Quotes & Sayings About Forty Years Old

Altogether forty-five Emperors had claimed the Spear of Destiny as their possession between the coronation in Rome of Charlemagne and the fall of the old German Empire exactly a thousand years later. And what a pagentry it was! THe Spear had passed like the very finger of destiny through the millenium forever creating new patterns of fate which had again and again changed the entire history of Europe ... According to the legend associated with the Spear of Longinus, the claimant to this talisman of power has a choice between the service of two opposing Spirits in the fulfilment of his world historic aims
a Good and an Evil Spirit. — Trevor Ravenscroft

His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.
His large head was pink, his brown hair thin and dry. His face was babyish in slumber, despite his wrinkles and the red spectacle-dents on the slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed; his cheeks were pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless upon the khaki-colored blanket was slightly puffy. — Sinclair Lewis

One of the reasons I am happy now is that I did the work I had always dreamed of doing. But I didn't start doing it seriously and professionally until I was forty years old. — Ellen Gilchrist

Each time they meet, they have more to discuss, and so they talk, quietly revealing themselves with and without language, their eyes moving like their hands over the plates of food between them....As he walks away from these visits, his heart almost bursts from happiness and regret. He would give anything to have made different choices. He is making those choices now, but he is forty-six years old. Sometimes he is haunted by the thought that it's all come too late. Other times he thinks, No, what is happening now could never have happened before; I was too young and too fearful. The paradox fascinates him--as the old loyalties desiccate and the danger intensifies, he feels lighter and younger than he has in years. — Karen Connelly

It was him, thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, & forty watts too dim maybe, but him. — Michael Chabon

The years passed unnoticed and unremembered, and one autumn morning I found myself suddenly forty-five years old. It was a time for weighing youthful hopes against mature accomplishment, for it was quite certain that I had by then done all I was ever going to do. Sitting alone at my desk that evening of my forty-fifth birthday I asked that least original of introspective questions: Where had it all gone? And the somewhat less banal question: What, after all, had it been? My — Trevanian

He didn't move, didn't blink. He didn't seem like a man who heard no too often. Too bad. But he must have found something he liked, because he slowly undid his tie, then unbuttoned his shirt.

She would not drool.

He didn't have an ounce of fat on him. Austin had said Morgan was forty years old, but he didn't look it. Nor did he have the body of a twenty-year-old man. Callie didn't want that anyway. His body had aged beautifully and was clearly well cared for. He had some hair on his chest, but not much. The hair on his belly trailed down to beneath his dress pants and Callie did her best not to swallow her tongue.

She persevered.

Barely. — Carrie Ann Ryan

My breakdancing crew used to go to the mall and squat a piece of cardboard there; we had our jam box, and I'd spin on my head and make about forty bucks a day, which was pretty good back then. I was only 14 years old, so I would chase the girls around the mall and eat some pizza and have some change left over. — Vanilla Ice

I don't fight old men, he said. That was strange. No one had ever called me old before. I remember laughing, but there was shock behind my laughter. Weeks before, talking with Aethelflaed, I had mocked her because she was staring at her face in a great silver platter. She was worried because she had lines about her eyes and she had responded to my mockery by thrusting the plate at me, and I had looked at my reflection and seen that my beard was gray. I remember staring at it as she laughed at me, and I did not feel old even though my wounded leg could be treacherously stiff. Was that how people saw me? As an old man? Yet I was forty-five years old that year, so yes, I was an old man. — Bernard Cornwell

The chief tragic event of the old man's life, so far as I could judge, was his mishap with a certain goose, which lived and died some twenty or forty years ago: a goose of most promising figure, but which, at table, proved so inveterately tough, that the carving-knife would make no impression on its carcase, and it could only be divided with an axe and handsaw. — Anonymous

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead? — Irvin D. Yalom

When it comes to breaking old habits and starting new ones, remember to be patient with yourself. If you've spent twenty, thirty, or forty years or more repeating the behaviors you're now trying to change, you've got to expect it's going to take time and effort before you see lasting results. — Darren Hardy

I'm forty-six years old and I don't care who knows it, but what I will tell you is that when a woman is forty-six and has lived her life the way she's wanted to live it, she knows everything there is to know about what to do in the sack. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

But Alfred could not live long. He was already an old man, well past forty years, and now he was looking to the future. He — Bernard Cornwell

Won't the new 'Suggested for Mature Audience' protect our youngsters from such films? I don't believe so. I know many forty-five-year old men with the mentalities of six-year-olds, and my feeling is that they should not see such pictures, either. — Shirley Temple

It's different now but I enjoy it more than I did then. I think I appreciate it more now and I love playing acoustically. This is the way I started. Herb and I met each other forty years ago when we were both eighteen years old, playing bluegrass, and that's what drew me into music, and I enjoyed every particular part of my career. But now I enjoy it because it's the twilight of my career, where I can play what I want and I can play when I want and where I want. And that's the greatest part it all. So it's sort of a right that I've earned. I can record records the way I want to. — Chris Hillman

You live that long, things start happening to you. You get too impressed with yourself. Ends up, you think you're God. Suddenly the little people, thirty, maybe forty years old, well, they don't really matter anymore. You've seen whole societies rise and fall, and you start to feel you're standing outside it all, and none of it really matters to you. And maybe you'll start snuffing those little people, just like picking daisies, if they get under your feet. — Richard K. Morgan

I wanted to say sorry, I wanted to tell her I could not forget the roundup, the camp, Michel's death, and the direct train to Auschwitz that had taken her parents away forever. Sorry for what? he had retaliated, why should I, an American, feel sorry, hadn't my fellow countrymen freed France in June 1944? I had nothing to be sorry for, he laughed.
I had looked at him straight in the eyes.
Sorry for not knowing. Sorry for being forty-five years old and not knowing. — Tatiana De Rosnay

I'm very pleased with each advancing year. It stems back to when I was forty. I was a bit upset about reaching that milestone, but an older friend consoled me. 'Don't complain about growing old - many, many people do not have that privilege.' — Earl Warren

But Zelda was never about plot. Indeed, one's head could explode if all the games were considered one story, since Link is always meeting Zelda and villainous Gannon for the first time. Imagine trying to explain why James Bond has stayed forty years old for forty years, while changing faces and hair color. Better to accept the story as a constant retelling, and don't dwell on continuity matters. Mario has made a cottage industry of jokes about how Bowser had only one playbook - kidnap the princess - and this time it'll work! He's utterly incapable of coming up with any other plan. Aside from that one time he obtained a degree in hotel management. — Jeff Ryan

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

I feel great. I feel younger. And I don't feel anything at all. I don't know who knows, but right now I'm, how, how many years have I, fifty five, something like that. Forty three years old. And I feel like seventeen, like twenty five years ago. — Olga Korbut

The first thing I did when I was forty years old, I put handcuffs on and I jumped off Alcatraz prison and swam to San Francisco handcuffed. That made national publicity. Then, there were three or four years where I would do more difficult feats. Another birthday I towed a thousand pound boat across the Golden Gate. On my 65th Birthday I towed 65 boats a mile and a half in Tokyo. On my 70th Birthday I towed 70 boats with 70 people in it with my feet and hands tied a mile and a half in Long Beach ... My next Birthday I will be 93. I'm gonna tow my wife across the bathtub. — Jack LaLanne

My older son who is, I think, here tonight, is forty-one years old. Which is odd because so am I. — Robert B. Parker

Forty years ago my mother died," he said. "She captured by Comanches, nine years old. Love Indian and wild life so well, no want to go back to white folks. All same people anyway, God say. I love my mother. — S.C. Gwynne

We'll never know. In the summer of 1971, against the advice of his mother, Howard Myers took a vacation to Florida. The combination of the heat and his medical condition combined to give him a massive heart attack which killed him. He was forty-one years old. There — Howard L. Myers

There was a point where if you had told me I was going to be a national morning anchor, I would probably have been terrified. But now, I feel prepared. I've been in the business for almost 20 years now. I'm almost forty years old and I've been doing this for a long time, so I felt like, "Okay, I'm ready to do this." — Ainsley Earhardt

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

It doesn't bother me," I said. "If you don't mind looking forty years old at twenty, smelling like an ashtray, and getting lung cancer, why should I? — Michelle Hodkin

I'm still afflicted with the malady of research. I don't like what I do, and I paint it out, and paint it out again. I hope this mania will come to an end ... I'm like a child at school. The white page must always be evenly written and slap! bang! and there's a blot! I'm still blotting and I'm forty years old. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

And if I say to you that I am glad of everything we have done together, and sorry that we will not be here together in forty years, laughing at a faded photo of you impersonating a lion, it having withered well, you less so, as we stand fabulously old, in a city that understands what spirit it takes to be old, to be beautiful, to be much looked at, to be itself, to be never quite caught, to have a past, to be content, to have seen much, to have remained, to have continued ... — Jeanette Winterson

radiocarbon dating works only for objects up to forty thousand or so years old. Curiously, — Bill Bryson

Rosalia is dressed in raven clothes forty years too old for her, so that she seems to be in mourning for her life ... — Penelope Gilliatt

What is it with me and guys? Do I come on too strong? Why do none of them want to stick around? I'm gonna be forty years old and out on a date with some man, and we'll make out, then he'll tell me we're not meant to be, and I'll go home to my fourteen cats. — Miranda Kenneally

They had painted a lady leaning her arms on the sill of the window. This lady was waiting for a husband. Her flesh was slack and she was some forty-five years old. Perhaps she had been waiting since she was fifteen. A rose and mauve lady that had not yet gathered her flesh and her beauty into dark clothes, and still waited, like a rose stripped of its petals, with her faded colors and her artificial smile, bitter as a grimace. — Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio

An actress without talent, forty years old, ate a partridge for dinner, and I felt sorry for the partridge, for it occurred to me that in its life it had been more talented, more sensible, and more honest than the actress. — Anton Chekhov

After all, at almost forty-three-years old, his brother — Trudy J. Smith

Thinking of Macintosh's reaction to Veronica, Grant felt a wave of empathy. "Poor kid's going to be mooning like a puppy for a month. Did you have to smile at him?"
"Really,Grant.He can't be more than fifteen."
"Old enough to break out in a sweat," he commented.
"Hormones," she murmured as she found Fairfield's sparse selection of wine. "They just need time to balance."
Grant's gaze drifted down and focused as she bent over. "It should only take thirty or forty years," he muttered. — Nora Roberts

One day you gone look up and realize that you will be forty years old still calling on 'options' and the rest of us will have husbands or potential husbands and a few children. — Nat L. Johns

Then to give the kids a historical perspective, Chacko told them about the earth woman. He made them imagine that the earth - 4600 million years old - was a 46 year old woman- as old as Aleyamma teaacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of earth woman's life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The earth woman was 11 yrs old when the first single celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty five - just 8 months ago - when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it, began only 2 hrs ago in the earth woman's life ... — Arundhati Roy

ONCE I STOOD on the bank of a rice paddy in rural Sichuan Province, and a lean and aging Chinese peasant, wearing a faded forty-year-old blue jacket issued by the Mao government in the early years of the Revolution, stood knee deep in water and apropos of absolutely nothing shouted defiantly at me, We Chinese invented many things! — Mark Kurlansky

... imagine that the earth - four thousand six hundred million years old - [were] a forty-six-year-old woman ... . It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman's life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old ... when the first single-celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty-five - just eight months ago - when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman's life ... . It was an awe-inspiring and humbling thought ... that the whole of contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge - was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman's eye. — Arundhati Roy

About the last thing I ever wanted in life was a knighthood, and even today some forty years after the event, I find it difficult to come to terms with a life where old and valued friends insist on calling me 'Sir' instead of Don, simply because they think it is protocol. But I have consciously shouldered these burdens because I felt that I was the medium through which cricket could achieve a higher status and gain maximum support from the people, not only in Australia but throughout the world. — Donald Bradman

She might not do it tonight, and she might not do it with that French boy, but she was going to get laid, and soon, because she was forty-three years old and she damn well needed it. — Victoria Dahl

In my writers' room, which is mostly men, I get a lot of questions like "What would be the quickest way to pass as a seemingly normal guy between the ages of twenty-five and forty years old?" — Mindy Kaling

That is my conviction of forty years. I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. I tell all old men that to their face, all these venerable old men, all these silver-haired and reverend seniors! I tell the whole world that to its face! I have a right to say so, for I shall go on living to sixty myself. To seventy! To eighty! ... Stay, let me take breath ... — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

As it happens, the first souvenir I bought was a dried llama fetus. Revolting as it may sound, my poor stillborn llama is actually rather cute. Frozen in the fetal position and dried stiff like beef jerky, it has the gentle, smiling face of a camel and plenty of soft, if slightly formaldehyde-scented, fur. I bought the llama fetus partly because it horrified me, but also for educational purposes, so that my eight-year-old daughter Sophia could show it to her class. (She refused.)
Bolivians buy llama fetuses to ward off evil in its many guises. Bolivian miners - who, with a life expectancy of forty-five years, basically live their entire adult lives dying - look to llama fetuses for protection against dynamite explosions and the lung-destroying silicon particulates they inhale all day. Downing high-proof alcohol also helps. "The purer the alcohol, the purer the minerals I find," one miner told me wryly. — Amy Chua

My music is how I feel, and that's changed from being twenty years old to being forty-three years old. — Chris Robinson

To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

To me, at forty-four years old, my book was a search for truth and identity. — Melissa Gilbert

A death in reverse is the rewinding of life. I do not die of old age,
in a bed surrounded by strangers my loved ones paid to take care of me.
I die in reverse.
I die falling back
into a younger age.
From my forty-five years to twenty-five.
To sixteen. When we were in love.
To fourteen: when we first met.
To five.
To one.
To the hospital my mother died at
from the complications of my existence.
A life for a life. — F.K. Preston

He tells me of one American woman, forty-five years old, who was able to conceive only after being blessed by the Holy Dildo. That's what I call it. A fourteen-inch-long wooden phallus carved with impressive detail. Colorful pendants dangle off one end - the end that would be attached to a real man, if real men were endowed with fourteen-inch wooden penises. The abbot — Eric Weiner

The mediocre mind has no capacity for understanding. It is stuck somewhere near thirteen years in its mental age, or even below it. The person may be forty, fifty, seventy years old - that does not matter, that is the physical age. He has been growing old, but he has not been growing up. You should note the distinction. Growing old, every animal does. Growing up, only a few human beings manage. — Rajneesh

Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age, and to get drunk till forty; but, after forty, gives them leave to please themselves, and to mix a little liberally in their feasts the influence of Dionysos, that good deity who restores to younger men their gaiety and to old men their youth...fit to inspire old men with mettle to divert themselves in dancing and music; things of great use, and that they dare not attempt when sober. — Michel De Montaigne

The mature, forty-five-year-old woman, quite experienced in matters of life and death, knows that it was 'for the best,' but Daddy's girl, who hung onto his belt and danced fox trots on the tops of his shoes, cannot accept that Daddy is not here anymore. — Mary-Lou Weisman

He let out a breath. "How old are you?" he asked, fearful of the answer.

"Twenty-five." She gave him a wry smile. "And since you yelled it at Heather, I know you're 'forty fucking years old'."

He would have laughed, but he couldn't breathe. Jesus, he'd known she was young, but hearing her actual age..."That's fifteen years."

"I can do the math, but you know what else? I'm legal. I can drink. I have decent car insurance since I hit the quarter century mark, and I own this house." she paused. "Well the bank owns most of it, but I qualified for a loan and everything since I have decent credit." Her nose wrinkled. "I'm getting off subject. If the age difference truly bothers you, then I will see you at the shop to finish your tattoo. No hard feelings."

He growled softly. Well, something was hard, and it wasn't his feelings. — Carrie Ann Ryan

The earliest evidence of recognizable human art is forty thousand years old. The earliest evidence of human agriculture, by contrast, is only ten thousand years old. Which means that somewhere in our collective evolutionary story, we decided it was way more important to make attractive, superfluous items than it was to learn how to regularly feed ourselves. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Butterfly effect." "Right. It means small events can have large, whatchamadingit, ramifications. The idea is that if some guy kills a butterfly in China, maybe forty years later - or four hundred - there's an earthquake in Peru. That sound as crazy to you as it does to me?" It did, but I remembered a hoary old time-travel paradox and pulled it out. "Yeah, but what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?" He stared at me, baffled. "Why the fuck would you do that?" That was a good question, so I just told him to go on. — Stephen King

The religious literature handed out by the earnest young missionaries in Temple Square makes no mention of the fact that Joseph Smith
still the religion's focal personage
married at least thirty-three women and probably as many as forty-eight. Nor does it mention that the youngest of these wives was just fourteen years old when Joseph explained to her that God had commanded that she marry him or face eternal damnation. — Jon Krakauer

Forty-three years old, and still afraid of my father. Some tycoon, hunh? — John Saul

Am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

All this to say: I am forty-three years old. I may yet live another forty. What do I do with those years? How do I fill them without Lexy? When I come to tell the story of my life, there will be a line, creased and blurred and soft with age, where she stops. If I win the lottery, if I father a child, if I lose the use of my legs, it will be after she has finished knowing me. "When I get to Heaven", my grandmother used to say, widowed at thirty-nine, "your grandfather won't even recognize me. — Carolyn Parkhurst

Forty-three years old, he is handsome and he knows it, but it's not a view that is held with arrogance. His opinion on his looks are merely understood with the same logic he applies to tasting a fine wine. The grape was merely grown in the right place, under the right conditions. Some degree of nurturing and love mixed with later moments of being completely trampled on and walked all over. — Cecelia Ahern

Babe, you think I found the woman of my dreams at forty-five years old and I'm gonna let anything happen to her, think again. That's a long fuckin' time to wait for what you want. I waited. I found it. I'm pullin' out all the stops to take care of it. I know you feel the same for me so I'm doin' the same to keep me safe for you. — Kristen Ashley

Old men are always advising young men to save money. That is bad advice. Don't save every nickel. Invest in yourself. I never saved a dollar until I was forty years old. — Henry Ford

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

That anonymous coward is probably forty years old with raging BO and still living in his mum's granny flat — Gabrielle Tozer

I'm a good girl. I'm a nice girl. I'm a straight-A, strait-laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody's boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my parents' shit and brother's shit and I'm not a girl anyhow, I'm over forty fucking years old, and I'm good at my job and I'm great with kids and I held my mother's hand when she died,after four years of holding her hand while she was dying, and I speak to my father ever day on the telephone
every day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because here it's pretty gray and a big muggy too? It was supposed to say "Great Artist" on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say "Such a good teacher/daughter/friend" instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL. — Claire Messud

During its sixteen years in the field, it achieved a series of seemingly impossible tasks, culminating with the destruction of a 488-year-old vampire who had been secretly controlling the wheat industry for 252 of those years. Keep in mind that in an episode that occurred in 1980, it took forty-five soldiers to kill a sixty-four-year-old vampire. Gestalt is tough. — Daniel O'Malley

She was forty-one years old, and she was tired. But the fatigue would pass. The old dreams of full-time motherhood and a cushy retirement were forever forgotten. — John Grisham

If you want to live and you want to prosper, you've got to be ambitious. You've got to be ready to sacrifice leisure and pleasure, and you've got to plan ahead. I was forty years old before I had any money at all. But these things don't happen overnight. Now, how many people are there who will wait that long to be successful, and work all the time? Not very many. Maybe they're right. Maybe I'm a bloody fool. But I don't think I am. — Roy Thomson

I'm forty-two years old - which is a lot more like middle age than forty or even forty-one. — Claire Messud

We really feel the fact of our mortality after we turn forty years old. — Hideo Kojima

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

[A Buddhist monk on a pilgrimage speaks to a museum curator.]
And I come here alone. For five
seven
eighteen
forty years it was in my mind that the old Law was not well followed; being overlaid, as thou knowest, with devildom, charms, and idolatry ... '
So it comes with all faiths. — Rudyard Kipling

The gospels were, in fact, written anywhere from forty to a hundred years after Jesus, and their authors attempted to demonstrate that Jesus could be seen to fulfill various Old Testament pronouncements. — Jay Parini

Why should Canada, wild and unsettled as it is, impress us as an older country than the States, unless because her institutions are old? All things appeared to contend there, as I have implied, with a certain rust of antiquity, such as forms on old armor and iron guns,
the rust of conventions and formalities. It is said that the metallic roofs of Montreal and Quebec keep sound and bright for forty years in some cases. But if the rust was not on the tinned roofs and spires, it was on the inhabitants and their institutions. — Henry David Thoreau

God help me, how Tolstoy sweats over drying up people's sources of life, of wild and joyful life, drying them up and making the world fat with the love of God and everyman ... But the man is old, after all, his fountains of life run dry, without a trace remaining of human affections ... Only someone who has become slow and watertight with old age, satiated and hardened with pleasure, will go to youth and say, Renounce! ... And yet the youth renounces nothing, but sins royally for forty years. Such is the course of nature! — Knut Hamsun

He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember. — John Edward Williams

You can't cure people of their character,' she read.
After this he had crossed something out then gone on, 'You can't even change yourself. Experiments in that direction soon deteriorate into bitter, infuriated struggles. You haul yourself over the wall and glimpse new country. Good! You can never again be what you were! But even as you are congratulating yourself you discover tied to one leg the string of Christmas cards, gas bills, air letters and family snaps which will never allow you to be anyone else. A forty-year-old woman holds up a doll she has kept in a cardboard box under a bed since she was a child. She touches its clothes, which are falling to pieces; works tenderly its loose arm. The expression that trembles on the edge of realizing itself in the slackening muscles of her lips and jaw is indescribably sad. How are you to explain to her that she has lost nothing by living the intervening years of her life? How is she to explain that to you? — M. John Harrison

I think that much of the advice given to young men about saving money is wrong. I never saved a cent until I was forty years old. I invested in myself - in study, in mastering my tools, in preparation. Many a man who is putting a few dollars a week into the bank would do much better to put it into himself. — Henry Ford

Are the family lists complete yet?" he asked George.
"Aye, my lord. We've gathered the names of every possible successful runner for the last forty years. Not many men, I'll tell you that. Six at most, and all were thought to be very much dead. Four apparently lost to fire-you remember the blaze that leveled the tavern in '33-one to drowning, and one bloke to, ah, wolves."
Kit raised his brows. "Wolves?"
"That's what his son said. Stirling Jacobs was his name. Liked to hunt at dawn. Liked a challenge. Known to venture out beyond our boundaries. Bones were found, possibly his. That's all."
"How old would this man be now?"
"Let's see...nearing eighty, I'd say."
Kit gazed at him over the mess of china and papers.
"Your instructions were to consider everyone." George shifted in the chair, uneasy. "And I've bloody well considered everyone."

-Kit & George — Shana Abe

I was staring down thirty-five in a few months. While I might have thought forty was old when I was her age, I'd since decided to move that particular goal post down the field to somewhere around sixty. And I reserved the right to make it even older if I survived the next ten years. — Marshall Thornton

Forty-seven years old, tired, but none the worse for wear. In a little more than thirteen months, he had discovered, analyzed, and packed tens of thousands of pieces of artwork, including eighty truckloads from Altaussee alone. He had organized the MFAA field officers at Normandy, pushed SHAEF to expand and support the monuments effort, mentored the other Monuments Men across France and Germany, interrogated many of the important Nazi art officials, and inspected most of the Nazi repositories south of Berlin and east of the Rhine. It would be no exaggeration to guess he put 50,000 miles on his old captured VW and visited nearly every area of action in U.S. Twelfth Army Group territory. And during his entire tour of duty on the continent, he had taken exactly one and a half days off. — Robert M. Edsel

A boy gets to be a man when a man is needed. Remember this thing. I have known boys forty years old because there was no need for a man: — John Steinbeck

And if I went
back to sleep and slept for forty years and woke up without any teeth to the sound of Melody Radio in
an old people's home, I wouldn't worry that much, because the worst of life, i.e., the rest of it, would
be over. And I wouldn't even have had to kill myself. — Nick Hornby

Go along, go along quickly, and set all you have on the table for us. We don't want doughnuts, honey buns, poppy cakes, and other dainties; bring us a whole sheep, serve a goat and forty-year old mead! And plenty of vodka, not vodka with all sorts of fancies, not with raisins and flavorings, but pure foaming vodka, that hisses and bubbles like mad. — Nikolai Gogol

And now I am eking out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the bitter and entirely useless consolations that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything; that only a fool can become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent nineteenth-century man must be, is morally bound to be, an essentially characterless creature; and a man of character, a man of action - an essentially limited creature. This is my conviction at the age of forty. I am forty now, and forty years - why, it is all of a lifetime, it is the deepest of old age. Living past forty is indecent, vulgar, immoral! — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Three out of ten women in the United States have an abortion by the time they are forty-five years old. And women who need abortions get abortions, whether or not the procedure is legal or safe, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Blaming women who need abortions through slut-shaming is not only morally reprehensible, it also is medically irresponsible. — Leora Tanenbaum

He was forty years old, no more, and the color of a white napkin stained with olive oil. — Anonymous

On a trip to Germany, Lange and his entourage were climbing the tower of an ancient castle when they stopped to catch their breath. "How old is this ruin?" someone asked a guide. "Forty-two years," said Lange. — David Lange

The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What's that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating ... and you finish off as an orgasm. — George Carlin

It's 2010. I'm forty-three years old. I've just turned in the final draft of what will be my third novel when I decide I want a tattoo. Maybe it's a middle-age thing. Or maybe now that my kids are nearly grown and I have a career in place, I'm finally coming into my own. — Therese Fowler

These houses were thirty, forty years old. People must have died, had babies, gotten engaged, married, divorced, hurt each other in a thousand ways, reconciled and forgiven, passionately hated and desperately loved; if you abandoned a house whenever something significant happened, people would live in tents. This house had known life. — Sonja Condit

Memory deludes me. I have just remembered something that I completely forgot after it happened. I remembered it again when I was about sixteen, and then I forgot it again. And this morning I remembered not the event itself but the previous recollection, which itself was more than forty years ago, as though an old moon were reflected in a windowpane from which it was reflected in a lake, from where memory draws not the reflection itself, which no longer exists, but only its whitened bones. — Amos Oz

When I was nineteen years old, I was the number-one star for two years. When I was forty, nobody wanted me. I couldn't get a job. — Mickey Rooney

But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year-old habits. — Andre Gide

How did a woman who was not even forty years old - and barely five feet tall in heels - come to command the full attention of a superpower like America — Monique Brinson Demery

At almost forty years old, I assumed my career on camera was over. And I was certainly given that message by all the TV managers and news directors who passed on me when I was trying to get a job back in the business. — Mika Brzezinski

Running away from home is not a good idea. Unless, of course, you happen to be forty years old, and then your parents will probably shout, "Hurrah!" and change the locks the minute you've stepped off the front stoop. But in the case of Gwendolyn and Homer, ages fifteen and twelve, setting off in the middle of the night would only bring their parents immense heartache and worry. — Suzanne Selfors