The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change.

You're a domestic man, David. You feel hundreds of small affections all the time. They haunt every friendly pillow and comfortable chair like household gods. Together they add up to a great love, big enough to ignore this silly man who's hanging around your wife's skirts.

The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.

We in middle age require adventure.

Middle age is having a choice between two temptations and choosing the one that’ll get you home earlier.

When you’re thirty you’re old enough to know better, but still young enough to go ahead and do it.