The real sting of Eliot's remark lies not in permission-granting—we all know change is theoretically possible—but in its quiet insistence that your unlived life is still yours to claim, not a ghost story. Most of us treat our past choices as irreversible verdicts rather than detours, accepting the false logic that a misstep at twenty forecloses possibilities at fifty. Consider the person who spent a decade in the wrong profession and finally becomes a teacher, or the parent who enrolls in evening classes after the children grow: they're not pretending the lost years didn't matter, but rather refusing to let them own the future too. Eliot, who published her first novel at forty under a man's name, understood that becoming yourself is sometimes an act of defiance against your own resignation.