Jean Rhys Quotes

What is an adult? A child blown up by age.

Age is an accumulation of life and loss. Adulthood is a series of lines crossed.

The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.

You can almost measure where you are in life by the degree to which you have begun looking back rather than ahead.

As you get older, you change certain things.

I like getting older. When you're in your twenties you're really forging for your future. Things take shape later on.

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

I said 'No, I've aged, but grown up? No'.

My interests are different now than they were thirty years ago.

Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.

The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.

Some days, you feel like a 22-year-old and some days you feel like a 40-year-old.

Kids don't shuffle along in unison on the road to maturity. They slouch toward adulthood at an uneven, highly individual pace.

At a certain point, you have to face the fact that you've turned into an old fart.

I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity.

When you are young, nothing is more important than football, but as you get older, you get married, have kids and lose people. Then you realise your family is more important. This comes with age.

I just think age is meaningless. It's a system we've all agreed to that supposedly signals when we should develop, reach our peak and go downhill, as they say. It interferes with our natural growth.

Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.

I think aging and maturing is really interesting, and it's a shame that Americans are so panicky and paranoid about it.

And I continued to grow until I was 25 years old.

One can't feel old in a day or overnight!

As you grow older, you change.

Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life.

If you're asking me to acknowledge that I've gotten older, I can do that.

I usually say I left puberty at 58.