Age Difference Quotes

“AGE DIFFERENCE

What if I told you that one day you will meet a girl who is unlike anyone else you've known. She will know all the right things to say, what makes you laugh, what turns you on, what drives you wild and best of all, you will do for her exactly what she does for you.

"When will I meet her?"

Well let's put it this way, she doesn't even exist yet.”
― Lang Leav

“My age makes him nervous and shamey, cause his eyes keep heading southwards and then back up, guilty. I can tell I can make his eyes swirl and that's just about all I want to do.”
― Andrea Portes, Hick

“I hated the way they spoke like that. As if there could be no measurement of their past in years. As if I, so young, couldn't possibly understand the way time worked, and what it did to people.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“People asked if I was his daughter. They ask all the time. Hoping, accusing. We never say yes, and we never say no.”
― Kirsteen Reed

“Looking back, it seems that was how Jude always was with me: keeping his distance, never asking for anything I might not want to give. That steadiness that I took to be a strength--his consistency--I realize now was a kind of boundary, a way of drawing a line in the sand. Like a sprinkling of salt at the threshold, it was a kind of spell to keep himself safe, unchanged. What he needed more than anything was to believe he needed nothing, that if I should ever leave, he'd remain the same man. But I had his key in my coat pocket and I was happy then, because it seemed like he was letting me in.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“It was hard to argue with him when he played the card of time--his winning hand, all those years he had over me.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Do you love me? Do you love me? I asked, shaking him awake in the dark.

His rotation of answers:
You know I do.
Don't make me say it all the time or it will lose its meaning.
If I didn't, would I still be here, in bed with you?

I needed to hear it, the reassurance of those words. Repeating it to him over and over that winter, IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou, like a prayer. Sometimes I would keep myself awake after Jude had fallen asleep to look at his face, missing him even in sleep. So sure, in these moments, that if he ever tried to leave me, I wouldn't let him. Undignified, the scene I'd make. Not too proud to beg.

I wanted us to be like rocks or anchors, keeping each other in place. Love, I'd read, was supposed to be a light and weightless feeling, but I had always longed for gravity.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“He was tall, handsome, charismatic, and only thirty-two years old—an age that had once sounded mature to Leia, and now seemed impossibly young.”
― Claudia Gray, Bloodline

“I felt like we'd promised to tell each other a secret and after I'd revealed mine, he'd changed his mind. Though maybe it was a female thing, I thought later, to feel vulnerability where a man might have felt power, but still I longed to see him cracked open under my hands in return, while I remained clothed and composed.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I don't need you to be here, Jude would tell me in time, but I want you to be. And that's how it should be. It's better that way. Love, he would tell me, is all about choice. Free will. Need is about dependency.

Jude thought we should be like a gift to each other, but I longed to be essential. That was love, I decided, as our intimacy changed and deepened over the course of the year. Not being able to do without. Waiting -- that was just desire, fluid and changeable as the tide. Need was real love, the truest kind I'd known, born as it is out of what we lack, and that was how I felt about Jude back then -- that he completed me, we completed each other, as in the old myth about the origin of love. And if I was essential, the other half of whatever he was, then he could never abandon me.

Across from me at the table that afternoon, he shrugged.

So stay, he said, as if it were an easy thing.

I don't have any of my things.

I have things. A whole house full of things.

I shouldn't.

He was offering me what I'd wanted, but I was plagued by the feeling that the invitation wasn't genuine, that it was only because I'd prompted him that he suggested I'd stay. This cheapened it in my mind, and I felt graceless and worse than if he hadn't asked at all.

So don't. Forget it.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“But that night, listening to the swell music, Patsy Cline's voice strained with sorrow, I thought. She's got these little things, I've got you. Wrapping my arts around Jude's waist. In that moment, I felt so lucky I thought I might die. The only way I can understand this now is that what I was feeling, standing in his kitchen all those years ago, was a presentiment of loss.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“And was Jude broken? How raw was the wound left by the last woman? What kind of woman would I have to be to keep him?

I could love her easily, abundantly, where with Jude I had to be so careful to parcel out my affections in case I scared him away.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I held out my hand and he looked down at it, as if he didn't understand what I was offering. At last he said, I think I'm a little old for that, love. But I stood there, stubborn, my empty palm open and outstretched. Don't give me that look, he said, and then he signed, relented. I felt happy then, proud, as if I had won something. Walking side by side with his hand in mine.

I would learn that things I perceived as abandonment were Jude's acts of trust, like the way he always walked ahead without looking behind him, trusting me to keep pace, to follow. But I was the kind who always looked back, glancing over my shoulder whenever I turned a corner, as if I were a woman descended from the line of Lot's wife in the old parable. When I licked my lips, I tasted salt.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“You're just different from the other boys I've brought home.

Different in what way?

Well, you're not exactly a boy.

I'm old, you mean?

No, not old. But you're, you know, a man.

I hate that there've been others, said Jude, and I was so surprised at the fact of his jealousy that I apologized. Why would he be jealous, I thought, when I had never loved or been loved this way before?

It wasn't like this, I said. It wasn't ever like this.

Tell me that you've never had anyone else. I want you to pretend.

Okay, I said, laughing. I've never been with anyone else. Happy?

Tell me I'm your first, he said, his voice low and his hands moving across my blouse. Tell me that you've never been touched.

I'm untouched. Chaste, a clean slate.

But you want it.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Much better were the quiet afternoons in the dim light ... my legs hanging from the end of the bed while he kneeled before my body as if in supplication. I was a greedy lover, he teased, and I was, I was, this desire, this pleasure, unknown and new.

Light streamed into my bedroom early in the autumn through the thin lace curtains. The morning after Jude spent the night at my house for the first time, I turned to look at him beside me.

He looked old. Not older, old.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Tell me your greatest loves, the things you've loved the most, he said one afternoon.

That's easy, I said. My mother, my younger brother. And the ocean. Though does it count if what you love can't love you back?

Unrequited love is still love, he said. But it's never a great love. Can't be. It's one-sided. Except in the case of the ocean. For the ocean, we can make an exception.

How about you? I said. Big, real, soul-splitting loves. How many?

Real love? he said. Just the one time.

And I couldn't decide if that was better or worse than all the other loves I might have imagined for him.

How did you know? What made it so different from all the other times?

Oh, it's just one of those things. You know it when you see it.

Volatile, he called their love, but true.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Rolling back over with a sigh. If you could, you'd follow me into dreams, he said, and I hated that he saw me that way, as someone always trailing behind, like a little sister, where I wanted us to be equals -- like my mother had said about herself and my father, twins.

Sometimes I think you must have seen it all before. That I can't show you anything new.

You show me things I've forgotten, he said. Which is almost the same. Maybe even better. And anyway, don't forget I was young too.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“What matters now is this, he said. He pulled me close, kissed the top of my head. Here, with you.

I was so eager to be loved by him, to be held in his arms and reassured, to shut out the ghosts of other girlfriends from the room like a cold draft, I said nothing more. Climbing on top of him, my hand on his chest, an animal warmth. I bent to kiss him and let the damp ropes of my hair drag across his face, his chest. He reached up and moved his hands through it, as if it were light or water.

I can see it all over your face, he said. Such naked wanting.

I told him that I'd always been afraid of wanting anything so badly that it becomes visible.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I like you as you are, he said. Even if you're going to wear me out.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I could never be bored, I thought, if he was nearby. It was the stage of love, where even the most mundane activity seemed like an adventure.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Stooping to kiss below my ear, pulling me close from behind. Running his hands over my body, soft in a black sweater, holding my breasts, slipping his fingers into my tights. How quickly his moods changed, pivoting like someone turning sharply on a boot heel. Vague thought before I closed my eyes, leaned into his hands--how many other women had he reached toward as a distraction?”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I think now that Jude kept me waiting that night to prove to me, and to himself, that he could. You want a dog, not a man, he said to me on another occasion, when I was angry at him for coming home late or not answering his phone. Someone to come whenever you whistle, whenever you call. He wanted to feel free, and to Jude that meant belonging to no one. Maybe he liked women who played along with those kinds of games, pushing him away only to pull him back again. To behave badly and be reprimanded in order to be forgiven--somewhere along the course of his life, Jude had learned this as a kind of love. And while I was slow to trust, to let people in, I loved without reservation once I did, and in this way I was stronger than him.

Although I did not feel strong then, when out of relief, rage, frustration, I began to cry.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Jude turned to me with a look I didn't recognize.

Can we keep him? he said.

I remember he said it that way--we. For so long I'd felt like a beggar for his love, and now, for the first time, he was asking something of me. To share with him something that would be ours together.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“The way he looked at me sometimes, on waking: as if I were a surprise, a gift, my appearance in his life miraculous. He called me Love, as if it were my name. As if I could be the very thing itself.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Though later I'd decide this was noncommittal, evasive, at the time it struck me as generous, a swelling in my chest, another unfamiliar feeling -- assurance, or security, or trust. we were in this together, we'd figure it out, and that made our love seem durable.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I never got used to the different reactions Jude and I provoked from other people. Often enough, I was congratulated for finding a mature man, as if this spoke highly of me and my intelligence, while Jude received looks that suggested he was too much of a child for women his own age--which was patronizing to me also since, by then, I perceived us to be equals. Of course, I have lived enough years by now to have seen this kind of thing many times over: the husband who leaves his wife for a university girl or a teenager, the family abandoned. It happened to my grandmother. It has even happened to friends of mine. As my mother would say, it starts so much younger than you think. Still, the truth was that it worked both ways--that for whatever sense of youth I restored to Jude, I was attracted to the years of experience he had over me and the knowledge they might hold of things I hadn't yet had time to learn.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“All his rules for butterflies and birds. He treated me like a light thing. Loving things loosely and then letting them go.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I was not yet given a life when you were born; when I was born you were old already. How I wish I had not come this late, but death has placed mountains and seas between you and me.”
― Yiyun Li, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

“I was nineteen. You had your lips on my neck and whispers in my ear. You drove me crazy. But I mistook crazy for absolute happiness.”
― Dominic Riccitello

“I have experience now with older women. I took one for the team."
"He slept with Clare," I reminded Simone.
"I said 'older,' not 'ancient.'" Anil sniffed. I took one for the team with Milan, not Clare.”
― Sara Desai, 'Til Heist Do Us Part