Ageing Quotes

It is only in the peach innocence of youth that life is at its crest on top of the wheel. And there being only life, the young cling to it, they fear death... And they should! ...For they are in life.

~ Roman Payne

We may say that all ages are dangerous to all people, in this dangerous life we live. But the thirties are a specially dangerous time for women. They have outlived the shyness and restraints of girlhood, and not attained to the caution and discretion of middle age. They are reckless, and consciously or unconsciously on the lookout for adventure. They see ahead of them the end of youth, and that quickens their pace.

~ Rose Macaulay

Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved - to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty would be used like that...

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sorcha took the elevator down to the basement of the fashion house. She glanced at her stunningly beautiful reflection in the mirror and smiled to herself. How fortunate she was to be a vampire - no gray hairs, no wrinkles, no broken nails, no weight problems, and no PMT. What bliss! And how fortunate it was that all the legends about vampires were not true. She could not imagine an existence where she could not see and admire her own likeness - such a life to her would be intolerable and tedious. How could any female, even a vampire, survive without being able to see their own reflection? How could they do their hair and makeup? The very idea was totally preposterous.

~ Alan Kinross

When the years are dying in the arms of your life,the earth is in pain moving around the sun.

~ Munia Khan

When did my youth slip away from me? I suddenly thought. It was over, wasn't it? Seemed just like yesterday I was still only half grown up. Huey Lewis and the News had a couple of hit songs then. Not so many years ago. And now here I was, inside a closed circuit, spinning my wheels. Knowing I wasn't getting anywhere but spinning just the same. I had to. Had to keep that up or I wouldn't be able to survive.

~ Haruki Murakami

God is like a mirror, consistent, stable, unchanging; reflecting His image of us, that is always changing.

~ Anthony Liccione

The ultimate Maturing comes only when we lose our parent(s), we can keep them young though by maturing earlier as a responsibility.

~ Sandeep Sahajpal

You don't stop laughing because you grow old. You grow old because you stop laughing.

~ Michael Pritchard

You know you're old when you're watching Karate Kid and you realize you're more attracted to Mr. Miagi than Ralph Macchio.

~ Hayley Linfield

When we age we shed many skins: ego, arrognace, dominance, self-opionated, unreliable, pessimism, rudeness, selfish, uncaring ... Wow, it's good to be old!

~ Stephen Richards

Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.

~ Don Delillo

... forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on.

~ Julian Barnes

She looked at his face. So old and wrinkled. So beautiful and just right.

~ R.j. Lawrence

Because I’ve gotten older, I worry that there will be a steep decline in my talent, but I promise not to let the same thing happen to my passion for writing.

~ Pat Conroy

Unattached and aimless, these old men are always infatuated with little certainties and regularities such as those that ordered the life of Mr. Krupper as seen from outside. Habit is living. Anything unexpected reminds them of death.(Hard Candy)

~ Tennessee Williams

Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image. He still saw himself, in his mind's eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed ... Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went.

~ Philip K. Dick

...real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here and sullen there, warm asymmetrical streaks on a rosewood cabinet from where a slant of sun had struck it while the other side was as dark as the day it was cut.

~ Donna Tartt

One Life With Many Names, Childhood, Boyhood, Manhood And Old, Then? Then! All Unknown, Uncertain Destination....

~ Muhammad Imran Hasan

It’s not that I’m particularly worried about growing old. Nor am I all that bothered about wrinkles, grey hair and all that. BUT. Major but. I don’t like the idea of dying – not when i have so much left to do! That, people, is the rather unwelcome realisation that strikes me now and then, namely that the number of years ahead of me are fewer than the ones behind me, and while I have ticked off a lot of items on that mental list of mine, there are so many things left. Like riding through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in my hair, to mention one.

~ Anna Belfrage

Almost any age is better than twenty-two.

~ David Rakoff

She has built her whole life on the foundation of beauty: each chiseled plane, each sloping dimple, each soft curve as crucial as keystones in the cathedral of her body.

~ Nenia Campbell

And I seemed to see myself ageing as swiftly as a day-fly. But the idea of ageing was not exactly the one which offered itself to me. And what I saw was more like a crumbling, a frenzied collapsing of all that had always protected me from all I was always condemned to be.

~ Samuel Beckett

When it's all said and done remember, You are only as old as you look.

~ Mark W. Boyer

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.

~ Susan Sontag

If we are to welcome the elderly into our communities and support them to stay there for as long as possible, if we are to attend to the social needs of our elderly citizens both inside and out of institutions, then we need both government intervention and funding, along with the community's engagement and help.

~ Karen Hitchcock

When I spoke to a colleague about Joe's report, her face registered surprise. She said, Is it possible for a death in a nursing home to be premature? Joe told me, If it were happening in any other kind of institution, to any other part of the population - workers, say, or children - there'd be an outcry, media, inquiries, swift intervention. The truth is we do not value the last months or years of a person's life. The remaining life of someone old. Particularly if they are in residential care. If we are all just economic units who lift or lean, then very little is lost when a nursing home resident or anyone getting on in their years dies prematurely. In fact money might be saved - one less nursing-home bed to fund, and the kids can finally get their hands on the house.

~ Karen Hitchcock

Medicine and society have entered into a folie a deaux regarding medicine's importance in gigantic population ills. We believe that genetics and pills and enzymes bring us health. We wait for the dementia cure (the obesity cure, the diabetes cure) rather than changing our society to decrease incidence and severity. We slash social welfare programs and access to GPs and ignore the downstream effect this will have on future generations. To reduce non-communicable disease, the actions we need to take are societal: make it easier for people to move and eat well, strengthen education, promote community participation and meaningful work. Our collective delusion is that we can have all the benefits such a society would bring without the structural supports necessary to bring it into being, that we can attain health by inventing and buying drugs. It is hard to know which is the more utopian vision: magic pills or a society serious about prevention.

~ Karen Hitchcock

To all, I would say how mistaken they are when they think that they stop falling in love when they grow old, without knowing that they grow old when they stop falling in love.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

In the seven years or so that had passed since I had last seen him, Sir Magnus Donners had grown not so much older in appearance, as less like a human being.

~ Anthony Powell

One’s capacity for hearing about ghastly doings lessens with age.

~ Anthony Powell

In the old pieces of furniture almost as in the old paintings, dwells the charm of the past, of the faded which becomes stronger in a man when he reaches an advanced age.

~ Adalbert Stifter

I know I do everything. I've been doing everything for an awfully long time, and I've seen and lived as hard as I could, and it's been unbelievable, I tell you, unbelievable. But now I have the feeling everything is gliding away from me, and I don't remember, and I don't care, and yet now is right when I need it.

~ Tove Jansson

He had found that jealousy – or perhaps the fear of betrayal – was no respecter of age. Indeed, if anything, he thought getting older simply made it worse; he felt more vulnerable now.

~ Kathy Shuker

Anyway, those things would not have lasted long.The experience of the years shows it to me.But Destiny arrived in some haste and stopped them.The beautiful life was brief.But how potent were the perfumes,On how splendid a bed we lay,To what sensual delight we gave our bodies.An echo of the days of pleasure,An echo of the days drew near me,A little of the fire of the youth of both of us,Again I took in my hands a letter,And I read and reread till the light was gone.And melancholy, I came out on the balconyCame out to change my thoughts at least by looking atA little of the city that I loved,A little movement on the street and in the

~ Constantinos P. Cavafis

Our reverence for independence takes no account of the reality of what happens in life: sooner or later, independence will become impossible. Serious illness or infirmity will strike. It is as inevitable as sunset. And then a new question arises: If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained?

~ Atul Gawande

Now is the time of fresh startsThis is the season that makes everything new.There is a longstanding rumor that Spring is the timeof renewal, but that's only if you ignore the depressingclutter and din of the season. All that floweringand budding and birthing--- the messy youthfulnessof Spring actually verges on squalor. Spring is too busy,too full of itself, too much like a 20-year-old to be the best time for reflection, re-grouping, and starting fresh. For that you need December. You need to have lived through the mindless biological imperatives of your life (to bud, and flower, and show off) before you can see that a landscape of new fallen snow is THE REAL YOU.December has the clarity, the simplicity, and the silence you need for the best FRESH START of your life.

~ Vivian Swift

Many things can prolong your life, but only wisdom can save it.

~ Neel Burton

I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book.

~ Michael Ondaatje

Time is a function of memory; what does not pass through a smile flies away through dark. Celebrating passing time applies to the successful ones. Cheer on your birthday, you're among the lucky ones.

~ Shady K. Hallab