Quotes & Sayings About Being Sixty

Time the healer (Time the killer) flies faster here in Rome than anywhere else in the world, I believe ... here in Rome there are or seem to be strange differences in the value of things. For instance, the pound weight, instead of being sixteen ounces, is only twelve; the foot measure, instead of being twelve inches, is only nine; and I think, in some way, this must apply to time as well, so that the hour, instead of being sixty minutes long, is only forty-five! — Charlotte Saunders Cushman

I know you worry about getting older, about not being the prettiest guy in the room anymore."

And I worried about aging, but not how he thought. I had never presumed I was prettiest, just one of many. My only concern now was that Sam Kage thought I was hot.

"But there will never come a time when that will be the case," he said, pressing soft kisses to the side of my neck. I leaned my head back so he could reach more of my throat. "To me, Jory," he said, "you're more beautiful now than you ever have been, and I can't wait to see what you're gonna look like at forty and fifty and sixty, and God willing a lot more numbers after that."

"Many after that," I assured him as my eyes drifted open so I could look up into his smoky-blue ones.

"The most important thing is that you're mine, you belong to me," he said, his hands pressing me closer before he kissed me. — Mary Calmes

Because I have sixty years of being a professional composer, conductor, musician, whatever, and you develop a lot of friendships and you get involved with a lot of sort of long-term commitments and obligations. — Gunther Schuller

Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the infinite, so long are you young. — Samuel Ullman

From forty-nine to fifty-six this aloneness becomes your focus of being. Everything else in the world loses meaning. The only remaining meaningful thing is this aloneness. From fifty-six to sixty-three you become absolutely what you are going to become: the potential blossoms, and from sixty-three to seventy you start getting ready to drop the body. Now you know you are not the body, you know you are not the mind either. The body was known as separate from you somewhere around the time when you were thirty-five. That the mind is separate from you was known near the time when you were forty-nine. Now, everything else drops except the witnessing self. Just the pure awareness, the flame of awareness remains with you - and this is the preparation for death. — Osho

But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull, as ever admit it; and I do believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we might make life more fun. — Sinclair Lewis

Oh, once you've been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn't want you back." Veronica settled herself in a rattan chair and adjusted her hat just so. "We - by whom I mean anyone over sixty - commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman's memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight. — David Mitchell

The fact is, parents and schools and cultures can and do shape people. The most important influence in my life, outside of my family, was my high school journalism teacher, Hattie M. Steinberg. She pounded the fundamentals of journalism into her students
not simply how to write a lead or accurately transcribe a quote but, more important, how to comport yourself in a professional way. She was nearing sixty at the time I had her as my teacher and high school newspaper adviser in the late 1960s. She was the polar opposite of "cool," but we hung around her classroom like it was the malt shop and she was Wolfman Jack. None of us could have articulated it then, but it was because we enjoyed being harangued by her, disciplined by her, and taught by her. She was a woman of clarity and principles in an age of uncertainty. I sit up straight just thinking about her! — Thomas L. Friedman

To be a living sacrifice will involve all my time. God wants me to live every minute for Him in accordance with His will and purpose, sixty minutes of every hour, twenty-four hours of every day, being available to Him. No time can be considered as my own, or as "off-duty" or "free." I cannot barter with God about how much time I can give to serve Him. Whatever I am doing, be it a routine salaried job, or housework at home, be it holiday time and free, or after-work Christian youth activities, all should be undertaken for Him, to reveal His indwelling presence to those around me. The example of my life must be as telling as my preaching if He is to be honored. — Helen Roseveare

I wouldn't have known when I was a teenager that when I was coming up to being a sixty-year-old woman that I'd be making music, I'd be recording music, talking about music, and incorporating my views on the world into the music-making. So it's a very rarefied place to be, and I'm very grateful for that. — Annie Lennox

The thing about marriage is that it requires so much compromise. And, naturally, someone is going to come into the marriage being better at The Yield. In fact, I say a lengthy marriage requires it. Someone is always going to come in with horns down and nostrils flaring. That requires that the other person run away as quickly as possible while waving the white flag. Certainly not the red flag, because I don't want to be that poor woman who accidentally ran over her spouse sixty-five times. Someone is the bull. Someone must be the china shop. We all have important roles to play. — Jen Mann

seems that men are at their best between sixty and seventy, the reason being that in such occupations a wide experience of other men is essential. — Bertrand Russell

Sixty-four percent of managers in the U.S. are afraid to be alone in a room with a woman. Mentoring is all about being alone in a room with someone. Let's start talking about this honestly. The lack of equal access is the silent killer for women and no one wants to talk about it. — Sheryl Sandberg

My murderer has deprived me of very little. There are the years I will not live, but set against the vastness of eternity, the time I've lost is but a moment. What is forever is the same as if I'd lived another sixty years or more: those I loved will always be a part of me, and I will never cease being a part of those who loved me. I did not want to speak — Adam Mitzner

So I'm beginning to think that when I'm fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety years old I still won't be any closer to being wise and knowledgeable. Perhaps people on their deathbeds, who have had long, long lives, seen it all, travelled the world, have had kids, been through their own personal traumas, beaten their demons and learned the harsh lessons of life will be thinking : God, people in heaven must really know it all. — Cecelia Ahern

Beautiful self-delusion: Isn't that what being young is all about? You think you're immortal until one day when you're around sixty, it hits you: you see and Ingmar Bergman-y specter of death and you do some soul searching and possibly adopt a kid in need. You resolve to live the rest of your life in a way you can be proud of. But I am not one of those young people. I've been obsessed with death since I was born. — Lena Dunham

Time is what I'm giving you," he said, staring down at her. His hand curved beneath her chin, compelling her to look at him. "There's only one way for me to prove that I will love you and be faithful to you for the rest of my life. And that's by loving you and being faithful to you for the rest of my life. Even if you don't want me. Even if you choose not to be with me. I'm giving you all the time I have left. I vow to you that from this moment on, I will never touch another woman, or give my heart to anyone but you. If I have to wait sixty years, not a minute will have been wasted- because I'll have spent all of them loving you. — Lisa Kleypas

I do not find that I grow any older. Being arrived at seventy, and considering that by traveling further in the same road I should probably be led to the grave, I stopped short, turned about, and walked back again; which having done these four years, you may now call me sixty-six. Advise those old friends of ours to follow my example; keep up your spirits, and that will keep up your bodies. — Benjamin Franklin

How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten? — Logan Pearsall Smith

It wasn't the most rational move, but I was hungry. I was angry. I hated being taken advantage of, and I didn't particularly like bald eagles. The blade hit the bird's back and stuck there like superglue. I tried to pull it away, but it wouldn't move. My hands were grafted to the sword grip. "Okay, then," the eagle squawked, "we can play it that way." He took off through the food court at sixty miles an hour, dragging me along behind him. — Rick Riordan

I can't imagine being sixty years of age and playing music I wrote when I was in my twenties. I would rather sail the sea of consequence to new lands. Laps around the shallow end of the pool, not for me. — Henry Rollins

I helped lift a sixty-five-year-old woman out of the bloody machine that had just torn four fingers off her hand, and I still hear her cries - "Jesus and Mary, I won't be able to work again!"
The factory. Long live the factory! Today, even as new factories are being built, the civilization that made the factory into a cathedral is dying. And somewhere, right now, other young men and women are driving through the night into the heart of the emergent Third Wave civilization. Our task from here on will be to join, as it were, their quest for tomorrow. — Alvin Toffler

The rules are the rules for a reason. Being a Shadowhunter, a good one, is about more than just training fourteen hours a day and knowing sixty-five ways of killing a man with salad tongs. — Cassandra Clare

As French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre noted sixty years ago, as soon as we imagine we're being watched, we start to notice how we're behaving, and we begin to imagine how other people might respond if they were watching. — Adam Alter

Being sixty-five ... became a crossroads. We said, we have nothing to lose, so we can raise hell. — Maggie Kuhn

I loathed being sixty-four, and I will hate being sixty-five. I don't let on about such things in person; in person, I am cheerful and Pollyannaish. But the honest truth is that it's sad to be over sixty. The long shadows are everywhere - friends dying and battling illness. A miasma of melancholy hangs there, forcing you to deal with the fact that your life, however happy and successful, has been full of disappointments and mistakes, little ones and big ones. There are dreams that are never quite going to come true, ambitions that will never quite be realized. There are, in short, regrets. Edith Piaf was famous for singing a song called "Non, je ne regrette rien." It's a good song. I know what she meant. I can get into it; I can make a case that I regret nothing. After all, most of my mistakes turned out to be things I survived, or turned into funny stories, or, on occasion, even made money from. But — Nora Ephron

Finnick Odair is something of a living legend in Panem. Since he won the Sixty-fifth Hunger Games when he was only fourteen, he's still one of the youngest victors. Being from District 4, he was a Career, so the odds were already in his favour, but what no trainer could claim to have given him was his extraordinary beauty. Tall, athletic, with golden skin and bronze-coloured hair and those incredible eyes. — Suzanne Collins

But I hate being a grandfather. It's indecent. In my mind's eye, I'm still twenty-five. Thirty-three max. Certainly not sixty-seven, reeking of decay and dashed hopes. My breath sour. My limbs in dire need of a lube job. And now that I've been blessed with a plastic hip-socket replacement, I'm no longer even biodegradable. Environmentalists will protest my burial. — Mordecai Richler

The second simultaneous thing Reacher was doing was playing around with a little mental arithmetic. He was multiplying big numbers in his head. He was thirty-seven years and eight months old, just about to the day. Thirty-seven multiplied by three hundred and sixty-five was thirteen thousand five hundred and five. Plus twelve days for twelve leap years was thirteen thousand five hundred and seventeen. Eight months counting from his birthday in October forward to this date in June was two hundred and forty-three days. Total of thirteen thousand seven hundred and sixty days since he was born. Thirteen thousand seven hundred and sixty days, thirteen thousand seven hundred and sixty nights. He was trying to place this particular night somewhere on that endless scale. In terms of how bad it was. Truth was, it wasn't the best night he had ever passed, but it was a long way from being the worst. A very long way. — Lee Child

On board ship there are many sources of joy of which the land knows nothing. You may flirt and dance at sixty; and if you are awkward in the turn of a valse, you may put it down to the motion of the ship. You need wear no gloves, and may drink your soda-and-brandy without being ashamed of it. — Anthony Trollope

For someone who's had a life like mine, living beyond sixty is just being stubborn. — Daniel Galera

One attribute of the human being is the potential to keep on growing, to keep on developing. And I think there's room in each of us. I hate to hear someone say, oh well, that man or that woman is sixty or seventy or eighty or ninety or a hundred, so he's finished. There's always something that can be transformed on the upward spiral. — William Segal

I write everything I do. On the average, it takes you about sixty months from the first molecule of an idea to it being in front of an audience. I'm actually somebody that creates their own stuff. — Mike Myers

And Will knew what it was to see his daemon. As she flew down to the sand, he felt his heart tighten and release in a way he never forgot. Sixty years and more would go by, and as an old man he would still feel some sensations as bright and fresh as ever: Lyra's fingers putting the fruit between his lips under the gold-and-silver trees; her warm mouth pressing against his; his daemon being torn from his unsuspecting breast as they entered the world of the dead; and the sweet rightfulness of her coming back to him at the edge of the moonlight dunes. — Philip Pullman

She was almost sixty and she had not been to London, or Paris, or Rome, and there was no going there now. Yes, she was balanced, as she had gotten into the habit of congratulating herself for being. But, she saw, she was balanced on a very narrow perch. — Jane Smiley

In fact, if you're not prepared to die when you're almost sixty, then I would say you've been falling down on your philosophical responsibilities as a grown-up human being. — Barbara Ehrenreich

In the past few years, I have made a thrilling discovery ... that until one is over sixty, one can never really learn the secret of living. One can then begin to live, not simply with the intense part of oneself, but with one's entire being. — Ellen Glasgow

Don't be afraid of being laughed at for failing. Fear being sixty-five years-old and never trying. — Troy Gathers

We - by whom I mean anyone over sixty - commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. — David Mitchell

At fifty, that is in 1880, I formulated the idea of unity, without being able to render it. At sixty, I am beginning to see the possibility of rendering it. — Camille Pissarro

The years fell away from him till, in an instant, from being a rather poorly preserved, liverish greybeard of sixty-five or so, he became a sprightly lad of twenty-one in a world of springtime and flowers and laughing brooks. In other words, taking it by and large, George felt pretty good. The impossible had happened; Heaven had sent him an adventure, and he didn't care if it snowed. — P.G. Wodehouse

Again, after years of research, I'm convinced that we all numb and take the edge off. The question is, does our _ (eating, drinking, spending, gambling, saving the world, incessant gossiping, perfectionism, sixty-hour workweek) get in the way of our authenticity? Does it stop us from being emotionally honest and setting boundaries and feeling like we're enough? Does it keep us from staying out of judgment and from feeling connected? Are we using _ to hide or escape from the reality of our lives? Understanding — Brene Brown

Today is my grandfather's birthday."
"How old is he?"
"Sixty-three. It's hard to believe he was once a human being. — Charles M. Schulz

I've been told a time or two that I spiral.
Zero to sixty in the blink of an eye.
One second, I'm perfectly fine, laughing, smiling. The next, I've got my hands around someone's throat, choking the life out of them.
There's probably a name for whatever's wrong with me, but I've got no interest in a diagnosis. I don't need treatment. Until people stop being ignorant, I'm going to keep on getting pissed. No little mood-stabilizing pill can stop that from happening.
But still, sometimes, I can feel it. I feel myself spiraling hard, and falling far, making mountains out of molehills that even I struggle to climb.
And today? I'm feeling it.
My hands shake.
I can hardly see straight. — J.M. Darhower

Arrange these threats in ascending order of deadliness: wolves, vending machines, cows, domestic dogs and toothpicks. I will save you the trouble: they have been ordered already.
The number of deaths known to have been caused by wolves in North America in the twenty-first century is one: if averaged out, that would be 0.08 per year. The average number of people killed in the US by vending machines is 2.2 (people sometimes rock them to try to extract their drinks, with predictable results). Cows kill some twenty people in the US, dogs thirty-one. Over the past century, swallowing toothpicks caused the deaths of around 170 Americans a year. Though there are sixty thousand wolves in North America, the risk of being killed by one is almost nonexistent. — George Monbiot

As I write this, I am sixty-four years old, with, I hope, many more years to live and lots more to do. And, by the way, no face work. I know you're thinking, "No kidding." But cosmetic surgery just doesn't work on a man. Were I to take the plunge, no one would ever say, "Whoa, who's that really hot thirty-eight-year-old dude?" They'd say, "Who's that sixty-four-year-old who's been in a fire?" Being — Martin Short

Looking back over sixty-odd years, life is like a piece of string with knots in it, the knots being those moments that live in the mind forever, and the intervals being hazy, half-recalled times when I have a fair idea of what was happenng, in a general way, but cannot be sure of dates or places or even the exact order in which events took place. — George MacDonald Fraser

I have a problem about being nearly sixty: I keep waking up in the morning and thinking I'm thirty-one. — Elizabeth Janeway