Aging Quotes

By the time men get to be of our age, Mr. Vaiden, about all any new acquaintance can do is to remind them of somebody else. You know at times I have thought that is why we die. We become more and more intricately linked with the past, until finally we drift completely into it...and we are dead.

~ Thomas K. Stribling

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~ Rick Lauber

A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.

~ John Steinbeck

Once when he was still young, I saw a bit of his scalp showing through his hair and I was afraid. But it was just a cowlick. Now sometimes it shows through for real, but I feel only tenderness.

~ Jenny Offill

I think it's reasonable to suppose that one could oscillate between being biologically 20 and biologically 25 indefinitely.

~ Aubrey De Grey

Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry, aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.

~ Willa Cather

A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.Wrong, I want to say.In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.

~ Joan Didion

it had been a winter of deadening seriousness, when all the illusions and bright dreams of my early twenties had withered and died. I did not yet have the interior resources to dream new dreams; I was far too busy mourning the death of the old ones and wondering how I was to survive without them. I was sure I could replace them somehow , but was not sure I could restore their brassy luster or dazzling impress .

~ Pat Conroy

There should be an age limit for patients, he thinks as he takes off his shoes. You just have to say to them, You lived long enough. From now on, think of what's left as a bonus, a gift without an exchange slip. It hurts? Stay in bed. It still hurts? Wait: Either you'll die or it'll pass.

~ Etgar Keret

That’s what getting old is: When you can no longer bear the consequences of being wrong.

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

There is something the child sees that he does not see; something the child hears that he does not hear; and this something is the most important thing of all. Because he does not understand it, his understanding is more childish than the child's and more simple than simplicity itself; in spite of the many clever wrinkles on his parchment face, and the masterly play of his fingers in unravelling the knots.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Heyday, now that is a funny word ain't it? Part of a heyday is, you don't never know you are having yourself one till later when it's all over with, long gone.

~ Lee Smith

I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car.I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.

~ Joan Didion

Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.

~ Joan Didion

I see an actress smoking a cigarette in an old Fred McMurray movie. She’s clever and beautiful and manipulative. I feel envy. I suddenly wish I smoked cigarettes and was as clever and beautiful and manipulative as she. I want to be that way at the restaurants I visit, as I’m walking to my car, with certain friends who might understand. The actress has played her part well; she’s made me want to emulate her base desires if only for a while. Does that make me impressionable, a fool, or someone who will recognize the deepest secrets of her heart?I fight hard to stay young—to keep the lines from further etching my face and hands and breasts, presumably to trick the world into believing I am young. I’m an actress playing a part. I’m afraid to tell the truth. I fear losing those younger or becoming those older. In the presence of youth, a sort of unseen age-osmosis occurs within me. The years drop away and I don’t want to leave. It’s utterly selfish but I don’t care. After all, I’m no older than they—I’ve just been so longer. I was nineteen only yesterday and they don’t retire nineteen-year-old actresses.

~ Chila Woychik

It is only the rooms of the present I wish to inhabit.

~ Regina O'melveny

(You know you've reached middle-age if...) when you hear 'Boys in the hood' you think of the Ku Klux Klan.

~ Joey Green

I've always figured it that you die each day and each day is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you've died a couple of thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand.

~ Ray Bradbury

Living this long's not as wonderful as people think. I mean, you get the same amount of youth as everyone else, but a great big extra helping of being very old and deaf and creaky.

~ Terry Pratchett

In these days of physical fitness, hair dye, and plastic surgery, you can live much of your life without feeling or even looking old. But then one day, your knee goes, or your shoulder, or your back, or your hip. Your hot flashes come to an end; things droop. Spots appear. Your cleavage looks like a peach pit. If your elbows faced forward, you would kill yourself. You’re two inches shorter than you used to be. You’re ten pounds fatter and you cannot lose a pound of it to save your soul. Your hands don’t work as well as they once did and you can’t open bottles, jars, wrappers, and especially those gadgets that are encased tightly in what seems to be molded Mylar. If you were stranded on a desert island and your food were sealed in plastic packaging, you would starve to death. You take so many pills in the morning you don’t have room for breakfast.You lose close friends and discover one of the worst truths of old age: they’re irreplaceable. People who run four miles a day and eat only nuts and berries drop dead. People who drink a quart of whiskey and smoke two packs of cigarettes a day drop dead. You are suddenly in a lottery, the ultimate game of chance, and someday your luck will run out. Everybody dies. There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God.

~ Nora Ephron

Age doesn't arrive slowly, it comes in a rush. One day nothing has changed, a week later, everything has. A week may be too long a time, it can happen overnight. You are the same and still the same and suddenly one morning two distinct lines, ineradicable, have appeared at the corners of your mouth.

~ James Salter

I felt old. Again. It had been happening a lot lately. I did not live the life of an old lady, but I could hear it beckoning to me, like a mermaid on a rock.— Michelle Tea, Paris: A

~ Clint Catalyst

Nothing comes back. The eye sees for a moment, the ear hears, but look, now it is gone.

~ Eva Figes

Though Jonah felt transfixed inside his own childhood, no one else saw him as a child. He was already over the hump of middle age, heading rapidly toward those year that no one like to speak of. The best parts had already passed for people Jonah's age. By now you were meant to have become what you would finally be, and to gracefully and unobtrusively stay in that state for the rest of your life.

~ Meg Wolitzer

...wear a hat and some old lady shoes, and you can do whatever you want.

~ Elizabeth Berg

Getting older comes with abilities. Being old comes with disabilities.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The only things that old age comes standard with: grey hair and wrinkles. Wisdom and intellect are earned.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Many people define beauty as skin deep, but I’ve found the beauty in physical and superficial changes that continue throughout the life of a woman.

~ Alyscia Cunningham

To flatter a young man, tell him that you thought that he was older than he is. To flatter an old woman, tell her that you thought that she was younger than she is.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Someday, I suppose I’ll give up, and sit in the rocking chair. But I’ll probably be rocking fast, because I don’t know what I’ll do without a job.

~ Pat Summitt

I hope you learn how to slow down and not let your life pass you by while you're watching the idiot box. Life's short, and one day you'll wake up and look in the mirror and realize you look like King Tut.

~ K. Martin Beckner

Youth. I don't seek it through another because I have it within; it's a state of mind, a spirit that is free, and a mind that is playful. The shell of my being is altered by the effects of time, but nothing will tarnish a soul that will never forget what its like to experience creation with endless wonder and appreciation. Each time I see the first snowfall of the season I feel it's the first time I've seen it at all.

~ Donna Lynn Hope

I used to think that eighty was a very old age. Now I am ninety. I do not think this any more. As long as you are able to admire and to love, you are young.

~ Pablo Casals

Intelligence, goodness, humanity, excitement, serenity. Over time, these are the things that change the musculature of your face, as do laughter, and animation, and especially whatever peace you can broker with the person inside.It's furrow, pinch, and judgement that make us look older - our mothers were right. They said that if you made certain faces, they would stick, and they do. But our mothers forgot that faces of kindness and integrity stick as well.

~ Anne Lamott

Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all of which were different terms for the same illusion.

~ Anthony Marra

And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a waste or theft of my time that was greater than any theft of my goods or money.

~ James Lee Burke

The more candles on my cake means I get a little more exercise in blowing them out.

~ Donna Lynn Hope

Old age saves us from the realization of a great many fears.

~ Graham Greene

He did not want to feel old. He did not want to feel the weight of his age hovering above him, mocking him out of the core of a man’s pride, waiting to descend upon his mind and body.

~ William Sarabande

..Thirty's the end of being young, forty is where you stop fooling yourself.

~ Stephen King