Aging Quotes

Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

~ China Miéville

Youth is as easily wasted as a fine wine consumed by a drunken man. There is no poetry in aging, and Javert lived out the process in its most hideous iteration.

~ Kelsey Brickl

Just then, a little hopped-up Japanese car zips up next to us. It’s bright yellow with loud, high-pitched exhaust pipes and a big air spoiler on the back. I look over at the driver to see who’s making all the racket. I’m surprised to see a teenage girl there. After a moment, she gooses it and whinnies on past. On her back window, there’s a sticker: NO FEAR. I think, good girl.

~ Michael Zadoorian

There was nothing about youth that was fair: the young hadn't done anything to deserve it, and the old hadn't done anything to drive it away.

~ Emma Straub

To have the experience I did as a child, I would have to be a physically different being, one with whom I share nearly nothing. On a cellular level, aside from the neurons of my cerebral cortex and a few other stranglers in my heart and eyes, I am not him.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

How naive and foolish the young are to imagine that they understand the loneliness of great age, the outliving of your contemporaries, anyone to whom your century of memory might make any sense.

~ Bill Holm

The young have little use for the concept of rebirth, yet the older they get the more appealing the concept becomes.

~ Charles Spencer King

I do not dye my hair blackso as to be young again and sin againbut because people dye their clothes black in mourning,so I have dyed my hair black, mourning for my old age.

~ Rūdagī

It was dawning on the wizards that they were outside the University, at night and without permission, for the first time in decades. A certain suppressed excitement crackled from man to man. Any watch trained in reading body language would have been prepared to bet that, after the click, someone was going to suggest that they might as well go somewhere and have a few drinks, and then someone else would fancy a meal, and then there was always room for a few more drinks, and then it would be 5 a.m. and the city guards would be respectfully knocking on the University gates and asking if the Archchancellor would care to step down to the cells to identify some alleged wizards who were singing an obscene song in six-part harmony, and perhaps he would also care to bring some money to pay for all the damage. Because inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.

~ Terry Pratchett

Youth is an unrecoverable asset. Unless you are a hydra, lucky you.

~ Anca Ioviţă

It's strange how in childhood it feels like tomorrow won't come until the end of forever, but in adulthood it feels like the end of forever could come tomorrow.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Our first youth is of no value; for we are never conscious of it, until after it is gone. But sometimes--always, I suspect, unless one is exceedingly unfortunate--there comes a sense of second youth, gushing out of the heart's joy at being in love; or possibly, it may come to crown some other grand festival in life, if any other such there be. This bemoaning of one's self. . . over the first, careless, shallow gayety of youth departed, and this profound happiness at youth regained,--so much deeper and richer than that we lost,--are essential to the soul's development. In some cases, the two states come almost simultaneously, and mingle the sadness and the rapture in one mysterious emotion.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Trust me, somewhere over the rainbow, happily ever after, etcetera, etcetera - looks far less likely in your mid-thirties.

~ Heather Mcvea

I had forgotten such innocence exists,/forgotten how it feels/ to live with neither calendars nor clocks

~ P.k. Page

Of course, you were crowned with laurel in the beginning, your gold hair was wreathed with laurel, but the gold is thinning and the laurel has withered. Face it – pitiful monster.

~ Tennessee Williams

Aging offers certain rewards that youth cannot. It represents the culmination of our efforts in building self-knowledge, families, friendships, careers, and the sense of self that comes from facing whatever adversity we may have encountered. Aging is to be honored. Youth certainly has its own set of rewards, but to dwell on them to the exclusion of those that come later in life causes a stagnation of the self. It keeps us from experiencing an appreciation of living an entire (ital) life, not just the beginning. When we're really old we will likely measure our lives by how well we loved, how well we were loved, and by what we created, whether that be family, work, art, or friendships. Even if we have chosen to have them, we will probably not measure our lives collagen injection by collagen injection.

~ Joyce T. Mcfadden

The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men's characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.

~ Cephalus

Sitting in the wicker rocking chair with her interrupted work in her lap, Amaranta watched Aureliano José, his chin covered with foam, stropping his razor to give himself his first shave. His blackheads bled and he cut his upper lip as he tried to shape a mustache of blond fuzz, and when it was all over he looked the same as before, but the laborious process gave Amaranta the feeling that she had begun to grow old at that moment.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

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

My youth was the most stubborn, peremptory part of myself. In my most relaxed moments, it governed my being. It pricked up its ears at the banter of eighteen-year-olds on the street. It frankly examined their bodies. It did not know its place: that my youth governed me with such ease didn't mean I was young. It meant I was divided as if housing a stowaway soul, rife with itches and yens which demanded a stern vigilance. I didn't live thoughtlessly in my flesh anymore. My body had not, in its flesh, fundamentally changed quite so much as it now could intuit the change that would only be dodged by an untimely death, and to know both those bodies at once, the youthful, and the old, was to me the quintessence of being middle-aged. Now I saw all my selves, even those that did not yet exist, and the task was remembering which I presented to others.

~ Susan Choi

Nature felt no change, and was ever young.

~ Elizabeth Gaskell

Each night when she prepared for bed she smeared her face with some new unguent which she hoped illogically would give back the glow and freshness to her vanishing beauty.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

My wisdom is as spurned as chaos. What is my nothingness, compared to the amazement that awaits you?

~ Arthur Rimbaud

Throughout their lifetime, most women learn to be uncomfortable with their physical appearance. They create amask of makeup that is intended to “fix” their “imperfections.” They identify so much with this mask they reject their true beauty.Feminine Transitions encourages women to remove their masks and love their true selves, completely.

~ Alyscia Cunningham

And the view was suddenly clear to me. The world opened out to its grim beyonds and I realized that, at forty, one must learn the rigors of acceptance. Capitalize it: Acceptance. I needed to accept what was put before me--be it a watery grave in Ireland's only natural fjord, or a return to the city and its grayer intensities, or a wordless exile in some steaming Cambodian swamp hole, or poems or no poems, or children or not, lovers or not, illness or otherwise, success or its absence. I would accept all that was put in my way, from here on through until I breathed my last.

~ Kevin Barry

For me- and for everybody else, probably- this is my first experience growing old, and the emotions I'm having, too, are all first-time feelings. If it were something I'd experienced before, then I'd be able to understand it more clearly, but this is the first time, so I can't. For now all I can do is put off making any detailed judgments and accept things as they are. Just like I accept the sky, the clouds, and the river. And there's also something kind of comical about it all, something you don't want to discard completely.

~ Haruki Murakami

For a second, I stared at the map of her veins just under the surface of her thin skin. It was like her body was trying to become diaphanous. Instead of getting harder and stronger and full of life as we age, we disappear slowly. Our skin thins and evaporates. Our nails barely coat our fingertips. Our hair falls out. We are never more see-through.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

I wear my wrinkles like battle scars, having earned every last one slaying life’s dragons. They boast of my victories and some defeats while their beauty is a wealth of wisdom gained.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Aging is a mortal term that my immortal spirit doesn't quite grasp.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Men do not quit playing because they grow old, they grow old because they quit playing.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Where are the eyes of my childhood, those fearful eyes she had thirty years ago, the eyes that made me?

~ Annie Ernaux

Little by little she had been discovering the uncertainty of her husband's step, his mood changes, the gaps in his memory, his recent habit of sobbing while he slept, but she did not identify these as the unequivocal signs of final decay but rather as a happy return to childhood.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we thing we won't, that we are different. As a child I thought that I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old?

~ Patti Smith

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

~ Munia Khan

The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

When you are a young person, you are like a young creek, and you meet many rocks, many obstacles and difficulties on your way. You hurry to get past these obstacles and get to the ocean. But as the creek moves down through the fields, it becomes larges and calmer and it can enjoy the reflection of the sky. It's wonderful. You will arrive at the sea anyway so enjoy the journey. Enjoy the sunshine, the sunset, the moon, the birds, the trees, and the many beauties along the way. Taste every moment of your daily life.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

The easiest way to get old is to be technologically behind...

~ Gabrielle Zevin

Real vision dies only when life dies. Once we live, we hope, we yearn for and we aspire to have something!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

So where does that leave me? I like hosting the show....It’s become my identity. If that’s gone, where am I?

~ Barbara Delinsky

In recent years a smaller share of young adults has been employed than at any time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking such trends in 1948. So it's not surprising that this generation of youthful protesters has a different focus for their grievances: the economy, stupid. But notice the targets they've chosen to demonize. It's all about class, not age. It's 1% versus 99%, not young versus old. Occupy Wall Street, not Occupy Leisure World.

~ Pew Research Center