What Famous Writers Say About Your Age

I love this beautifully produced book: 100 Years by Joshua Prager. Every age from 0 to 100 years is featured with a quote from a famous writer. Here’s a selection:

14 Even though I’m only fourteen, I know what I want, I know who’s right and who’s wrong, I have my own opinions, ideas, and principles… (Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank)

24 She was twenty-four years old. She wanted to inhabit facts, not dreams. (Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown)

30 Thirty – the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby)

40 Men at forty. Learn to close softly, the doors to rooms, they will not be coming back to. (Donald Justice, Men at Forty)

51 Fifty-one was too old for dreams of the future. At fifty-one you had to keep running just to escape the avalanche of your own past. (Stephen King, Needful Things)

61 Fame, success, power, 500 million dollars, world leadership – well if they should arrive, I might not exactly take to cover, but as for lying awake nights craving them as in my youth I did – well, I really don’t care to any more. (Theodore Dreiser, Life at Sixty-Seven)

Bilal

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