Now, I don't actually know the exact cut-off age where beautiful ceases and 'must have-once-been-beautiful' begins. It's true it's not forty-five. I can still get attention when I try really hard, even if it's greatly reduced.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The older I get, the more I feel almost beautiful.
Beauty at 70 years old isn't the same as beauty at 20 years old, but it is stunning nonetheless.
I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.
I wonder if it is harder for a woman who was beautiful to get older or a woman who was never looked at.
It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before.
This idea that being youthful is the only thing that's beautiful or attractive simply isn't true.
The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more.
Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age.
The Western man declares that in order to be beautiful, a woman must look 14 years old. If she dares to look 50, or worse, 60, she is beyond the pale. By putting the spotlight on the female child and framing her as the ideal of beauty, he condemns the mature woman to invisibility.
Forty is brilliant and I love it. I'm happier now than when I was 20.