Aging Quotes

Perhaps she wasn't ill at all in the end, but simply more revealed.

~ Charles Lambert

Never has nostalgia held stronger sway, never has the belief in the redemptive possibilities of the future seemed so laughable.

~ Ann Marlowe

Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.

~ Colum Mccann

He had always imagined that some sort of emotional mental equipment was meant to arrive, when he was forty-five, say, or fifty, a kind of kit that would enable him to deal with the impending loss of a parent. If he were only in possession of this equipment, he would be just fine. He would be noble and selfless, wise and philosophical. Perhaps he would even have kids of his own, and would presumably possess the kind of maturity that comes with fatherhood, the understanding of life as a process.

~ David Nicholls

You know, you the worst kind, you want to marry the artist and live like squalor, but you wait, in five years you be like, Baby Jake why we eat ramen noodles every night? You a hustler, don't blind me, I see.

~ Stephanie Danler

I’m most endeared to the fact that they used gifts and talents that were taught to them by other enterprising women who looked just like them. These are gifts and talents they brought with them from Africa and other distant shores. These were gifts and talents women used to appease their owners, and make their lives comfortable. These were gifts and talents used to fuel economies and for building communities. In one book I read, nickels from the sale of chicken eggs paid the college tuition of three children.

~ Robin Caldwell

As our body journeys through life, and life journeys on our body….life will leave marks on us too. From the creases of our wrinkles to the birthmarks on our bodies to the tattoos we decide to place.

~ Lauren Klarfeld

After having imposed itself on us like the egomaniac it is, clamouring about its own needs, foisting upon us its own sordid and perilous desires, the body's final trick is simply to absent itself. Just when you need it, just when you could use an arm or a leg, suddenly the body has other things to do. It falters, it buckles under you; it melts away as if made of snow, leaving nothing much. Two lumps of coal, an old hat, a grin made of pebbles. The bones dry sticks, easily broken.

~ Margaret Atwood

Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This gawky wormbent tabernacle.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

Aging gracefully - A concept that is rejected in 40s, but gracefully accepted in 50s...

~ Sandhya Jane

Aging gracefully - A that is rejected in 40s, but gracefully accepted in 50s...

~ Sandhya Jane

She went weak in the knees and could barely walk as she followed him, trembling with fear. Her hopes for a happy future with Jordan came crashing down. Whoever had told Jordan she was free to travel under the name of Maria Brooks must have misled him.

~ Dianne Harman Cornered Coyote

It is very rarely that a middle-aged man finds an author who gives him, what he knew so often in his teens and twenties, the sense of having opened a new door.

~ C.s. Lewis

he dared to explore her withered neck w/his fingertips…her hips w/their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.

~ Sylvia Townsend Warner

It behooves me to remember as I advance in age that death is an inevitable part of the life cycle rather than a medical failure.

~ Lisa J. Shultz

Here is what happens in middle age: Some friends and acquaintances who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad.

~ Jenny Offill

Know this. That the things that go into the fire are forever changed. That all you have ever done can be measured not by distance but by circumference. That these twin spirals of smoke; they are your life, rising in curls.

~ Christian Kiefer

You pass as a guy; I, as pregnant. Our waiter cheerfully tells us about his family, expresses delight in ours. On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more “male,” mine, more and more “female.” But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.

~ Maggie Nelson

Writing about the indignities of old age: the daunting stairway to the restaurant restroom, the benefits of a wheelchair in airports and its disadvantages at cocktail parties, giving the user what he described as a child's-eye view of the party and a crotch-level view of the guests.Dying is a matter of slapstick and pratfalls. The aging process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over and runs off laughing. No one should grow old who isn't ready to appear ridiculous.

~ John Mortimer

The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.

~ Robert Frost

And the beauty of a woman, with passing years only grows!

~ Audrey Hepburn

When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun—that life is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays—whenever. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, 'Well then, exactly what was it I was having—that interlude—the scrambly madness—all that time I had before?

~ Douglas Coupland

Keeping up the appearance of having all your marbles is hard work, but important.

~ Sara Gruen

You don't stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing.

~ George Bernard Shaw

The curse of mortality. You spend the first portion of your life learning, growing stronger, more capable. And then, through no fault of your own, your body begins to fail. You regress. Strong limbs become feeble, keen senses grow dull, hardy constitutions deteriorate. Beauty withers. Organs quit. You remember yourself in your prime, and wonder where that person went. As your wisdom and experience are peaking, your traitorous body becomes a prison.

~ Brandon Mull

I'm not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naive and romantic and idealistic - the part of you that you treasure most - to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact?

~ Kenneth Cain

I grow old … I grow old …,I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

~ T.s. Eliot

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

Never tease an old dog, he might have one bite left.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

I don't see why there should be a point where everyone decides you're too old. I'm not too old, and until I decide I'm too old I'll never be too fucking old.

~ Lemmy Kilmister

It is lovely to meet an old person whose face is deeply lined, a face that has been deeply inhabited, to look in the eyes and find light there.

~ John O'donohue

The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you'll grow out of it.

~ Doris Day

Maybe it's true that life begins at fifty. But everything else starts to wear out, fall out, or spread out.

~ Phyllis Diller

Janey accuses me of chasing jailbait. She bursts into angry tears, asking if it's because she's getting older. It's true. She's aging more noticeably every day—while I am standing still. I prefer the stillness here. I am tired of Earth. These people. I am tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives.

~ Alan Moore

Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.

~ May Sarton

Books aren’t eggs, you know. Simply because a book has aged a bit doesn’t mean it’s gone bad.” There was now an edge to Monsieur Perdu’s voice too. “What is wrong with old? Age isn’t a disease. We all grow old, even books. But are you, is anyone, worth less, or less important, because they’ve been around for longer?

~ Nina George

For after all we make our faces as we go along...

~ May Sarton

Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.

~ May Sarton

I am thinking about the way that life can be so slippery; the way that a twelve-year-old girl looking into the mirror to count freckles reaches out toward herself and that reflection has turned into that of a woman on her wedding day, righting her veil. And how, when that bride blinks, she reopens her eyes to see a frazzled young mother trying to get lipstick on straight for the parent/teacher conference that starts in three minutes. And how after that young woman bends down to retrieve the wild-haired doll her daughter has left on the bathroom floor, she rises up to a forty-seven-year-old, looking into the mirror to count age spots.

~ Elizabeth Berg