Aging Quotes

Old Age homes are civilization's dumpsites for human beings who it cannot exploit further.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I am a fading phantasmagoria. Time has left me in partial glory.

~ Fidelis O. Mkparu

It’s not loving a man that makes life harder for gay guys, it’s homophobia. It’s not the color of their skin that makes life harder for people of color; it’s racism. It’s not having vaginas that makes life harder for women, it’s sexism. And it’s ageism, far more than the passage of time, that makes growing older harder for all of us.

~ Ashton Applewhite

We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn't even know it.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.

~ Maya Angelou

I reckon responsible behavior is something to get when you grow older. Like varicose veins.

~ Terry Pratchett

Your scared and my scared are two different things.''What's that supposed to mean?' she asked.'As you get older, you don't recover from things so easy.''As you get older, you also get tired?''Yeah,' I said, 'you get tired.

~ Haruki Murakami

The Babies we were are buried, and their shadows are plodding on.

~ Emily Dickinson

At some point, you're no longer growing up, you're aging. But no one can pinpoint that moment exactly.

~ Richard Linklater

Life is brief, young maiden, fall in love; before the crimson bloom fades from your lips, before the tides of passion cool within your hips, for those of you who know no tomorrow. (Gondola no Uta)

~ Kouhei Kadono

My last girlfriend was a Showgirl - But we eventually broke up because she wouldn't Tell me anything. Now I'm dating a girl who looks exactly like my grandma, only my girl older.-James Lee Schmidt and Jarod Kintz

~ James Lee Schmidt

If we are lucky enough, as I am, to be from time to time in quite close contact with young people, they can sometimes make it easier to hang on to this notion when they function, as every person does vis-a-vis every other person they come up against, as a mirror. Always we are being reflected in the eyes of others. Are we silly or sensible, stupid or clever, bad or good, unattractive or sexy...? We never stop being at least slightly aware of, if not actively searching for, answers to such questions, and are either deflated or elated, in extreme cases ruined or saved, by what we get. So if when you are old a beloved child happens to look at you as if he or she thinks (even if mistakenly!) that you are wise and kind: what a blessing! It's not that such a fleeting glimpse of yourself can convert you into wiseness and kindness in any enduring way; more like a good session of reflexology which, although it can cure nothing, does make you feel like a better person while it's going on and for an hour or two afterwards, and even that is well worth having. The more frequent such shots of self-esteem are, the more valuable they become, so there is a risk - remote, but possible - of their becoming addictive. An old person who doesn't enjoy having young people in her life must be a curmudgeon, but it is extremely important that she should remember that risk and watch her step. Or he, his.

~ Diana Athill

You don’t have to spend much time with the elderly or those with terminal illness to see how often medicine fails the people it is supposed to help. The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a sliver’s chance of benefit. They are spent in institutions—nursing homes and intensive care units—where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in life. Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need.

~ Atul Gawande

In the grand scheme of life, nobody grows old keeping their soul unblemished.

~ A.j. Darkholme

The sooner growing older is stripped of reflexive dread, the better equipped we are to benefit from the countless ways in which it can enrich us.

~ Ashton Applewhite

The mother at thirty with face commencing to display the faint seams of the plan for the second face life had in store for her and which she feared would be her own mother’s

~ David Foster Wallace

It gave her a sudden sense that it was now her turn to grow old, to find the world changing, sliding away from the old ways of being and behaving, so that you were gradually a stranger to the place you lived in. The woman priest with jogging clothes and a BlackBerry gave Mary a glimpse of what life must have been like for her mother as she grew older.

~ John Lanchester

Twenty-three is old. It's almost 25, which is like almost mid-20s.

~ Jessica Simpson

He walked into the bathroom, wincing at himself in the mirror, that always more tired older brother.

~ J.g. Ballard

now that one was mature then, said Peter, one could watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling, he said. No, that is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply, more passionately, every year. It increased, he said, alas, perhaps, but one should be glad of it-- it went on increasing in his experience.

~ Virginia Woolf

She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age.

~ C.s. Lewis

No one in the world is really over 28. I wish I had known that when I thought I was 40.

~ Neil A. Hogan

It was then I realized that no one can escape his age, and that my dangerous contempt had melted like ice the moment someone was kind enough to show they cared about me, and in a way that suited me.

~ Raymond Radiguet

They say you’re only as old as you feel but try telling that to a ninety-year-old on their deathbed, just wishing he could do all the bloody things he wants to do.

~ Karina Halle

As I have aged, I’ve been lucky never to reach old. Old is always at least five or ten years beyond my current calendar stage.

~ Dan Groat

A person gets built and stands for a few years and then nature’s demolition team comes in.

~ Dan Groat

As his boots walked towards the old station, he felt as though he were hallucinating. Scary apprehension increased the beat of his heart and the sweat upon his forehead was cold. The reality of where he stood created a sinking feeling inside of him. An old man everyone called Uncle Tucker once owned this place. His sole existence behind the counter all of the time, day and night. He could have been a creature out of a fairy tale, with his long white beard and equally long white hair. Merlin. The overalls and the ball cap perched upon his head, along with the half-smoked cigar with an endless burning orb positioned in his mouth. It made him a fixture in time. He wondered if Tucker would still be alive. Tucker with his endless stories of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and flower children. A man that never left a country thousands of miles away where bicycles filled the capital. A man who never left those fields where killing occurred.

~ Jaime Allison Parker

One grey hair appeared on my headI plucked it out with my hand.It answered me: You have prevailed against me alone -What will you do when my army comes after me?

~ Yehuda Halevi

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

Then Treece realized a remarkable thing. He understood in a flash that everyone in the world was the same age -no one younger or older than anyone else. He could not understand it, but he knew it to be true. Was there something in the air of the world that made people appear to be old or middle-aged or young?

~ P.k. Page

Courage has no age.

~ Anne Fortier

You are only old once, but you can be immature forever.

~ Anonymous

...A mirror can trick you day by day into thinking you remain looking and existing in one way forever. But a photograph presents you with the truth: it freezes you eternally, existing as a reminder that you can never, ever go back to any one moment again- that you are always changing, hour by hour, cell by cell, in tiny fragments that build skyscrapers overnight.

~ Kels Adeline Sapp

His age was indeterminate. But in cynicism and general world weariness, which is a sort of carbon dating of the personality, he was about seven thousand years old.

~ Terry Pratchett

A face-lift is a woman’s attempt to lower the odds of the next person accurately guessing her age.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Like the culture that created me, I am receding into the past at a rate of knots. Soon I'll need a whole row of footnotes if anybody under thirty-five is going to comprehend the least thing I say.

~ Angela Carter

This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can’t get fresh fruit in the shops.

~ Geoff Ryman

Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible.

~ Orhan Pamuk

So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long. For suppose you should think that a man had had a long voyage who had been caught in a raging storm as he left harbour, and carried hither and thither and driven round and round in a circle by the rage opposing winds. He did not have a long voyage, just a long tossing about.

~ Seneca

America isn't breaking apart at the seams. The American dream isn't dying. Our new racial and ethnic complexion hasn't triggered massive outbreaks of intolerance. Our generations aren't at each other's throats. They're living more interdependently than at any time in recent memory, because that turns out to be a good coping strategy in hard times. Our nation faces huge challenges, no doubt. So do the rest of the world's aging economic powers. If you had to pick a nation with the right stuff to ride out the coming demographic storm, you'd be crazy not to choose America, warts and all.

~ Pew Research Center