Matthew Stover Quotes

A year ago, I turned the final page of The Book of the Dead. I don't feel young any more.

You get to a certain point in your life where you get closer to the end of your life than the beginning, and it colors your life, in a way.

If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.

The realisation of one's own death is the point at which one becomes adult.

The understanding that we reach a point where we stop becoming something and start ending as something. That comes at different times in different points in different people's lives, and obviously there are lots of people who experience the presence of death much more keenly and much earlier than I did. But we all come to grips with it eventually.

In your teens and twenties, death doesn't exist. In your thirties, you glance down the road occasionally. But then in your forties, it becomes a full-time job looking the other way.

Some people say, I'd give anything to be 30 again. Well, I really wouldn't. I didn't enjoy being 30.

It's funny, because when you're younger you're in a rush to be 18 or 21 or whatever. But then you hit 30. And now, the days go by like hours. You think, 40, man, this could be the halfway point. It could be the three-quarters point, you know? Who knows?

That's one of the things about getting older isn't it? You suddenly realise that you are what you set out to be. And there are no role models any more.

The passage of time is a continuing thing. At 18, you're going to live forever, and you are definitely not at 52, so that is a recurring topic. I still think it's the main stuff.

Knowing you don't have much time left changes things. You get kind of philosophical. And you figure things out-more like, they figure themselves out-and everything gets real clear.

When I was young, the early death of my father cast a shadow over me - and I was afraid to die before all my literary plans came true. But between 30 and 40 years of age my attitude to death became quite calm and balanced. I feel it is a natural, but no means the final, milestone of one's existence.

In your 20s, you feel like you're indestructible...In your 30s, you think...I'll be around here a little longer, so I'm going to take better care of myself.

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

It doesn't take that many years for a kid to realise that they're going to die. It's always there in the back of their mind the rest of their lives.

When I was young, I lived like an old woman, and when I got old, I had to live like a young person.

It's sort of interesting how, when you get older, things that were once so important sort of fall away.

I know you think that when you're 35, 45, 55, you'll be different. But I'm going to let you in on a bit of a secret. You're going to look different, and your life is going to be different, but in your head you'll always be that 16-year-old girl.

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

There is a trade off - as you grow older you gain wisdom but you lose spontaneity.

When you're in your 30s and actively pursuing a career and a home life, a wife and children, you're busy doing as opposed to busy thinking. As you get older, even as you don't have as much time, I think you tend to think more and reflect more on what is happening in your own life.

You never expect anything when you are 20 because you think that you'll never get older.

At twenty a man is a peacock, at thirty a lion, at forty a camel, at fifty a serpent, at sixty a dog, at seventy an ape, at eighty a nothing at all.

I do think I feel it but you don't think you are cause at a certain time you are no age but you don't think you are anything. You feel the life you have lived. I feel that. It's been a long fifty years.

I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn't think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older, you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that's happening to me.