Aging Quotes

What made Olive the saddest about the Gardners was that everyone wanted to be enshrined in someone’s memory. It was the only way of living on after death, really: in the minds of loved ones. Memories were the only things that made aging bearable, a way of reverting to better, simpler days.

~ Andrea Lochen

He put his hand on his forehead and scoured the French department of his memory for a word. He knew it was in there. He'd put it in almost fifty years before and hadn't had cause to remove it. But for the life of him he couldn't find it.

~ Colin Cotterill

For most of her life she just expected things would work out, that people would be kind. Now she recognized her good fortune for what it was. She'd been lucky in so much, it had left her woefully unprepared for old age.

~ Stewart O'nan

But you've looked forward to this trip for so long.And now I won't have it to look forward to any longer.

~ Ashley Warlick

She had collected experiences, I realized, as much as she had collected all these things. As we moved her out of her own life, she seemed lonelier that I hope I'll ever be.

~ Jenny Moore

One is alone when the last one who remembers is gone. I have nephews and nieces and kind friends---but there's no one who knew me as a young girl---non one who belongs to the old days. I've been alone for quite a long time now.

~ Agatha Christie

He was smarter than most, more sensitive. In that regard he was more prepared for the loneliness of senescence than she was. He'd been a stranger in the world for most of his life.

~ Matthew Thomas

My aunt must have been perfectly well aware that she would not see Swann again, that she would never leave her own house any more, but this ultimate seclusion seemed to be accepted by her with all the more readiness for the very reason which, to our minds, ought to have made it more unbearable; namely, that such a seclusion was forced upon her by the gradual and steady diminution in her strength which she was able to measure daily, which, by making every action, every movement 'tiring' to her if not actually painful, gave to inaction, isolation and silence the blessed, strengthening and refreshing charm of repose.

~ Marcel Proust

Fighting makes us feel alive, until it kills us. If it doesn’t kill us, the pain of sitting alone with ourselves, quietly, under constant assault by our own thoughts and memories of war can easily be enough to make us wish we’d died in battle instead.

~ Agnostic Zetetic

One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living... and with each one, he thinks he feels patterns on his cortex going dark, settling to sleep forever, parts of whoever he's been losing all definition, reverting to dumb chemistry...

~ Thomas Pynchon

...alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life--it was not worth much--not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage,he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one--we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.

~ James Salter

If You Don't Believe the Numbers and Believe in Your Spirit, then You're Ageless.

~ Carew Papritz

Let me tell you something, honey. When your boobs fall south and that pretty skin of yours looks like you’ve been tanning in a nuclear war zone, you’ll see what I mean about independence. When the looks are gone, all you’ve got left is your spirit, and ya gotta use it until you lose it. That and the occasional sponge bath from Francisco, but soon his ass will be just as wrinkly as mine. Beauty fades, but a strong will keeps ya young and springy.-Miss Velma

~ Rachael Wade

Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age.

~ Vera Nazarian

It's very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed twenty-two, you'd always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It's growth. It's more than the negative that you're going to die, it's also the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.

~ Mitch Albom

To understand how growth, aging and death works, you must understand the radiation environment.

~ Steven Magee

It was painful to contemplate the distance between the future of accomplishment I'd imagined for myself twenty years earlier, and the reality...it was painful to understand that the cushion of exceptionality invoked by the drug had made me oblivious to my inertia. And it was painful to have to define myself again, at an age when most people are happy in their own skins.

~ Ann Marlowe

The truth is, I can choose to view tough times as growing times, I can choose to see aging as seasoning and I can choose to focus on whatever good there is to be found in living. I choose. After all, it’s my point of view.

~ Steve Goodier

Aging is not our fault, but we certainly are guilty of feeling it.

~ Munia Khan

though aging reduces speed, it increases experience and understanding

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Perception of a self is not simply about actuality. Human beings’ identities are self-generating and people constantly revise and recreate the story of their being. Coming-into-being, not being, is the highest expression of reality. We only attain the fullest knowledge of a living thing including ourselves when we know what it was, understand what it now is, and understand what it can become. We do not know the truth of a living thing’s existence until we discern its entire history from development to demise.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Age 50 is the mile marker where any mildly perceptive person becomes acutely aware that he or she alone is accountable for the content and coherence of their character.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

No age of life is inglorious. Youth has its merits, but living to a ripe old age is the true statement of value. Aging is the road that we take to discern our character. Fame and fortune can elude us, but character is immortal. We must encounter a sufficient variety of experiences including both failures and accomplishments in order to gain nobility of character.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

In terms of days and moments lived, you’ll never again be as young as you are right now, so spend this day, the youth of your future, in a way that deflects regret. Invest in yourself. Have some fun. Do something important. Love somebody extra. In one sense, you’re just a kid, but a kid with enough years on her to know that every day is priceless. (418)

~ Victoria Moran

There is no old age. There is, as there always was, only you.

~ Carol Grace

The older you get, the faster time passes in your mind, so use your time according to what is most important.

~ A.j. Darkholme

In her 20′s, a woman’s breasts double her self-esteem. In her 40′s, they halve it.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

~ T.s. Eliot

When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvements … while remaining heedless of the world’s barbarism. I don’t say things have got worse; I merely say the young wouldn’t notice if they had. The old times were good because then we were young, and ignorant of how ignorant the young can be.

~ Julian Barnes

The distance to the corner shops of childhood becomes unfathomable, immeasurable; the candy bars have changed. And change has changed.

~ Ilse Aichinger

The past is gone. It went by like dusk to dawn.

~ Steven Tyler

I don't mind pointing out some of the failings of old age, because we are all headed in that direction, unless of course we take our own lives before we become a burden. I'm not advocating suicide, oh wait, I guess I am.

~ Amy Sedaris

I'm going to live to be twenty-five,' she said, 'then die.

~ Haruki Murakami

I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.

~ Nicole Krauss

Day by day we increase in age. Step by step we reduce the number of our steps. When you grow old, you shall see life differently and you shall get a better understanding of the journey of life: how you lived it and how you should have lived it!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Everything breaks down but desire. And because we are old, doctors try to shame that out of us. Young punks! Lose one's youth, and doctors take it as axiomatic that you've lost your mind, your balls.

~ Kiana Davenport

On the third day Vera said:'I love your body because it is beautiful. But I do not know your soul. I do not know whether there is a soul. Nor is it necessary for me because your body is beautiful.But everything is mutable and you will grow old. At first your face will grow old. Your body will live longer. An old face will be a mockery before a youthful body. And then a wasted body will be a mockery to ravenous desires.This is like the dead light of the setting sun which from the clouds above was reflected in the water... feeble and full of disillusion.Should I not kill you so that I might always possess you for myself.'And Vera became terrifying.I found this unpleasant.But from these words I understood that she had decided upon the day.(Thirty-Three Abominations)

~ Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal

When you’re seventy-five, you are still going to be you.

~ Linda Gray

When you get older, you know that life’s mysteries are revealed in the fullness of time. All you have to do is wait, watch, and be amazed.

~ Linda Gray

Most teenage girls don't give old people the time of day which is sad because all old people do all the time is think about how nice it was to be a teenager so long ago.

~ Aimee Bender