Quotable Quotes

by Editors of Reader's Digest

  The Second Sin

  Maturity is the ability to do a job whether or not you are supervised, to carry money without spending it and to bear an injustice without wanting to get even.

  —ANN LANDERS

  You are not mature until you expect the unexpected.

  —Chicago Tribune

  The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.

  —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES SR.

  You’re never too old to grow up.

  —SHIRLEY CONRAN

  Savages

  You grow up the day you have your first real laugh—at yourself.

  —ETHEL BARRYMORE

  Age is a high price to pay for maturity.

  —TOM STOPPARD

  To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

  —HENRI BERGSON

  Maturity begins when we’re content to feel we’re right about something without feeling the necessity to prove someone else wrong.

  —SYDNEY J. HARRIS

  Maturity is reached the day we don’t need to be lied to about anything.

  —FRANK YERBY

  Maturity means reacquiring the seriousness one had as a child at play.

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  Youth is when you blame all your troubles on your parents; maturity is when you learn that everything is the fault of the younger generation.

  —HAROLD COFFIN

  AS WE GROW OLD . . .

  As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?

  —SATCHEL PAIGE

  Whatever a man’s age may be, he can reduce it several years by putting a bright-colored flower in his buttonhole.

  —MARK TWAIN

  When it comes to staying young, a mind-lift beats a face-lift any day.

  —MARTY BUCELLA

  in Woman magazine

  It’s easier to have the vigor of youth when you’re old than the wisdom of age when you’re young.

  —RICHARD J. NEEDHAM

  A Friend in Needham, or, A Writer’s Notebook

  Adults are obsolete children.

  —DR. SEUSS

  We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.

  —ANDRÉ BERTHIAUME

  Contretemps

  After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

  —CYNTHIA OZICK

  The Paris Review

  The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.

  —MARGUERITE YOURCENAR

  Memoirs of Hadrian

  The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly and just not think about your age.

  —LUCILLE BALL

  If youth only knew; if age only could.

  —HENRI ESTIENNE

  When the problem is not so much resisting temptation as finding it, you may just be getting older.

  —Los Angeles Times

  The person who says youth is a state of mind invariably has more state of mind than youth.

  —American Farm and Home Almanac

  If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

  —ABRAHAM SUTZKEVER

  Most people say that as you get old, you have to give up things. I think you get old because you give up things.

  —SEN. THEODORE FRANCIS GREEN

  You don’t stop laughing because you grow old; you grow old because you stop laughing.

  —MICHAEL PRITCHARD

  We are only young once. That is all society can stand.

  —BOB BOWEN

  I’ve always believed in the adage that the secret of eternal youth is arrested development.

  —ALICE ROOSEVELT LONGWORTH

  The joy that is felt at the sight of new-fallen snow is inversely proportional to the age of the beholder.

  —PAUL SWEENEY

  Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

  —JEANNE MOREAU

  Age appears best in four things: old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust and old authors to read.

  —FRANCIS BACON

  Growing up is usually so painful that people make comedies out of it to soften the memory.

  —JOHN GREENWALD

  Old age lives minutes slowly, hours quickly; childhood chews hours and swallows minutes.

  —MALCOLM DE CHAZAL

  When I no longer thrill to the first snow of the season, I’ll know I’m growing old.

  —LADY BIRD JOHNSON

  Just remember, when you’re over the hill, you begin to pick up speed.

  —CHARLES SCHULZ

  People are living longer than ever before, a phenomenon undoubtedly made necessary by the 30-year mortgage.

  —DOUG LARSON

  There is always some specific moment when we become aware that our youth is gone; but, years after, we know it was much later.

  —MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN

  It takes about ten years to get used to how old you are.

  —Quoted by RAYMOND A. MICHEL

  in The Leaf

  Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel just as good as ever.

  —DON MARQUIS

  Middle age is the awkward period when Father Time starts catching up with Mother Nature.

  —HAROLD COFFIN

  Middle age is when you begin to wonder who put the quicksand into the hourglass of time.

  —The Orben Comedy Letter

  Midlife crisis is that moment when you realize your children and your clothes are about the same age.

  —BILL TAMMEUS

  in Kansas City Star

  Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. Middle age is when you’re forced to.

  —BILL VAUGHN

  What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

  —VOLTAIRE

  I don’t know what the big deal is about old age. Old people who shine from inside look 10 to 20 years younger.

  —DOLLY PARTON

  in Ladies’ Home Journal

  I have no romantic feelings about age. Either you are interesting at any age or you are not. There is nothing particularly interesting about being old—or being young, for that matter.

  —KATHARINE HEPBURN

  Old age is having too much room in the house and not enough in the medicine cabinet.

  —Orben’s Current Comedy

  When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.

  —VICTOR HUGO

  A young boy is a theory; an old man is a fact.

  —ED HOWE

  Never lose sight of the fact that old age needs so little but needs that little so much.

  —MARGARET WILLOUR

  The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

  —H. L. MENCKEN

  Prejudices

  Wisdom doesn’t necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.

  —TOM WILSON

  You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.

  —JOHN NUVEEN

  Sometimes the child in one behaves a certain way and the rest of oneself follows behind, slowly shaking its head.

  —JAMES E. SHAPIRO

  Meditations From the Breakdown Lane

&nbs
p; The best thing about being young is, if you had to do it all over again, you would still have time.

  —SANDRA CLARKE

  If life were just, we would be born old and achieve youth about the time we’d saved enough to enjoy it.

  —JIM FIEBIG

  Everybody has been young before, but not everybody has been old before.

  —AFRICAN PROVERB

  You will stay young as long as you learn, form new habits and don’t mind being contradicted.

  —MARIE VON EBNER-ESCHENBACH

  You are young at any age if you are planning for tomorrow.

  —The Sword of the Lord

  A grownup is a child with layers on.

  —WOODY HARRELSON

  When people tell you how young you look, they are also telling you how old you are.

  —CARY GRANT

  To age with dignity and with courage cuts close to what it is to be a man.

  —ROGER KAHN

  I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more, as I grow older.

  —MONTAIGNE

  The older you get, the more important it is not to act your age.

  —ASHLEIGH BRILLIANT

  The trick is growing up without growing old.

  —CASEY STENGEL

  Growing older is not upsetting; being perceived as old is.

  —KENNY ROGERS

  The trouble with class reunions is that old flames have become even older.

  —DOUG LARSON

  A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.

  —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES SR.

  After thirty, a body has a mind of its own.

  —BETTE MIDLER

  We grow neither better nor worse as we grow old, but more like ourselves.

  —MAY LAMBERTON BECKER

  The best thing about growing older is that it takes such a long time.

  —WALTERS KEMP

  One advantage in growing older is that you can stand for more and fall for less.

  —MONTA CRANE

  The best birthdays of all are those that haven’t arrived yet.

  —ROBERT ORBEN

  The older I grow, the more I listen to people who don’t talk much.

  —GERMAIN G. GLIDDEN

  We’ve put more effort into helping folks reach old age than into helping them enjoy it.

  —FRANK A. CLARK

  MEMORY IS THE DIARY . . .

  Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.

  —OSCAR WILDE

  Count reminiscences like money.

  —CARL SANDBURG

  It’s surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

  —BARBARA KINGSOLVER

  Animal Dreams

  We do not remember days; we remember moments.

  —CESARE PAVESE

  The Burning Brand

  The moment may be temporary, but the memory is forever.

  —BUD MEYER

  Don’t brood on what’s past, but never forget it either.

  —THOMAS H. RADDALL

  Recall it as often as you wish, a happy memory never wears out.

  —LIBBIE FUDIM

  Each of us is the accumulation of our memories.

  —ALAN LOY MCGINNIS

  The Romance Factor

  One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.

  —PHYLLIS ROSE

  in Hers: Through Women’s Eyes

  Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

  —CORRIE TEN BOOM WITH JOHN AND ELIZABETH SHERRILL

  The Hiding Place

  May you look back on the past with as much pleasure as you look forward to the future.

  —Quoted by PAUL DICKSON in Toasts

  Keep some souvenirs of your past, or how will you ever prove it wasn’t all a dream?

  —ASHLEIGH BRILLIANT

  To live without a memory is to live alone.

  —GILLES MARCOTTE

  There is no fence or hedge round time that has gone. You can go back and have what you like if you remember it well enough.

  —RICHARD LLEWELLYN

  How Green Was My Valley

  Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

  —SAUL BELLOW

  Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.

  —CHARLES R. SWINDOLL

  The Strong Family

  You never know when you’re making a memory.

  —RICKIE LEE JONES

  “Young Blood”

  Our memories are card indexes—consulted, and then put back in disorder, by authorities whom we do not control.

  —CYRIL CONNOLLY

  What is memory? Not a storehouse, not a trunk in the attic, but an instrument that constantly refines the past into a narrative, accessible and acceptable to oneself.

  —STANLEY KAUFFMANN

  The New Republic

  Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things.

  —PIERCE HARRIS

  Atlanta Journal

  I’m always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.

  —DIANE SAWYER

  in TV Guide

  When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.

  —MARK TWAIN

  You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.

  —STANISLAW J. LEC

  Unkempt Thoughts

  There are times when forgetting can be just as important as remembering—and even more difficult.

  —HARRY AND JOAN MIER

  Happiness Begins Before Breakfast

  Remembering is a dream that comes in waves.

  —HELGA SANDBUR

  “. . . Where Love Begins”

  Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

  —BARBARA KINGSOLVER

  Animal Dreams

  Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.

  —JEAN PAUL RICHTER

  The true tomb of the dead is the heart of the living.

  —JEAN COCTEAU

  There is something terrible yet soothing about returning to a place where you once lived. You are one of your own memories.

  —MARY MORRIS

  Crossroads

  Some folks never exaggerate—they just remember big.

  —AUDREY SNEAD

  The older a man gets, the farther he had to walk to school as a boy.

  —Commercial Appeal (Danville, Virginia)

  God gave us our memories so that we might have roses in December.

  —JAMES M. BARRIE

  No memory is ever alone; it’s at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.

  —LOUIS L’AMOUR

  Ride the River

  IF YOU’RE YEARNING FOR THE GOOD OLD DAYS . . .

  If you’re yearning for the good old days, just turn off the air conditioning.

  —GRIFF NIBLACK

  in Indianapolis News

  We have all got our “good old days” tucked away inside our hearts, and we return to them in dreams like cats to favorite armchairs.

  —BRIAN CARTER

  Where The Dream Begins

  Things ain’t what they used to be and probably never was.

  —WILL ROGERS

&
nbsp; Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.

  —DOUG LARSON

  In the old days, when things got rough, what you did was without.

  —BILL COPELAND

  Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: you find the present tense and the past perfect.

  —The United Church Observer

  The essence of nostalgia is an awareness that what has been will never be again.

  —MILTON S. EISENHOWER

  The Wine Is Bitter

  There has never been an age that did not applaud the past and lament the present.

  —LILLIAN EICHLER WATSON

  Light from Many Lamps

  Nothing seems to go as far as it did. Even nostalgia doesn’t reach back as far as it used to.

  —Changing Times

  You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present.