“I am beginning to reach the age when I say hello to the old women I meet in my neighborhood, anticipating the moment in life when I shall be one of them. When I was twenty I didn't notice them; they would be dead before my face had wrinkles.”

“At times it seems to me that I am living my life backwards, and that at the approach of old age my real youth will begin. My soul was born covered with wrinkles—wrinkles my ancestors and parents most assiduously put there and that I had the greatest trouble removing.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

“At the age of twenty six I am in the condition of an aged person — all my old friends are gone … & my heart fails when I think by how few ties I hold to the world….”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer

“I shall have more to say when I am dead.”

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) American poet

“When I was twenty, I chose my life. It wasn't this one.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

“I'm Irish!… When I feel well I feel better than anyone, when I am in pain I yell at the top of my lungs, and when I am dead I shall be deader than anybody.”

Morgan Llywelyn (1937) Irish writer

“I am not that person who walks in a room with my nose in the sky. I smile at people when I meet them, and I like photos of me when I'm smiling because they show my personality. I am always trying to have fun.”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

“You are a concert pianist. That was my life when I was twenty-two years old.”

George Antheil (1900–1959) American avant-garde composer, pianist, author and inventor

“I am certain I have not a right feeling towards women - at this moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. Is it because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? When I was a schoolboy I thought a fair woman a pure Goddess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

“Your own nature will triumph. We are all born with our natures… And I think back over my life and I realize that my own nature -the core me- essentially hasn't changed over all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel the same way I did when I woke up at the age of five.”

Douglas Coupland book Life After God