brandy. There's your truth. — Nathan Yocum

To think nothing of symmetry and much of convenience; never to remove an anomaly merely because it is an anomaly; never to innovate except when some grievance is felt; never to innovate except so far as to get rid of the grievance; never to lay down any proposition of wider extent than the particular case for which it is necessary to provide; these are the rules which have, from the age of John to the age of Victoria, generally guided the deliberations of our two hundred and fifty Parliaments — John M. Marincola

It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a 'Negro' fraction ... — Gwendolyn Brooks

Not only these were new kinds of stories, they were being told with a new kind of formal structure. [...] The result was a storytelling architecture you could picture as a colonnade - each episode a brick with its own solid, satisfying shape, but also part of a season-long arc that, in turn, would stand linked to other seasons to form a coherent, freestanding work of art. [...] The new structure allowed huge creative freedom: to develop characters over long stretches of time, to tell stories over the course of fifty hours or more, the equivalent of countless movies. — Brett Martin

The real problem is that there's a tendency to associate ageing with loss and decline and things that aren't desirable. But experiencing all that there is to experience in life - whether that's at the age of ten or thirty or fifty or eighty - is what life is all about. — S. Jay Olshansky

Then she revived him with an ardor and skill he could not have imagined in the meager pleasures of his solitary lovemaking, and without glory deprived him of his virginity. He was fifty-two years old and she was twenty-three, but age was the least pernicious of the differences between them. They continued to make hurried, heartless siesta love in the evangelical shade of the orange trees. The madwomen encouraged them from the terraces with indecent songs, and celebrated their triumphs with stadium ovations. Before the Marquis was aware of the dangers that pursued him, Bernarda woke him from his stupor with the news that she was in the second month of pregnancy. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

You need to add a new voice inside your head, one that says, "So what?" What if you don't get married by 30? So what? What if you haven't paid off your loans or debt by 35? So what? What if you're not a stand-out success by 28? So what? If you were to achieve everything you wanted in life by the age of 30, then what would you do for the next fifty years? You have time. You don't have to get to everything right now. — Alexandra Robbins

It would help not to treat age as if it were any less of a pleasure than it was when we were six and saying, 'I'm six and a half.' You know, we could be saying, 'I'm fifty and a half' and say it with joy. Each age is different and has different discoveries and pleasures. — Gloria Steinem

Whereas Mark Fidrych has awakened the boy lying dormant in every man's breast, Whereas he has reminded us all that, in an age of free agents and no-cut contracts, baseball is still a game, he has proven baseballs, like people, respond best to kind words and constructive criticism and not to saliva and Vaseline, he made Big Bird as popular with fifty-year-olds as with the playpen set" - Governor Michael Dukakis — Doug Wilson

He looked up at her. Age and worry had taken their toll on her frail body, but she was kind and beautiful. And for a moment, memories and thoughts swam to the surface, the world coming into utter clarity. And all of them revolved around Amanda, his wife of fifty years. — Crissy Moss

The Age of Intellect is accompanied by surprising advances in natural science. In the ninth century, for example, in the age of Mamun, the Arabs measured the circumference of the earth with remarkable accuracy. Seven centuries were to pass before Western Europe discovered that the world was not flat. Less than fifty years after the amazing scientific discoveries under Mamun, the Arab Empire collapsed. Wonderful and beneficent as was the progress of science, it did not save the empire from chaos. — John Bagot Glubb

A man of about fifty-four years of age, had begun, five or six months before, to be somewhat emaciated in his whole body ... a troublesome vomiting came on, of a fluid which resembl'd water, tinctur'd with soot ... Death took place ... In the stomach ... was an ulcerated cancerous tumour ... Betwixt the stomach and the spleen were two glandular bodies, of the bigness of a bean, and in their colour, and substance, not much unlike that tumour which I have describ'd in the stomach. — Giovanni Battista Morgagni

... Well, some day i'm going to get in with that wild artistic group. It's the only thing that makes this town different."

"The 'wild artistic group,' as you put it, has an average age of fifty-seven, and most of us have heart disease and bladder trouble... — Richard Bradford

I began drinking alcohol at the age of thirteen and gave it up in my fifty sixth year; it was like going straight from puberty to a mid-life crisis. — George Montgomery

From the time I was twelve years old until I retired last year at the age of fifty-seven, the Army was my life. I loved commanding soldiers and being around people who had made a serious commitment to serve their country. — Norman Schwarzkopf

He was already fifty years old, the age at which an intelligent and worldly man of means always becomes more respectful of himself, sometimes even against his own will. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The ideal of having a real job that you risk your soul in and make good or be damned, belongs to the heroic age of capitalist enterprise, imbued with self-righteous beliefs about hard work, thrift, and public morals. Such an ideal might still have been mentioned in public fifty years ago; in our era of risk-insured semimonopolies and advertised vices it would be met with a ghastly stillness. — Paul Goodman

I'd Better Not--

A man leaned over to a man in a pub
And said in a voice
'I used to be thirty seven but now I'm fifty one'.
And that's how the years go.
In handfuls.
Like somebody is almost at the end of a bag of crisps
And they tip the bag up
And it's as though they're drinking crisps.
That's how the years go. — Ian McMillan

I'm getting old," I said again, and that was true. I had lived more than fifty years and most men were lucky to see forty. Yet all old age was bringing was the death of dreams. — Bernard Cornwell

Maybe it's true that life begins at fifty. But everything else starts to wear out, fall out, or spread out. — Phyllis Diller

Benjamin felt himself on the verge of a proposal--with an effort he choked back the impulse. "You're just the
romantic age," she continued--"fifty. Twenty-five is too wordly-wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork;
forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is--oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is
the mellow age. I love fifty. — F Scott Fitzgerald

In any age, there is no shortage of people willing to embark on a hazardous adventure. Columbus and Magellan filled eight ships between them for voyages into the void. One hundred and fifty years ago, the possibilities offered by missionary service were limitless and first-rate. Later, Scott and Shackleton turned away droves after filling their crews for their desperate Antarctic voyages. In 1959 ... sailor H.W. Tilman, looking for a crew for a voyage in an old wooden yacht to the Southern Ocean, ran this ad in the London Times: "Hand [man] wanted for long voyage in small boat. No pay, no prospects, not much pleasure." Tilman received more replies than he could investigate, one from as far away as Saigon. — Peter Nichols

His view of me and my ways were expressed with some degree of force to our family physician who, when at the age of a hundred and fifty-three I came down with the mumps, having summoned the whole family and said that I would burst before morning, was met by a reassuring observation from Adam that he wouldn't believe I was dead even if I had been buried a year. "It is the good who die young, Doctor," he said. "On that principle this young malefactor will live to be the oldest man in the world. — John Kendrick Bangs

Leibniz never married; he had considered it at the age of fifty; but the person he had in mind asked for time to reflect. This gave Leibniz time to reflect, too, and so he never married. — Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle

When I started it still wasn't okay to be this age and still make this kind of music. And believe me, I consider our stuff to be much poppier than - we're not on like cutting edge, that kind of thing anymore. And even though we're not doing Britney Spears music or Nsync, it's still what I consider to be pop music. So that does give you a little bit more longevity, I guess. But if somebody told me I'd be getting up there and singing "Heartbreaker" at fifty I'd laugh. So I don't know, I have no idea. — Pat Benatar

I'm fifty-one years old, but I'm not through yet. I have lived a full life, and intend packing in quite a lot more. — Hedy Lamarr

A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. Another question: why do some people remain open and elastic into extreme old age, whereas others become rigid and unproductive before they're fifty? — Aldous Huxley

When you're a fifty-year-old woman, no one really bothers to look at you anymore, much less value your opinion. It's hard on the old ego. But damn, it does make it easy to get away with a lot. — Tess Gerritsen

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age. — Hosea Ballou

When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself. — Julian Barnes

So. Yes. We're all dying. We're all crumbling into the void, one cell at a time. We are disintegrating like sugar cubes in champagne. But only women have to pretend it isn't happening. Fifty-something men wander around with their guts flopped over their waistbands and their faces looking like a busted tramp's mattress in an underpass. They sprout nasal hair and chasm-like wrinkles, and go 'Ooof!' whenever they stand up or sit down. men visibly age, every day
but women are supposed to stop the decline at around 37, 38, and live out the next 30 or 40 years in some magical bubble where their hair is still shiny and chestnut, their face unlined, their lips puffy, and their tits up on the top third of the ribcage. — Caitlin Moran

To age, General Epanchin was in the very prime of life; that is, about fifty-five years of age, - the flowering time of existence, when real enjoyment of life begins. His — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In 1790, the average age of first menstruation for European girls was just about eighteen, almost fifty percent older than today. — Howard Means

We all accepted that this land was a gate to that other world, the realm of spirits and dreams and the Fair Folk, without any question. The place we grew up in was so full of magic that it was almost a part of everyday life - not to say you'd meet one of them every time you went out to pick berries, or draw water from your well, but everyone we knew had a friend of a friend who'd strayed too far into the forest, and disappeared; or ventured inside a ring of mushrooms, and gone away for a while, and come back subtly changed. Strange things could happen in those places. Gone for maybe fifty years you could be, and come back still a young girl; or away for no more than an instant by moral reckoning, and return wrinkled and bent with age. These tales fascinated us, but failed to make us careful. If it was going to happen to you, it would happen, whether you liked it or not. — Juliet Marillier

Nearly the physical size of Los Angeles, Bukchang housed fifty thousand prisoners who were kept in by, among many other things, a four-meter-high fence. If you were sent here, so was your entire family-the classic definition of guilt by association, which extended to infants, toddlers, teenagers, siblings, spouses, and grandparents. Babies born here shared the same guilt as their families. Unauthorized babies born here, because intercourse and pregnancies were strictly regulated, were killed. Age and personal culpability meant nothing, and a toddler and an ancient grand- mother were treated the same-brutally. — David Baldacci

Thenardier had just passed his fiftieth birthday; Madame Thenardier was approaching her forties, which is equivalent to fifty in a woman; so that there existed a balance of age between husband and wife. — Victor Hugo

Now, some guys' five minutes are worth other guys' fifty years, and while burning out in one brilliant supernova will send record sales through the roof, leave you living fast, dying young, leaving a beautiful corpse, there is something to be said for living. Personally, I like my gods old, grizzled and here. — Bruce Springsteen

Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can't afford is habit. — Carolyn Heilbrun

The common contaminated foods which would be the major source of Sr-90 might be classified into five grades- A, B, C, D, and E... The A food would be restricted to children and to pregnant women. The B food would be a high-priced food available to everybody. The C food would be a low priced food also available to everybody. Finally, the D food would be restricted to people over age forty or fifty... Most of these people would die of other causes before they got cancer. — Herman Kahn

In rich detail, Ken told us that on the second hole of the opening round, Hogan got stuck while standing over a putt. Hogan had the yips. "I can't take it back, Ken," Hogan said. "Nobody gives a shit, Ben," Ken said back. That bit of wise-guy humor was evidently all Hogan needed to hear: At age fifty-three and playing barely any tournament golf, he finished twelfth. Venturi finished three shots behind. Palmer was leading by seven with nine holes left and lost to Billy Casper in a playoff. Ken — Michael Bamberger

At the age of fifty-six Eleanor Stoddard was still a beautiful woman. She owned three hotels in France and another two in England. From nothing at all, she had built an empire. Eleanor had it all. Her one weakness was the young man sleeping beside her. — Barbara Taylor Bradford

At the beginning of the troubles of Saint Domingo, I felt that I was destined to great things. When I received this divine intimation, I was four and fifty years of age; I could neither read nor write. — Toussaint Louverture

I'm not ancient, darling. I'm only fifty. And when it comes to sex a woman of fifty can often outlast a man half her age. — Barbara Taylor Bradford

At the age of fifty he was beginning to discover, with a sense of panic, that his whole life had been in the nature of a hangover, with faintly unpleasant pleasures being atoned for by the dull unalleviated pain of guilt. Had he the solace of knowing that he was an alcoholic, things would have been brighter, because he had read somewhere that alcoholism was a disease; but he was not, he assured himself, alcoholic, only self-indulgent, and his disease, whatever it was, resided in shadier corners of his soul - where decisions were reached not through reason but by rationalization, and where a thin membranous growth of selfishness always seemed to prevent his decent motives from becoming happy actions. — William Styron

Maybe it's the age difference, but when my wife told me she was turned on by Fifty Shades of Grey, I thought she was talking about my hair color! — J. Thomas Steele

When I was a teenager, I looked at over-fifties with pity and unease: they walked too slow, they talked too slow, they watched TV instead of going out to movies and concerts, their idea of a great party was hotpot with the neighbors and tucked into bed after the eleven o'clock news. But - like most other fifty-, sixty-, and seventysomethings who are in relative good health - I didn't mind it so much when my turn came. Because the brain doesn't age, although its ideas about the world may harden and there's a greater tendency to run off at the mouth about how things were in the good old days. — Stephen King

Forty is ... an age at which people have histories and options. At thirty, they had perhaps less history. At fifty, perhaps fewer options. — Ellen Goodman

My blog is a celebration of the unexpected, settled, happy life I find myself living in Portland, Maine, at the ripe old age of fifty with someone I deeply love and am very happy with. That's part of why I started the blog. — Kate Christensen

You have to admit it's embarrassing that she's pregnant at thirty-three. And he's eleven years older. I feel sorry for their baby. Think of it - when the baby is our age your mother will be almost fifty and my father will be sixty. They'll be more like grandparents than parents. — Judy Blume

True majorities, in a TV-dominated and anti-intellectual age, may need sound bites and flashing lights and I am not against supplying such lures if they draw children into even a transient concern with science. But every classroom has one [Oliver] Sacks , one [Eric] Korn, or one [Jonathan] Miller , usually a lonely child with a passionate curiosity about nature, and a zeal that overcomes pressures for conformity. Do not the one in fifty deserve their institutions as well magic places, like cabinet museums, that can spark the rare flames of genius? — Stephen Jay Gould

I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life. - - - But when my father noticed that I could not do any work more than to drink, he engaged an expert palm-wine-tapster for me; he had no other work more than to tap palm-wine every day. So my father gave me a palm-tree farm which was nine miles square and it contained 560,000 palm-trees, and this palm-wine tapster was tapping one hundred and fifty kegs of palm-wine every morning, but before 2 o'clock p.m., I would have drunk it all; after that he would go and tap another 75 kegs. — Amos Tutuola

I caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror as we glided p. I looked as eroded as the groaning lift. What had happened to the fresh-faced belle from Boston, Mass.? The woman who stared back at me was at the dreaded age between forty-five and fifty, that no-man's land of sag, oncoming wrinkle, and stealthy approach of menopause.
"I hate this elevator, too," I said grimly.
Zoe grinned and pinched my cheek.
"Mom, even Gwyneth Paltrow would look like hell in that mirror."
I had to smile. That was such a Zoe-like remark. — Tatiana De Rosnay

You're just the romantic age," she continued- "fifty. Twenty-five is too worldly wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is- oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty." - Hildegarde — F Scott Fitzgerald

For those [observations] that I made in Leipzig in my youth and up to my 21st year, I usually call childish and of doubtful value. Those that I took later until my 28th year [i.e., until 1574] I call juvenile and fairly serviceable. The third group, however, which I made at Uraniborg during approximately the last 21 years with the greatest care and with very accurate instruments at a more mature age, until I was fifty years of age, those I call the observations of my manhood, completely valid and absolutely certain, and this is my opinion of them. — Tycho Brahe

Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out. — John Updike

From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie. — Hokusai Katsushika

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty. — Doris Lessing

Who ever he is, I agree with your mother," said Dad as he entered the kitchen. "Stay away from him. Stay away from them all until you're of marrying age. Once you reach a nice, mature fifty-four, gentlemen callers will be welcomed here. — Sarah Rees Brennan

Silenus's true age might be anywhere from ninety to a hundred and fifty standard years. If he were close to the latter age, the Consul knew, the odds were that the poet was quite mad. As — Dan Simmons

The direction in which the culture of an age develops is, humanly speaking, chosen by a few exceptionally intelligent men. The popular authors then pick up some of the main ideas, usually distorting and diluting them considerably, and finally fifty years or a century later the general viewpoint has seeped down to the whole populace. — Gordon H. Clark

There was no sign in the face of any intermediate stages in the aging process, no hint of the man of thirty or forty or fifty who had been left behind. Only adolescence and the age of sixty were represented. It was as though a seventeen-year-old had been withered and bleached by a blast of heat. — Kurt Vonnegut

From forty to fifty a man is at heart either a stoic or a satyr. — Arthur Wing Pinero

By contrast, my wife at fifty-two yeas old seems to me just as attractive as the day I first met her. If I were to say this out loud, she would say, 'Douglas, that's just a line. No one prefers wrinkles, no one prefers grey.' To which I'd reply, 'But none of this is a surprise. I've been expecting to watch you grow older ever since we met. Why should it trouble me? It's the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or fourty-three. It's that face.'
Perhaps she would have liked to hear this but I had never got around to saying it out loud. I had always presumed there would be time and now, sitting on the edge of the bed at four a.m., no longer listening out for burglars, it seemed that it might be too late. — David Nicholls

The ideal age for a boy to own a dog is between forty-five and fifty. — Robert Benchley

We recall that to the Cherokee, as to other people who have noticed how long it sometimes takes for humans to develop fully, adulthood comes
if it is coming at all
at the age of fifty-two. — Alice Walker

The Master said, At fifteen I set my heart upon learning.
At thirty, I had planted my feet firm upon the ground.
At forty, I no longer suffered from perplexities.
At fifty, I knew what were the biddings of Heaven.
At sixty, I heard them with docile ear.
At seventy, I could follow the dictates of my own heart; for what I desired no longer overstepped the boundaries of righ. — Confucius

He would be laughed at, that should go about to make a fine dancer out of a country hedger, at past fifty. And he will not have much better success, who shall endeavour, at that age, to make a man reason well, or speak handsomely, who has never been used to it, though you should lay before him a collection of all the best precepts of logic or oratory. — John Locke

He's a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man although not for a woman, as at my age a woman is an old maid but a man is not an old bachelor until he's fifty, and even then there's still hope for the ladies, as Mary Whitney used to say. — Margaret Atwood

By the age of twenty, you know you're not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you're not going to be a dentist or any kind of professional. And by thirty, darkness starts moving in- you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy and successful. By thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life, and you become resigned to your fate ...
... I mean, why do people live so long? What could be the difference between death at fifty-five and death at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five? Those extra years ... what benefit could they possibly have? Why do we go on living even though nothing new happens, nothing new is learned, and nothing new is transmitted? At fifty-five, your story's pretty much over. — Douglas Coupland

For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well. — J.M. Coetzee

How old is Old? It is interesting how, as we advance in years, we push the boundaries of what we consider "old age."
"I am so depressed." my friend Irma told me the other day.
When I asked why, she put her hands up in despair and answered, "I am turning thirty next week. I never thought I would get there."
No, none of us ever thinks that we will get "there."
What? Becoming thirty or forty or fifty? Or even older? No way! That happens to others - not me! But as the years pile up, you'll find yourself kicking the idea of "old" farther and farther down the road. — Brigitte Nioche

I think living to be one hundred would be great, but living to fifty twice would be so much better. — Barbara Johnson

I would rather have a young fellow too much than too little dressed; the excess on that side will wear off, with a little age and reflection; but if he is negligent at twenty, he will be a sloven at forty, and stink at fifty years old. Dress yourself fine where others are fine, and plain where others are plain; but take care always that your clothes are well made and fit you, for otherwise they will give you a very awkward air. — Lord Chesterfield

But when the call came from Shirley Pedler to help in organizing the Utah Coalition Against the Death Penalty, she knew she would go out in the world again with her freaky blond hair, blond to everyone's disbelief - at the age of fifty-four, go out in her denims and chin-length-hanging-down-straight vanilla hair to that Salt Lake world where nobody would ever make the mistake of thinking she was a native Utah lady inasmuch as Utah was the Beehive State. The girls went big for vertical hair-dos, pure monuments to shellac. — Norman Mailer

Regal Black Swan told me that in this world of personalities, there is always a duality. I had interpreted it as good versus bad, slavery or freedom, conformity and its opposite. But that is not the case. It is not black or white; it is always shades of gray. And most important, all the gray is moving in a progressive pattern back to the originator. I teased about our age and told him I needed another fifty years just for comprehension. — Marlo Morgan

Aunt Viney (short for 'Lavinia'), viewed in the grey daylight that came in through the dining-room window, was always a rather imposing spectacle. She was fifty-one years of age, and had large staring eyes, quick bustling movements, more than a tendency to stoutness, a menacing optimism that was not quite matched by a sense of humour, and the most decided opinions upon everything. She was an excellent 'manager', and for more than a decade had lived at the Manse with her sister and brother-in-law and their children (there had been boys at one time), looking after them all with undoubted if rather relentless competence. — James Hilton

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age.In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself ... A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we not take a trip; a trip takes us. — John Steinbeck

Her body was a mix of thin and plump, her skin lined and unlined, in that rounding-the-corner-to-fifty way. Age and youth, he chanted silently, youth and age, sing their songs on the very same stage. — Lorrie Moore

The truth is, part of me is every age. I'm a three-year-old, I'm a five-year-old, I'm a thirty-seven-year-old, I'm a fifty-year-old. I've been through all of them, and I know what it's like. I delight in being a child when it's appropriate to be a child. I delight in being a wise old man when it's appropriate to be a wise old man. Think of all I can be! I am every age, up to my own. — Mitch Albom

A Conference Board survey released in January of 2010 found that only 45 percent of workers surveyed were happy at their jobs, the lowest in 22 years of polling.2 Depression rates today are ten times higher than they were in 1960.3 Every year the age threshold of unhappiness sinks lower, not just at universities but across the nation. Fifty years ago, the mean onset age of depression was 29.5 years old. Today, it is almost exactly half that: 14.5 years old. — Shawn Achor

The air is an extremely dangerous, jealous and exacting mistress. Once under the spell most lovers are faithful to the end, which is not always old age. Even those masters and princes of aerial fighting, the survivors of fifty mortal duels in the high air who have come scatheless through the War and all its perils, have returned again and again to their love and perished too often in some ordinary commonplace flight undertaken for pure amusement. — Winston Churchill

Physically, I'm not tough. I may think tough. I would say I'm kinda tough and calloused inside. I could use a foot more in height and fifty more pounds and fifteen years off my age and then God help all you bastards. — Humphrey Bogart

Our feelings probably are not less strong at fifty than they were ten or fifteen years before; but they have changed their objects, and dwell on far different prospects. At five-and-thirty a man thinks of what his own existence is; when the maturity of age has grown into its autumn, he is wrapt up in that of others. The loss of wife or child then becomes more deplorable, as being impossible to repair; for no fresh connection can give us back the companion of our earlier years, nor a "new-sprung race" compensate for that, whose career we hoped to see run. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be ... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages ... the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide ... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup. — Madeleine L'Engle

Forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on. — Julian Barnes

It was becoming more and more evident that Salem was a town that celebrated individuality, a real live-and-let-live kind of place. Melody felt a gut punch of regret. Her old nose would have fit in here.
"Look!" She pointed at the multicolored car whizzing by. Its black door were from a Mercedes coupe, the white hood from a BMW; the silver trunk was Jaguar, the red convertible top was Lexus, the whitewall tires were Bentley, the sound system was Bose, and the music was classical. A hood ornament from each model dangled from the rear view mirror. Its license plate appropriately read MUTT.
"That car looks like a moving Benton ad."
"Or a pileup on Rodeo drive." Candace snapped a picture with her iPhone and e-mailed to her friends back home. They responded instantly with a shot of what they were doing. It must have involved the mall because Candace picked up her pace and began asking anyone under the age of fifty where the cool people hung out. — Lisi Harrison

By the age of fifty, you have made yourself what you are, and if it is good, it is better than your youth. — Marya Mannes

Open the "book of life" and you will see a "text" of about 3 billion letters, filling about 10,000 copies of the new York Times Sunday edition. Each line looks something like this:
TCTAGAAACA ATTGCCATTG TTTCTTCTCA TTTTCTTTTC ACGGGCAGCC
These letters, abbreviations of the molecules making up the DNA, could easily mean that the anonymous donor whose genome has been sequenced will be bald by the age of fifty. Or they could reveal that he will develop Alzheimer's disease by seventy. We are repeatedly told that everything from our personality to future medical history is encoded in this book. Can you read it? I doubt it. Let me share a secret with you: Neither can biologists or doctors. — Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

My dear Mrs. Ali, I would hardly refer to you as old," he said. "You are in what I would call the very prime flowering of mature womanhood." It was a little grandiose but he hoped to surprise a blush. Instead she laughed out loud at him. "I have never heard anyone try to trowel such a thick layer of flattery on the wrinkles and fat deposits of advanced middle age, Major," she said. "I am fifty-eight years old and I think I have slipped beyond flowering. I can only hope now to dry out into one of those everlasting bouquets. — Helen Simonson

He had a high opinion of his own insight, a weakness excusable in him as he was fifty, an age at which a clever man of the world of established position can hardly help taking himself rather seriously. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of fifty. — Alexander Hamilton

If the union of these States, and the liberties of this people, shall be lost, it is but little to any one man of fifty-two yearsof age, but a great deal to the thirty millions of people who inhabit these United States, and to their posterity in all coming time. — Abraham Lincoln

From birth to age eighteen a girl needs good parents. From eighteen to thirty-five she needs good looks. From thirty-five to fifty-five she needs a good personality. From fifty-five on she needs cash. — Sophie Tucker

A goodly portly man, i' faith, and a corpulent; of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage; and, as I think, his age some fifty, or, by'r Lady, inclining to threescore; and now I remember me, his name is Falstaff. — William Shakespeare

Competitiveness is a personality thing and competitive people don't become pushovers the day they turn fifty. — Hale Irwin

I'm older now, I'm a man getting near middle age, putting on a little fat and I still love to walk along Fifth Avenue at three o'clock on the east side of the street between Fiftieth and Fifty-seventh streets, they're all out then, making believe they're shopping, in their furs and their crazy hats, everything all concentrated from all over the world into eight blocks, the best furs, the best clothes, the handsomest women, out to spend money and feeling good about it, looking coldly at you, making believe they're not looking at you as you go past. — Irwin Shaw

Past age fifty-five, I experienced the advancement of exquisite fabric choices, paint distinctions that were celestial in scope, yet so many other man-made objects, such as people, became drab, redundant and boring. — Carol A. Elliott

Old age doth in sharp pains abound; We are belabored by the gout, Our blindness is a dark profound, Our deafness each one laughs about. Then reason's light with falling ray Doth but a trembling flicker cast. Honor to age, ye children pay! Alas! my fifty years are past! — Pierre-Jean De Beranger

I don't have that many days left," he said as we sat together in the library. "Why would I want to spend them on matters of drainage and overdue accounts? I must husband my hours and spend every one of them wisely. I regret that I didn't come to this realization until I reached fifty years of age. Calpurnia, you would do well to adopt such an attitude at an earlier age. Spend each of your allotted hours with care. — Jacqueline Kelly

No matter who you were in sixteenth-century Europe, you could be sure of two things: you would be lucky to reach fifty years of age, and you could expect a life of discomfort and pain. Old age tires the body by thirty-five, Erasmus lamented, but half the population did not live beyond the age of twenty. There were doctors and there was medicine, but there does not seem to have been a great deal of healing. Anyone who could afford to seek a doctor's aid did so eagerly, but the doctor was as likely to maim or kill as to cure. His potions were usually noxious and sometimes fatal - but they could not have been as terrible and traumatic as the contemporary surgical methods. The surgeon and the Inquisitor differed only in their motivation: otherwise, their batteries of knives, saws, and tongs for slicing, piercing, burning, and amputating were barely distinguishable. Without any anesthetic other than strong liquor, an operation was as bad as the torments of hell. — Philip Ball