Quotes & Sayings About Middle Aged

How had I become middle-aged while the ravages of time ignored her? I didn't know and didn't care, and before I could stop them, the words were already out.
"You're beautiful," I murmured. — Nicholas Sparks

What do you find in the average middle-aged man of woman? You're likely to see disharmony and unequal spin rates in the chakras. The slower ones would be causing parts of the body to deteriorate, while the faster ones would be causing nervousness, anxiety, and exhaustion. In short, chakras spinning either too quickly or too slowly produce ill health. From this we gather that the Five Rites coordinate, even enhance, the spinning of the seven energy centers of the human body; they help distribute pure life force energy to the endocrine glands and in turn to the body's organs and processes. When this happens, the result is longevity and rejuvenation. — Peter Kelder

A lot of middle-aged women are children still trying to find their way. — Tamsin Greig

But inside itself, in the very sap of it, the tree (so to speak) never forgot that other tree in Narnia to which it belonged. Sometimes it would move mysteriously when there was no wind blowing: I think that when this happened there were high winds in Narnia and the English tree quivered.... However that might be, it was proved later that there was still magic in its wood. For when Digory was quite middle-aged...there was a great storm all over the south of England which blew the tree down. He couldn't bear to have it simply chopped up for firewood, so he had part of the timber made into a wardrobe, which he put in his big house in the country. And though he himself did not discover the magic properties of that wardrobe, someone else did.... — C.S. Lewis

So many things seemed to come in plastic bags now that it was difficult to keep track of them. The main thing was not to throw it away carelessly, better still to put it away in a safe place, because there was a note printed on it which read 'To avoid danger of suffocation keep this wrapper away from babies and children'. They could have said from middle-aged and elderly persons too, who might well have an irresistible urge to suffocate themselves. — Barbara Pym

Women deserve better than organizations bearing the names of racist rapists funding million dollar campaigns on subway trains. These wealthy middle aged white men tell us what to do with our bodies while they wage wars and kill other people's babies. — Sonya Renee Taylor

I got booted out third, but to me [Last Comic Standing] was a lot like Rambo II ... I don't really remember much ... there was rats, people bombing, screaming, yelling, and a middle aged guy with a shaved chest got beat by somebody from the Viet Cong. — Rob Cantrell

Women are not short. They're petite. They also are never middle-aged. They're mature. — Kristen Ashley

After using a paint chart from a local DIY superstore to identify the skin tone of his penis as midnight chocolate, Miriam stayed down on one knee and offered him the citizenship he had always wanted and the middle-aged white woman he would grudgingly accept. — David F. Porteous

He was a nice guy, middle-aged, a little tired, like most doctors usually seemed to be, but he just nodded and said,
"Let me take a look at him. Shane?"
"I'm not dropping my pants," Shane said. "I just thought I'd say that up front. — Rachel Caine

I'm as prone to 'declinism' as the next over-mortgaged middle-aged guy. — David Ignatius

Paste Magazine needs to stay in business! It's the first non-sensational quality music and film publication that doesn't only attempt to appeal to middle-aged male Bob Dylan completionists! And there are still many of us who love to pick up a print magazine instead of going online. — Nina Persson

Nail polish or false eyelashes isn't politics. If you have good politics, what you wear is irrelevant. I don't take dictation from the pig-o-cratic style setters who say I should dress like a middle-aged lady. My politics don't depend on whether my tits are in or out of a bra. — Florynce Kennedy

I would always prefer radio or working behind the scenes where I don't have to be seen. I don't like how appearance oriented TV is (especially now that I'm middle aged!). But I am developing a show revolving around animal rescue which will hopefully entertain and maybe do a bit of good for the cause as well. — Susan Olsen

I've always said, since I got to know him and wrote about him, that he's the generation he least appeals to is his own and I think in many ways he was born middle-aged and that's become apparent in recent years. — Anthony Holden

I'm a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I'm a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I've been in jail more than once and I don't do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I'm a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life. — Raymond Chandler

She was in love, as she quite saw, with a middle - aged man who said the same thing to all the girls, who had been a prince for an evening which he'd most likely forgotten already, who had given her a ring with a redcurrant in it and who cared, to the exclusion of all else, for his work. — Penelope Fitzgerald

I do not see the E.E.C. [European Economic Community] as a great love affair. It's more like nine middle aged couples with failing marriages meeting at a Brussels hotel for a group grope. — Kenneth Tynan

It is hard work to give life to new characters every single day. It is not as if I am God. I am just a tired, middle-aged woman trying to keep going. — Karin Fossum

I have a feeling there is no ideal situation, unless she could go back in time and be 22 again. I think some of it is just kind of the shock of realizing that you're approaching middle age, or that you are middle-aged and kind of coming to terms with that in whatever incremental ways. — Amanda Peet

I can remember hearing one middle-aged man who sat nearby saying 'Simmer down, boyo' to another older man seated kitty-corner to me across the doorway to one of the hallways extending out from the waiting area, except when I looked up from the book both these men were staring straight ahead, expressionless, with no sign of anyone needing to 'simmer down' in any conceivable way. — David Foster Wallace

It is noticeable how intuitively in age we go back with strange fondness to all that is fresh in the earliest dawn of youth. If we never cared for little children before, we delight to see them roll in the grass over which we hobble on crutches. The grandsire turns wearily from his middle-aged, careworn son, to listen with infant laugh to the prattle of an infant grandchild. It is the old who plant young trees; it is the old who are most saddened by the autumn; and feel most delight in the returning spring. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

I think it's harder than ever to be an artist. I think that you end up, especially as a middle-aged person, you pay such big consequences for saying, 'I'm just going to devote my life to making art,' or 'I'm going to devote my life to writing novels.' You end up with no resources. — Dana Spiotta

For most of us, no matter how slim, middle-aged spread really does set in, and your waist thickens, irrespective of whether you've had children or if you exercise regularly. — Marie Helvin

You are still young enough to think that torment of the spirit is a splendid thing, a sign of a superior nature. But you are no longer a young man; you are a youngish middle aged man, and it is time you found out that these spiritual athletics do not lead to wisdom. — Robertson Davies

I look into the future and see my brother's face, impossibly middle-aged. His daughter has rejected all of his values, and stands now on the dais of a major university, the valedictorian preparing to deliver her commencement speech. What will she think when her dad stands in the aisle, releasing a hog call and raising his T-shirt to reveal the jiggling message painted upon his bare stomach? Will she turn away, as my father predicts, or might she remember all the nights she awoke to discover him: this slob, this lump, this silly drooling toy asleep at her feet. — David Sedaris

Logic , like lyrical poetry , is no employment for the middle-aged — John Maynard Keynes

I was the girl in the background, the just-friend, or - worse - the friend of a just-friend, the you-sit-next-to-her-in-geometry-but-can't-remember-her-name girl. It would have been better if some middle-aged collector of Star Wars action figures had found me in that snowbank. — Rick Yancey

From the accounts of those who have had glimpses of Heaven in visions and revelations, it seems that we do mature somewhat in Heaven. Those who arrive in their youth grow to maturity, while older people appear more middle-aged, in the prime of life. — David Berg

There's something peculiar about writing fiction. It requires an interesting balance between seeing the world as a child and having the wisdom of a middle-aged person. The further you get from childhood and the experience of the teenage years, the greater the danger of losing that wellspring. — Kazuo Ishiguro

Hetty did not understand how anybody could be very fond of middle-aged people. And — George Eliot

Is Jason intelligent enough to realise that if you describe a thirty-eight-year-old woman as middle-aged, she's more likely to want to kill you than help you? Because Lauren isn't. — Sophie Hannah

He was taking Kevin's cherry! The words made him harder and made him feel privileged, masterful, married. He thought how many men would pay unlimited amounts to have this inaugurating experience with this boy. He didn't want to feel like a middle-aged paedophile, he didn't even want to think all this would make a good porn film. He wanted every thrust, every second, to be laden with tenderness, a salute from him to Kevin, a deep recognition. He wanted Kevin to like what was being done to him, to push back for another joyous millimetre of penetration. He didn't want him to label it Guy's First Fuck or Kevin's First Time. He didn't want the idea and the label to crowd out the sensation or to sharpen it; he wanted it to be pure sex, undramatised. — Edmund White

What I lack in style and craft, I can make up for in joy and enthusiasm. I like to be around people who are at ease so I like to think the 25-year-old [I] would find me quite an easy-going late-middle-aged hippie. — Robert Plant

Isn't it enough to be middle-aged and impeccably beautiful? Why must one be economically useful? — Pietros Maneos

She's a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she has washed her hair since Coolidge's second term I'll eat my spare tyre, rim and all. — Raymond Chandler

Making jokes is about the most wrong and stupid thing a bemused, middle-aged, white heterosexual Anglo Saxon sort of Celt Australian male can do these days. — Michael Leunig

When at last a cab arrived and pulled up directly in front of me, I was astonished to discover that seventeen grown men and women believed they had a perfect right to try to get in ahead of me. A middle-aged man in a cashmere coat who was obviously wealthy and well-educated actually laid hands on me. I maintained possession by making a series of aggrieved Gallic honking noises - "Mais, non! Mais, non!" - and using my bulk to block the door. I leaped in, resisting the chance to catch the pushy man's tie in the door and let him trot along with us to the Gare du Nord, and told the driver to get me the hell out of there. He looked at me as if I were a large, imperfectly formed turd, and with a disgusted sigh engaged first gear. — Bill Bryson

Write what you know," my ass. Now, I'm not suggesting that you write about my ass. But although you do not, in fact, know my ass, I give you permission to write about it. And if you think you need my permission to write about my ass ("What right do I have, as a male, twenty-something, single, childfree, immigrant Indonesian Buddhist, to pretend to understand the ass of an Anglo American middle-aged married female Freethinker?") or about anything, then you lack the courage, curiosity and imagination to write good fiction, so please find something else to do. — Robyn Parnell

Ignorance is a terrible thing. It causes families to lose their center and causes people to lose their control. Ignorance knows no binds. Old people, young people, middle-aged, black, white, can all be ignorant. — Maya Angelou

If a fan comes up and it is a middle-aged lady, it is probably from 'Prime'; if it is a younger girl, it is probably from when I guest-starred on 'One Tree Hill.' And if it is, like, a skateboard kid or a hipster kid, I can tell they are 'How to Make It' fans. — Bryan Greenberg

At 2010 study published in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association followed 34,000 middle-aged women for 13 years, monitoring their diet, exercise, and weight. Only 13 percent managed to avoid significant weight gain - and that group averaged 1 hour of exercise a day. — Margaret Webb

The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. — Virginia Woolf

You are a ghost, like you were a ghost before because you were never here, but everywhere at once, i wish i could talk like my eyes can see, word you with what i smell, knock your socks off with aromas of a tiny metropolis tourists only catch glimpses of at the Wharf. A thousand LSD trips and middle-aged folks remembering Timothy Leary playing like a Pied Piper leading them all off to jump off the pier. — Ana Castillo

People think the painting is a portrait, but it isn't. Not really. He wasn't even in the field; he conjured it from a room in the house, an entirely different angle. He removed rocks and trees and outbuildings. The scale of the barn is wrong. And I am not that frail young thing, but a middle-aged spinster. It's not my body, really, and maybe not even my head. He — Christina Baker Kline

Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old. — John Ciardi

It is my feeling that as we grow older we should become not less radical but more so. I do not, of course, mean this in any political-party sense, but rather in a willingness to struggle for those things in which we passionately believe. Social activism and the struggle for social justice are often thought of as the natural activities of the young but not of the middle-aged or the elderly. In fact, I don't think this was ever true. — Margaret Laurence

When I board an airplane these days, all the middle-aged men are dressed like me - when I was an 8-year-old. They're in shorts and T-shirts. And it's not just on airplanes. It's in business offices, teachers' lounges, and churches. — P. J. O'Rourke

I'd learned that Holtzer Point was a top secret facility in St. Paul, Minnesota. I'd gathered that much already, but it was nice to have it confirmed by a series of websites that appeared to have been composed by middle-school-aged conspiracy theorists with a passion for stupid-looking animated graphics. — Cherie Priest

Lenin's Personal life was extraordinarily dull. He dressed and lived like a middle-aged provincial clerk, with precisely fixed hours for meals, sleep, work and leisure. He liked everything to be neat and orderly. — Orlando Figes

Ever since Jordana dumpled me, I've started feeling like a middle-aged person. I think it is to do with trauma. I just walk around doing and impression of a sixteen-year-old. — Joe Dunthorne

Sleepy head," he whispers, slipping an arm around my waist, "you snore."
"Do not," I say in voice croaky from sleep.
He nibbles my earlobe. "It's cute."
"Middle-aged, overweight men snore. That's not cute."
He strokes my hip. "Everything you do's cute."
I love it when he talks like this. It means he has a softer, sweeter side. I hate it for the exact same reason. — Ashley Lynn Willis

The problem in this case was you can't be a middle-aged virgin in America without something being wrong with you. People can't conceive of a virtue in someone else that they can't conceive in themselves. Instead of believing you're stronger, it's so much easier to imagine you're weaker. — Chuck Palahniuk

Italians give their city sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London's middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay. — David Mitchell

Deciding to wait, Scott sat down with a pint away from the bar at a corner table and lit a cigarette. The clientele in there on Sunday afternoon were the same as most other afternoons. From middle-aged to old men, drinking and cursing at the world like it was the last bus which had just left the stop without them. — R.D. Ronald

I want to learn something from my atheistic brothers and sisters, even though I'm a Christian. I want to learn something from my right-wing brothers and sisters, even though I'm a progressive. I want to learn something from the elderly, even though I'm middle-aged or tilting toward the elderly. I want to learn especially something from the youth. That's why I spend a lot of time in hip-hop studios. — Cornel West

Of middle age the best that can be said is that a middle-aged person has likely learned how to have a little fun in spite of his troubles. — Don Marquis

[Among the Arapeh ... both father and mother are held responsible for child care by the entire community ... ] If one comments upon a middle-aged man as good-looking, the people answer: 'Good-looking? Ye-e-e-s? But you should have seen him before he bore all those children'. — Margaret Mead

The middle-aged woman she would have become, so sure of herself and her place in the world, bossy and loving, condescending and impatient with her dear old mum, — Liane Moriarty

If you're ever feeling a lack of middle-aged white men, just pop into the Capitol. Not so much the House of Representatives, which has a bit more color and texture, but the Senate
jeez. Yes, let's have more testosterone running the country.
Maximum Ride, School's Out
Forever — James Patterson

Young, middle-aged, elderly, old, dead: this was how life conjugated. (No, life was a noun, so this is how life declined. Yes, that was better in any case, life declined. — Julian Barnes

middle-aged woman trying to reach the — Robert Galbraith

I keep on reading the Morning Star newspaper to see if there's any hope, but it seems to be in the 19th century; it seems to be written for dropped-out, middle-aged liberals. — John Lennon

Scientists have found a way to keep middle-aged female mice from going through menopause. Now they're working on a way to keep middle-aged male mice from buying expensive sports cars. — Conan O'Brien

My position in the family turned out to be a lucky one; I bore neither the brunt of my mother's newness to parenthood nor the force of her middle-aged traumas, as my younger sister, Ruth, did. — Katharine Graham

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't. — John Updike

Sheila's about the only young girl in this place and she naturally assumes that she ought to have it all her own way with the young things in trousers. Naturally it annoys her when a woman, who in her view is middle-aged and who has already two husbands to her credit, comes along and licks her on her own ground. [...] No, I think it's age daring to defeat youth that annoys her so much! — Agatha Christie

Europe is a woman, now middle-aged, who has already had a number of heart attacks and is currently experiencing the biggest health crisis of her life, but one that need not be fatal. — Timothy Garton Ash

It's hard to feel middle-aged, because how can you tell how long you are going to live? — Mignon McLaughlin

Thursday started badly. Two of the ladies of my parish elected to quarrel about the church decorations. I was called in to adjudicate between two middle-aged ladies, each of whom was literally trembling with rage. If it had not been so painful, it would have been quite an interesting physical phenomenon. — Agatha Christie

Middle-aged adolescents are a libel on the real thing. — Mason Cooley

Mike Royce and I have always had success writing what we know. What we know now is that we're middle-aged, neurotic and fat. — Ray Romano

I don't want to just add another DVD to the pile. So I think, 'Is this going to have an impact and some lasting value? Is it worth it for me to spend two years of my middle-aged life on this?' They're my criteria, and I think that's led me to more urgent projects. — Larry Charles

Then there was the realisation that I didn't actually feel that much better when I was thin(ner). In fact the 'thin' version felt worse because I lived with hunger clawing at my stomach all the time, and in fear that I was going to get fat again. After years of neuroticism I'd finally understood those who loved me would continue to put up with me fat or thin, and those who didn't ignored me. As a middle-aged woman I was pretty much invisible anyway. To pass unnoticed through an image-obsessed society is surprisingly liberating. — Helen Brown

Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Every one is born a king, and most people die in exile. — Oscar Wilde

One could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? — Virginia Woolf

Oblivion is increasingly attractive to the young, and even to the middle-aged, since why retain your brain when no amount of thinking can even begin to solve the problem? — Margaret Atwood

For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. — George Eliot

All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. — Doris Lessing

As a middle-aged woman who has had some luck as a writer, I'd like this profession of author to remain a possibility for young writers in the future - and not become an arena solely for the hobbyist or the well-heeled. — Janet Fitch

Generally it appears the case that, when faced with all life's problems, the baby, he wants to cry about everything, the child wants to question everything, the teenager wants to rebel against everything, the young adult wants to solve everything, the middle-aged adult wants to protect everything, and the elder wants to accept everything. — Criss Jami

The new supplants the old. Yet men's minds are stuffed with outworn bunk. Educating the young in the latest findings of authorities and scholars in the social sciences is important. It is equally important to devise ways and means for aiding the middle-aged and old to reexamine hang-over unscientific doctrines and ideas in the light of recent discovery and research. — Mary Barnett Gilson

There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged are still alive. — Jessamyn West

A tall, thin, middle-aged man with a long, gray Jovian beard stood outside the Hermitage Museum with an expression of absolute shattered regret.
Tatiana instantly reacted to his face. What could make a man look this way? He was standing next to the back of a military truck, watching young men carry wooden crates down the ramp from the Winter Palace. It was these crates the man looked at with such profound heartbreak, as if they were his vanishing first love.
"Who is that man?" she asked, tremendously affected by his expression.
"The curator of the Hermitage."
"Why is he looking at the crates that way?"
Alexander said, "They are his life's sole passion. He doesn't know if he is ever going to see them again. — Paullina Simons

I love gay Mardi Gras in Sydney, which is a big parade, a big march that thousands and thousands of people participate in. And there's one little group ... well it's not little, it's got hundreds of people marching, and they're all very sweet, middle-aged and elderly people who are the parents of gay children who are out and proud. — Jacki Weaver

He glanced around the reading room and closed his eyes, trying to keep hold of the past for a minute longer, a fattening and hungover middle-aged historian in a black corduroy suit. — Robert Harris

That year, a middle-aged acquaintance asked me what my favorite book was and I said "On the Road." He smiled, said, "That was my favorite book at sixteen." At the time , I thought he was patronizing me, that it was going to be my favorite book forever and ever, amen. But he was right. As an adult, I'm more of a Gatsby girl-more tragic, more sad, just as interested in what America costs as what it has to offer. — Sarah Vowell

I moved from Moscow to Rome with my family and two bicycles in 1998, and spent a lot of that year- and the next - obsessed, I am sorry to admit, with the bicycles. Italy, after all, was a place where thousands of middle-aged men felt perfectly comfortable spending many hours a week in brightly colored spandex. — Michael Specter

There were days - she could remember this - when Henry would hold her hand as they walked home, middle-aged people, in their prime. Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it. But she had that memory now, of something healthy and pure. — Elizabeth Strout

The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil. — C.S. Lewis

In fact, she [Pamela Flitton] seemed to prefer 'older men' on the whole, possibly because of their potentiality for deeper suffering. Young men might superficially transcend their seniors in this respect, but they probably showed less endurance in sustaining that state, while, once pinioned, the middle-aged could be made to writhe almost indefinitely. — Anthony Powell

Young people ... have more compassion and tenderness toward the elderly than most middle-aged adults. Nothing
not avarice, not pride, not scrupulousness, not impulsiveness
so disillusions a youth about her parents as the seemingly inhumane way they treat her grandparents. — Louise J. Kaplan

By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of providence are handed down to us, and from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve, we are never wholly new ... — Edmund Burke

You know what it's like, finding eight middle-aged guys having tantric sex with ostriches? — Warren Ellis

The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realize the deadliness of principles. To subdue one's self to one's own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one's self to other people's ends was dust and ashes. Yet there were those, still more unhappy, who envied even the ashy saltiness of those dead sea apples. — Dorothy L. Sayers

I loved fast driving.Isaiah and I had drag raced all last summer. What I didn't love was a middle-aged nut job who couldn't steer straight. — Katie McGarry

Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so 'safe,' and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure. — Malcolm X

It's easy now - it's middle-aged lady, nobody's looking, nobody notices. I go without lipstick if I feel like it, and I always wear my comfy clothes. It's a life with fewer distractions, but should something beautiful show up, a middle-aged woman is free to stare. — Abigail Thomas

You don't appreciate a lot of stuff in school until you get older. Little things like being spanked every day by a middle-aged woman: Stuff you pay good money for in later life. — Emo Philips

These are not men of great imagination, but one can hardly blame them for not being prepared for this particular contingency, the sight of a tweet-jacketed, tenured, middle-aged, senior professor and department chair in a fake nose and glasses, brandishing a live, terrified goose ... (Richard Russo, Straight Man) — Richard Russo