Phyllis McGinley Quotes

Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you're ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can. Then, perhaps, you will come back to it when you're older, and you will find the book has changed because you have changed as well, and the book is wiser, or more foolish, because you are wiser or more foolish than you were as a child.

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

Read a book at the right age and it will stay with you for life.

I'm amazed. When I was 40, I thought I'd never make 50. And at 50 I thought the frosting on the cake would be 60. At 60, I was still going strong and enjoying everything.

The real problem is that there's a tendency to associate ageing with loss and decline and things that aren't desirable. But experiencing all that there is to experience in life - whether that's at the age of ten or thirty or fifty or eighty - is what life is all about.

I didn't hate being 60 as much as I had 50.

Everything that happens later in life is appreciated in a different way. You can appreciate the thing for what it is, which you couldn't if you were 25 and had never experienced much else. You would take it all for granted and think that's what life is like.

Birthdays are getting harder as I get older.

Aging is interesting, you know? I really love it.

The distance between the adolescent and the true adult is about five thousand miles, but the distance between the adult and the elder is almost as large.

Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age

When you read a great book at one point in your life then in another part of your life, when you read the same book, it's like it was just written because now what you bring to the experience is so much richer.

If you think hitting 40 is liberating, wait until you hit 50; and I was surprised at how liberating it was. The anticipation of something is always much worse than the reality.

My inspiration is coming more and more from the way I feel and the gratitude I feel. The older you get the more humility you have.

In your mid-30s, it’s time to start playing guys of compromise. And as you get older, men of bitter compromise.

I think one of the things about being around for a while and getting to know yourself is that when you do have these positive experiences, you don't take them for granted - you identify them and you make the most of them. I don't know - it's kind of cool getting old in a lot of ways.

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

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.

When you're younger, you tend to be reckless about trying to find out who you are and what you can do and should do. But as you get older you become more accepting of yourself, and with that comes greater contentment.

I used to think my father was an idiot, until I turned twenty-one... Then I thought he was a genus.

If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.

We must not take the faults of our youth with us into old age, for age brings along its own defects.