A man is often too young to marry, but a man is never too old to love.

- Old Finnish proverb



Summer days are over!
o my one true lover
Sit we now alone together
In the early autumn weather!
From our nest the birds have flown
To fair dreamlands of their own
And we see the days go by
In silence-thou and I!



- JULIA C. R. DORR
"Thou and I," Poems, 1892



You see I thought love got easier over the years so it didn't hurt so bad when it hurt, or feel so good when it felt good. I thought it smoothed out and old people hardly noticed it. I thought it curled up and died, I guess. Now I saw it rear up like a whip and lash.

- LOUISE ERDICH
Love Machine, 1984



One of those looks which only a quarter-century of wedlock can adequately marinate.

ALAN COREN
- Seems Like Old Times, 1989



Immature love says: "I love you because I need you."
Mature love says: "I need you because I love you.

- Confucious proverb



When you are very old, and sit in the candlelight at evening sitting by the fire, you will say, as you murmur my verses, a wonder in your eyes, "Ronsard sang of me in the days when I was fair."

- PIERRE DE RONSARD
Sonnets pour Helene, 1578




Love's like the measles-all the worse when it comes late in life.

- DOUGLAS JERROLD
"A Philanthropist," Wit and Opinions, 1859



When I look back on the pain of sex, the love like a wild fox so ready to bite, the antagonism that sits like a twin beside love, and contrast it with affection, so deeply unrepeatable, of two people who have lived a life together (and of whom one must die), it's the affection I find richer. It's that I would have again. Not all those doubtful rainbow colours.

-- ENID BAGNOLD
Autobiography, 1974



They are in love, they have always been in love, although sometimes they would have denied it. And because they have been in love they have survived everything that life could throw at them, even their own failures.

-- ERNEST HAVEMANN
on a long-married couple, "Love and Marriage," Life, September 29, 1961