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Australian Coalition '99

QUOTES ON AGEING FOR YOUR OWN NEWSLETTERS

Below is a list of quotations which we encourage you to draw on for your own newsletters and communications. You may also choose to do your own research to find interesting, memorable and humorous quotations that capture the essence of or dispel the myths of ageing.

"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana"
Groucho Marx

"Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of 80 and gradually approach 18."
Mark Twain

"Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages."
Mark Twain

"Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been."
Mark Twain

"A man's only as young as the woman he feels."
Groucho Marx

"It takes 20 years to make an overnight success."
Eddie Cantor

"Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative."
Maurice Chevalier

"The first half of our lives is ruined by out parents, and the second half by our children."
Clarence Darrow

"Never let yesterday use up too much of today."
Will Rogers

"I am not young enough to know everything."
Oscar Wilde

"I do not want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying."
Woody Allen

"All life is an experiment."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Live life as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
Mahatma Gandhi

"I am still learning."
Michelangelo

"Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation" the other eight are unimportant."
Henry Miller

"Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save."
Will Rogers

"Too much of a good thing is wonderful."
Mae West

"What doesn't kill us, is making us stronger"
after Neitzche

"Age is only a number, a cipher for the records. A man can't retire his experience. He must use it. Experience achieves more with less energy and time."
Bernard Baruch

Do you think, at your age, it is right?"
Lewis Carrol, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

"Youth, which is forgiven everything,
forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives
itself everything, is forgiven nothing."
Man and Superman G B Shaw

"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of Day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light"
Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, Dylan Thomas

"The wiser mind
Mourns less for what age takes away
Than what it leaves behind"
The Fountain, William Wordsworth

"No wise man ever wished to be younger."
Jonathan Swift

This is a youth-oriented society, and the joke
is on them because youth is a disease from
which we all recover.
Anon

"Everyone believes in his youth that the
world really began with him, and that all
merely exists for his sake."
Goethe

"I do beseech you to direct your efforts more
to preparing youth for the path and less to
preparing the path for youth.
Ben Lindsey

"Profundity of thought belongs to youth,
clarity of thought to old age."
Friedrich Nietzsche

"The belief that youth is the happiest time of
life is founded upon a fallacy. The happiest
person is the person who thinks the most
interesting thoughts, and we grow happier as
we grow older."
William Lyon Phelps

"I was brought up to respect my elders and now I don't have to respect anybody."
George Burns at 87, in Playboy, June 1978

"Suddenly you start to get these roles as the mother of the ingenue you'd have been playing five years ago -- it happens in a very swift moment."
Julie Christie, Independent, 16/9/87

"When I started in films, they used to sign on girls for a seven-year contract at 17 or so, because studio doctors and people who were supposed to know thought women passed their peak by the age of 26."
Joan Collins at 53, in The Observer, 6/10/85

"In the morning I feel about 50; then, depending on how the day goes, I might get down to about 22. When I'm directing on stage, I'm 43 and 32 when making a film because I feel less in control. Acting? Oh, then I'm 24. And when I'm on my own, I feel about 17 and think the world is all before me."
Lindsay Anderson at 61, Film Yearbook 1985

"I've honestly not been too aware of my age until I went to the doctor for a full check-up. He said I had the heart of a young man -- 'but you're not young, you're 40'."
Sean Connery, Evening Standard 1971

"An actress I knew -- when I filmed with her, I was 31 and she was 36. Today, I'm 40 and she's still only 37."
Tony Curtis, Sunday Express, 10/10/65

"Females get hired along procreative lines. After 40, we're kind of cooked."
Carrie Fisher, Time, 18/2/91

"I was terrified when I turned 30. I was pregnant and had the mumps and Faye Dunaway was just coming out in Bonnie and Clyde. I thought: Oh my God, I'll never work again. I'm old!"
Jane Fonda, Time, 3/10/77

"Lionel Barrymore first played my grandfather, later my father, and finally, he played my husband. If he'd lived, I'm sure I'd have played his mother. That's the way it is in Hollywood. The men get younger and the women get older."
Lillian Gish, Film Yearbook, 1984

"I absolutely refuse to reveal my age. What am I -- a car?"
Cyndi Lauper, Film Yearbook, 1991

"I'm in pretty good shape for the shape I'm in."
Mickey Rooney at 58, Film Illustrated, 1979

"No one is 22. I've got shoes older than that."
Sylvester Stallone, Rolling Stone, 12/85

"I think I'm finally growing up - and about time."
Liz Taylor at 53, Film Yearbook, 1987

"Professionally, I have no age."
Kathleen Turner, Newsweek, 27/2/89

"Death is what makes life an event"
Francis Ford Coppola, Film 91, BBC TV, 5/3/91

"I'm working my way toward divinity."
Bette Midler, Rolling Stone, 9/12/82

"I'm Mother Courage, baby. I've been through it all."
Elizabeth Taylor, Photoplay 1981

"Sex appeal is in your heart and head. I'll be sexy no matter how old or how my body changes."
Sonia Braga, Movieline, 12/90

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