Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age. – Dwight D. Eisenhower
Growing old is not a gradual decline, but a series of drops, full of sorrow, from one ledge to another below it. But when we pick ourselves up we find our bones are, after all, not broken; while level enough and not unpleasing is the new terrace which lies unexplored before us. – Logan Pearsall Smith, “Age and Death,” Afterthoughts, 1931