Aging Quotes

You can do this (this thing, where your body will cease to produce hormones and your skin, hair, muscles and bones... basically every part of you will notice, go into withdrawals, and stage a coup). Be prepared for this mentally, and you'll own this thing.

~ Lisa Jey Davis

I haven’t been out driving at this time of night in many years, much less in an unfamiliar area. These are the things that scare you as you get older. You understand night all too well, all its attendant meanings. You try to avoid it, work around it, keep it from entering your house. Your weary, ornery body tells you to stay up late, sleep less, keep the lights on, don’t go into the bedroom—if you have to sleep, sleep in your chair, at the table. Everything is about avoiding the night. Because of that, I suppose that I should be scared out here in the dark, but I am finally past that, I think.(p.204)

~ Michael Zadoorian

Age had drained the color from her eyes the way darkness drains the color from everything

~ Brielle A. Marino

Looking back on it now, I'd say one's thirties are a cruel age. At this point, I think of them as a time I whiled away unaware of the tide that can suddenly pull you out, beyond the shallows, into the sea of hardship, and even death

~ Takashi Hiraide

The cool thing about getting older, is that you have so much to look back on. If you take the time to reflect on your life journey to where you are now, you will be amazed at how many times “fate” caused you to make great decisions that lead you to where you are now.

~ Beth Ramsay

I don't ask for your pity, but just for your understanding – not even that – no. Just for some recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.

~ Tennessee Williams

I thought that once I got to this city nothing could ever catch up with me because I could remake my life daily. Once that had made me feel infinite. Now I was certain I would never learn. Being remade was the same thing as being constantly undone.

~ Stephanie Danler

I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)

~ Nicole Krauss

But space shrinks when you get old, and things lose their wonder, and the wisest thing to do then is to try your best to sleep.

~ Dexter Palmer

The mysteries of life include the external and the internal conundrums that each person encounters in a world composed of competing ideologies and agents of change. Conflicting ideas include political, social, legal, and ethical concepts. Agents of change include environmental factors, social pressure to conform, aging, and the forces inside us that made us into whom we are as well as the forces compelling us to be a different type of person.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Whenever I hear people clucking about the decline of civilization, what's wrong with young people, how vulgar popular culture is, how confusing and frightening they find the internet, alarms go off. I know I'm around somebody whose hinges are rusting. Death will be bad enough, but for me, this early harbinger is more fearsome, because a part of one's spirit and openness and ability to learn and grow disappears.

~ Jon Katz

Rich said, As your get older, feelings are harder to come by. It was so simple and poignant.

~ Ahmir Questlove Thompson

A boy from Brooklyn used to cruise on summer nights.As soon as he’d hit sixty he’d hold his hand out the window,cupping it around the wind. He’d been assuredthis is exactly how a woman’s breast feels when you putyour hand around it and apply a little pressure. Now he knew,and he loved it. Night after night, again and again, untilthe weather grew cold and he had to roll the window up.For many years afterwards he was perpetually attemptingto soar. One winter’s night, holding his wife’s breastin his hand, he closed his eyes and wanted to weep.He loved her, but it was the wind he imagined now.As he grew older, he loved the word etcetera and refusedto abbreviate it. He loved sweet white butter. He oftenpretended to be playing the organ. On one of his last mornings,he noticed the shape of his face molded in the pillow.He shook it out, but the next morning it reappeared.

~ Mary Ruefle

At his age, it can be overwhelming and painful to harbor a thought accompanied by too much nostalgia. Not that he wanted to. Mabel, in her final years, had stopped listening to music. The songs of her teenage years brought her back to people and feelings of that time - people she could never see again and sensations that were no longer coming. It was too much for her. There are people who can manage such things. There are those of us who can no longer walk, but can close our eyes and remember a summer hike through a field, or the feeling of cool grass beneath our feet, and smile. Who still have the courage to embrace the past, and give it life and a voice in the present. But Mabel was not one of those people. Maybe she lacked that very form of courage. Or maybe her humanity was so complete, so expansive, that she would be crushed by her capacity to imagine the love that was gone.

~ Derek B. Miller

Old age breeds the miracle of recall. You have no short-term memory atall; you can’t remember what you did minutes ago, but you can recall with exquisite clarity what you did on your fifth birthday and how it all felt.

~ Vicki Covington

He thinks of the rotten parachute they played with as kids in Arcadia: they hurtle through life aging unimaginably fast, but each grasps a silken edge of memory that billows between them and softens the long fall.

~ Lauren Groff

I'm pretty sure that eating chocolate keeps wrinkles away because I have never seen a 10 year old with a Hershey bar and crows feet.

~ Amy Neftzger

We all become caricatures of ourselves, if we live long enough

~ Noah Hawley

A man of fifty is responsible for his face.

~ Edwin Mcmasters Stanton

You get older, and you make your choices, and one by one the doors shut.

~ Rebecca Podos

I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the cliches and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the cliches and conventions of the young.

~ Michael Chabon

Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciting received analyses of current events. All the Manor residents watched television day and night, informed to the eyeballs like everyone else and rushed for time, toward what end no one asked. Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else's, but their many experiences' having taught them so little irked Lou. One hated tourists, another southerners; another despised immigrants. Even dying, they still held themselves in highest regard. Lou would have to watch herself. For this way of thinking began to look like human nature--as if each person of two or three billion would spend his last vital drop to sustain his self-importance.

~ Annie Dillard

Aging masters emotions, but with experiences of aging

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I believe that love and forgiveness engages an incomprehensible healing force and sometimes true healing occurs, but always an emotional and spiritual healing happens.

~ Angeli Maun Akey

The Self Care Formula is simple-NITO(5R). Nutrients In & Toxins Out in the 5 Realms (Mental, Emotional, Physical, Environmental, Spiritual).

~ Nina Leavins

Growing old is humbling and it takes effort to accomplish this stage of life with dignity.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The days before, even the score of what you are filled in with today. What colour are you, the tangled hues of years gone by that affected you?

~ Juliet Castle

Are you thankful for not being young?''Yes, sir. If I was young, it would all have to be gone through again, and the end would be a weary way off, don't you see?...

~ Charles Dickens

I have a friend who likes to date younger women because their stories are shorter. Old men like us, our stories are longer.

~ Jerry N. Uelsmann

Until we’re pushing up daisies, it might be good to remind ourselves daily that everything’s coming up roses — for me and for you.

~ Gina Barreca

I love the optimism on the shores of youth, where time hasn't yet eroded faith.

~ Amy Neftzger

An old person knows what it’s like to be young, but a young person doesn’t know what it’s like to be old. There’s no substitute for life experience.

~ Eleanor Brownn

Why is it when we were kids we looked up at the stars... But now they seem to be looking down on us...?

~ Leonardo Donofrio

After 25 the only thing you’ll be precocious at is death.

~ Patricia L. Steffy

Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this

~ Philip K. Dick

I shot through my twenties like a luminous thread through a dark needle, blazing toward my destination: Nowhere.

~ Carrie Fisher

Life goes on and on after one's luck has run out. Youthfulness persists, alas, long after one has ceased to be young.

~ Glenway Wescott

He doesn't know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief.

~ Michel Houellebecq

At twenty-four she imagined with dread that she was growing old.

~ Jean Rhys

With age, gone are the forevers of youth. Gone is the willingness to procrastinate, delay, to play the waiting game. Now each day is a treasure beyond compare . . . because there are so few such diadems left.

~ Joe L. Wheeler