Aging Quotes

We're always trotting out some story of a ninety-seven-year-old who runs marathons, as if such cases were not miracles of biological luck but reasonable expectations for all. Then, when our bodies fail to live up to this fantasy, we feel as if we somehow have something to apologize for.

~ Atul Gawande

All things left her, allBut one. Her highborn courtlinessAccompanied her to the end,Beyond the rapture and its eclipse,In a way like an angel's. Of ElviraThe first thing that I saw - such years ago -Was her smile and also it was the last.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

There is a line in Verlaine I shall not recall again,There is a street close by forbidden to my feet,There's a mirror that's seen me for the very last time,There is a door that I have locked till the end of the world.Among the books in my library (I have them before me)There are some that I shall never open now.This summer I complete my fiftieth year;Death is gnawing at me ceaselessly.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Never give up hope. If you do, you'll be dead already.--Dementia Patient, Rose from The Inspired Caregiver

~ Peggi Speers

It's not cold in here, you're just dying.

~ Sarah Silverman

All are dead, and ourselves left alone amidst a new generation whom we know not, and who know us not.

~ Thomas Jefferson

I am a fading phantasmagoria. Time has left me in partial glory.--Fidelis O Mkparu

~ Fidelis O. Mkparu

There isn't a thing I can't do now that I didn't do when I was twenty-one...which gives you an idea of how pathetic I was when I was twenty-one. (That's a lie, but I might as well tell you something right here at the beginning of the book. Anytime I can get a laugh I'm not going to let the truth interfere with it.)

~ George Burns

[The thief-taker] was conspicuous by his age, I should estimate he is in his middle fifties, and by a bearing, I am tempted to call it dignity, wanting in the others. He has a good head of hair, only a bit thin on top, blond going grey, and sea green eyes. He has an excellently carved set of teeth, but displays them rarely. He has a trim figure, unusual in a profession that consists largely of loitering around taverns, but any illusion that he is especially fit is dispelled when he begins to move, for he is a little bit halt, and a little bit lame, stiff in the joints and given to frequent sighs and grimaces that hint at pains internal.

~ Neal Stephenson

I am tarred and feathered with Time.

~ Ogden Nash

We are on red alert when it comes to how we are perceiving ourselves as a species. There’s no desire to be an adult. Adulthood is not a goal. It’s not seen as a gift. Something happened culturally: No one is supposed to age past 45...

~ Frances Mcdormand

Accepting one's age and mortality is a sign that you've now become an adult. Once you realize you no longer fit in the same jeans you did when you were 30, and the spicy foods you loved when you were younger now like to revisit you at 2 AM, you come to realize that with aging comes adjustment. And, aging isn't a bad thing - it sure beats the alternative!

~ James Arlen Dennis

You believed you could transcend the body as you aged, she tells herself. You believed you could rise above it, to a serene, nonphysical realm. But it’s only through ecstasy you can do that, and ecstasy is achieved through the body itself. Without the bone and sinew of wings, no flight. Without that ecstasy you can only be dragged further down by the body, into its machinery. Its rusting, creaking, vengeful, brute machinery.

~ Margaret Atwood

We keep making decisions, every day, half without thinking, half against our will. If we don't fight back, if we allow ourselves to change, to be changed, then once it's done we have to do other things, and on and on until the person we wanted to be is so far away in the past that we only remember her, longingly, as if she were a beloved stranger.

~ Rona Jaffe

And since when had I become the guy that things happened to ten years ago?

~ Jim Butcher

You get tired of always wondering anew why life has to take the place of youth.

~ Gary Lutz

In the old pieces of furniture almost as in the old paintings, dwells the charm of the past, of the faded which becomes stronger in a man when he reaches an advanced age.

~ Adalbert Stifter

I don't know who to write to anymore... They've changed their souls, that's a way to be disloyal, to forget, to keep talking about something else.

~ Céline

John had written that normal fantasy (normal in the T.S. Kuhn sense) was written for the moderately educated class suffering from ennui. It was for folks stuck doing dull, repetitive work, growing old while not getting laid half often or variously enough, watching other, less deserving people (the privileged and the crooks) scoop up your share of fun. So then the fantasy generates the exciting world where you're given a heroic purpose and an opportunity to use those very powers you have suspected that you had but never have been able to locate and use, except in destructive ways when shit-faced.

~ Don Webb

No one likes to talk about the positive parts of getting older and aging into orphanhood, how with your parents you often bury a lot of things you were never able to confront or fix or let go of.

~ Jill Mccorkle

After all these years, his best friend is malaria.Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old battles.

~ Louis Bayard

At thirty either you are perfect or nothing.

~ Aporva Kala

John had written that normal fantasy (normal in the T.S. Kuhn sense) was written for the moderately educated class from suffering ennui. It was for folks stuck doing dull, repetitive work, growing old while not getting laid half often or variously enough, watching other, less deserving people (the privileged and the crooks) scoop up your share of fun. So then the fantasy generates the exciting world where you're given a heroic purpose and an opportunity to use those very powers you have suspected that you had but never have been able to locate and use, except in destructive ways when shit-faced.

~ Don Webb

Perhaps this was part of growing older, to undergo hideous alterations in the deepest certainties, in love, in lovers, finally in one's self.

~ Elizabeth Harrower

Wart meets Merlin for the first time – only for Merlin, who lives backwards, it's the last time. The old wizard weeps and the boy can't understand why. It's a powerful expression of the gulf between the ancient and the young.

~ Philip Womack

An old man with overalls walked by, I don't think old people should wear overalls, it makes them look like shrivelly toddlers.

~ Aimee Bender

It pleased him to see that things, and not only people, suffered the wear and tear of age. [53 yr old Inspector Bordelli's view]

~ Marco Vichi

No one can turn back the clock. Lie about your age if you want, but we're all going in the same direction.

~ Emma Woolf

I call the Change of Life Orchids because menopause is such an ugly word. It's got men in it for goddsakes.

~ Lisa Jey Davis

It’s this freedom that’s the key to becoming visible again. Not caring what others think is freeing. Expressing yourself any way you want is freeing. Having opinions, emotional wisdom, spiritual understanding…these things free you. And in freedom, we find power.

~ Jane Tara

Youth is marked by a breathtaking novelty that diminishes with each year of age - until life becomes a delusive struggle to break routines, escape the ordinary, and rediscover the joy of discovery.

~ Zack Love

When I was suddenly thrust into what everyone calls menopause (Orchids) earlier than my body planned, I decided someone needed to take charge on so many levels. It was time to not only change the vernacular, but to speak up and say Hey! This isn't an old lady's disease! We aren't old! We are strong and dammit, we are beautiful and sexy too!

~ Lisa Jey Davis

I know what's wrong with me - I could never stand still for death! Which you've got to do by a certain age, or be ridiculous - you've got to stand there nobly and serene, and let death run his tape on your arms and around your belly and up your crotch until he's got you fitted for that black suit. And I can't, I won't!... So I'm left with wrestling with this anachronistic energy which God has charged me with and I will use it till the dirt is shoveled in my mouth! Life! Life! Fuck death and dying!

~ Arthur Miller

Rich old people are more attractive than poor old people, so by all means, try to get rich before age sets in. Otherwise, you'll just be playing catch-up for the rest of your life and that will just wear you out, let me tell you.

~ Jill Conner Browne

Pre-forty, you can wash your face with Tide and use Vaseline for moisturizer, toss on a little mascara and lip gloss, and you're a friggin' cover girl. Those of us on the slippery slope that is the Other Side of Forty can testify-- those days are so over. You pore over labels promising everything short of actual rebirth-- you will buy most of them for an average of $450 per quarter once-- and none of them will work. You will still be getting older and poorer with every passing purchase.

~ Jill Conner Browne

Mother is fading for him, her face receding into shadows, her memory diminishing with each passing day, leaking like sand from a fist.

~ Khaled Hosseini

Getting older is a question of coming to terms with the fact that you’ll never know the secrets, and the resulting equilibrium is what gives the illusion of actually knowing them.

~ Paul Shepheard

If old age is good for anything it's good for being generous.

~ William Kuhn

Reading lives is the primary activity. Reading literature, although we engage in it more intentionally and more mindfully, is the secondary one. We are able to do the latter only insofar as we are already doing the former. As with narrative in general, then, reading our lives is not merely a metaphor for how we make sense of our lives. It is how we make sense of our lives.

~ William L. Randall

I've put one foot before another and the years have passed, the time marked by late rent payments and the appearance of wrinkles - tiny ones, on the corners of my eyes. They are a reminder of my youth, and of the hourglass that we all live in, grains of sand slipping through the gap of time, each granule adding another wrinkle, another pocket of fat, another sag that I will fight to overcome, another grey hair to pluck or dye.

~ Alessandra Torre