"Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese"
About this Quote
Bunuel’s line lands like a polite shrug that turns, on second thought, into a blade. Age, the metric society treats as destiny, gets demoted to a food-storage problem. The joke is simple enough to repeat at a dinner party, but it carries Bunuel’s signature contempt for the bourgeois need to rank, certify, and sentimentalize human life.
The specific intent is to puncture the pieties that cluster around “growing older” and the moralizing that comes with it: the idea that youth is virtue, age is wisdom, and everyone should behave according to their decade. By dragging the concept into the kitchen, Bunuel makes age practical instead of metaphysical. For cheese, time is chemistry: fermentation, ripening, value. For people, time is mainly a story we tell to police desire, ambition, beauty, relevance.
The subtext is even more Bunuelian: our culture wants humans to “mature” on schedule, to become more palatable, less disruptive. That’s the cruel twist. Cheese improves by becoming more controlled, more pungent in a predictable way. Bunuel implies that demanding the same of people is absurd, even authoritarian. His films repeatedly mock institutions that claim to know what “proper” development looks like - church, family, class etiquette - and this quip functions like a pocket-sized version of that larger project.
Context matters: Bunuel lived through wars, exile, and shifting regimes, watching ideologies age badly in real time. The line reads like hard-earned skepticism disguised as a gag: if you’re measuring life by its shelf life, you’re already thinking like a market.
The specific intent is to puncture the pieties that cluster around “growing older” and the moralizing that comes with it: the idea that youth is virtue, age is wisdom, and everyone should behave according to their decade. By dragging the concept into the kitchen, Bunuel makes age practical instead of metaphysical. For cheese, time is chemistry: fermentation, ripening, value. For people, time is mainly a story we tell to police desire, ambition, beauty, relevance.
The subtext is even more Bunuelian: our culture wants humans to “mature” on schedule, to become more palatable, less disruptive. That’s the cruel twist. Cheese improves by becoming more controlled, more pungent in a predictable way. Bunuel implies that demanding the same of people is absurd, even authoritarian. His films repeatedly mock institutions that claim to know what “proper” development looks like - church, family, class etiquette - and this quip functions like a pocket-sized version of that larger project.
Context matters: Bunuel lived through wars, exile, and shifting regimes, watching ideologies age badly in real time. The line reads like hard-earned skepticism disguised as a gag: if you’re measuring life by its shelf life, you’re already thinking like a market.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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