Florida Scott-Maxwell Quotes

You know, let a few years go by until I hit my midlife crisis. Then that can be documented on film.

As I get older, the more I don't want my life to be emotionally out of balance in the way it was in my twenties.

I don't think many people get to play big emotions in life.

Being halfway through my life, I think we start feeling less invincible and we start thinking more about the important things.

I think I have a lot of internal energy, which does need to come out.

There are moments when I can't believe I'm as old as I am. But I feel better physically than I did 10 years ago. I don't think, Oh God, I'm missing something.

It's funny, I get a little quieter with time. I don't want to chase my tail and one day repeat myself and repeat myself and one day have kids going to college and not have memories that I should, because I was too busy doing my thing.

I awake with a not entirely sickened knowledge that I am merely young again and in a funny way at peace, an observer who is aware of time's chariot, aware that some metamorphosis has occurred.

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.

You know, you get to a certain age, 45, 50, I don't know when it happens, I said, 'Jesus, all I got is a certain amount of time. Maybe I should think about using it a little better.'

I think when you get into your 30s, you start to realize all of the patterns you have in your life and all of the stuff that you're avoiding. It's a terribly unsung period in people's lives. I can't think about many artists who have sung about it, because it's so not sexy.

I feel like I've lived two or three completely different lives. At 33, I'm quite reflective and have the perspective you get in your old age when you have been through the losses of life.

It won't work,' Mr. Bentley continued, sipping his tea. 'No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you're nine, you think you've always been nine years old and will always be. When you're thirty, it seems you've always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.

It's not necessarily getting older or the change that comes with it, I think it's more about the memories that you have. Where you can look at your life in these eras.

Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.

I think there is something very relatable in the idea that you hit a certain age, later in your life, where you realize you have to pick up the rug and see what's underneath it and deal with stuff.

In fact, looking back, it seems to me that I was clueless until I was about 50-years-old.

We all grow older and we all have to live with ourselves.

I think all of us have our inner 13-year-old a lot closer to the surface than we're willing to admit even to ourselves.

Inside every seventy-year-old is a thirty-five-year-old asking, 'What happened?

The middle years of life come on like thunder.

Well, birthdays are merely symbolic of how another year has gone by and how little we've grown. No matter how desperate we are that someday a better self will emerge, with each flicker of the candles on the cake, we know it's not to be, that for the rest of our sad, wretched pathetic lives, this is who we are to the bitter end. Inevitably, irrevocably; happy birthday? No such thing.

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

And that's a life, isn't it? Some achievements and some disappointments. It's been interesting to me, though I wouldn't complain or be amazed if others found it less so. Maybe, in a way, Adrian knew what he was doing. Not that I would have missed my own life for anything, you understand. [pp.60-61]