Life & Wisdom Quote by Colleen McCullough

At forty, desire stops pretending it’s only about symmetry and stamina and starts admitting it’s also about leverage, clarity, and the pleasure of not needing to be chosen. McCullough’s line flirts with scandal while keeping its lipstick perfectly inside the lines: “lovely” turns what could read as predatory into something amused, even civilized. The joke is that age is supposed to narrow women’s options; she reframes it as an expansion of taste and permission.

The specific intent is to puncture the cultural script that casts forty as a cliff edge for female attractiveness and a coronation for male maturity. By naming “twenty-five-year-old men” outright, she inverts the old, exhausted pairing of older man/younger woman and exposes how arbitrary those norms are. It’s not just that the younger men are attractive; it’s that at forty you’re equipped to enjoy them without the frantic self-mythologizing that often accompanies youth. Appreciation implies connoisseurship, not conquest.

The subtext carries a quiet power fantasy: the older woman as the one who gets to evaluate, to desire on her own terms, to treat romance as an elective rather than a referendum on worth. It also smuggles in empathy. A forty-year-old “appreciates” because she can read what twenty-five-year-olds are still performing: confidence, ambition, hunger, sometimes cluelessness.

Context matters: McCullough, a novelist attuned to sex and social consequence, writes from a generation that watched second-wave feminism collide with persistent double standards. The line works because it’s breezy while doing damage to a whole system of expectations.