“When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.”

Samuel Johnson, in a letter to Bennet Langton, published in The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791), by James Boswell
Misattributed

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Sarah Orne Jewett 21
American novelist, short story writer and poet 1849–1909

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