Quotes About Aging

So -- I confess I have been a rake at reading. I have read those things which I ought not to have read, and I have not read those things which I ought to have read, and there is no health in me -- if by health you mean an inclusive and coherent knowledge of any body of great literature. I can only protest, like all rakes in their shameful senescence, that I have had a good time.

older women often 'fit in' a stable homo-sexual relationship between successive heterosexual ones

I'm sorry, but I have this fear that someday you're going to wake up a dried-out, bitter old hag with plenty of science awards but no personal life whatsoever. And you'll sit there at night and sob about how you've wasted your life.

To free humanity of time. For time is the great enslaver of us all. Time that ages us, time that limits us. Think how often you have wished to have more time for something, or wished you could go back a day and do something differently. When humanity is freed of time, old wrongs can be corrected before they are done.

But we are two old men, who have grown old together. Sometimes that is a greater closeness. We have come through time to your day and age. We can talk together, quietly, and share memories of a time that exists no more. I can tell you how it was, but it is not the same. It is like being two foreigners, trapped in a land we have come to, unable to return to our own, and having only each other to confirm the reality of the place we once lived.

I sleep like an old woman now, she thought to herself. In fits and starts. It isn't sleeping and it isn't waking and it isn't rest.

Have you ever felt as if you could actually feel time flowing away from you? As if life was passing you by and you were caught in a backwater with the dead fish and old sticks?

It is the way of the young to accept the debilitations of old age very gracefully on behalf of their elderly parents. And

A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn't end until she creates a home where all of life's beings can flourish.

All those nutrients field the growth of more new plants, in an accelerating cycle. This is the way for many ponds–the bottom gradually fills in until the pond becomes a marsh and maybe someday a meadow and then a forest. Ponds grow old, and though I will too, I like the ecological idea of aging as progressive enrichment, rather than progressive loss.

She reached her fingertips up to the hair at his temples. "You're showing a little gray here. Not much, but a little. I suppose I did that to you." "Probably. But I'm very tough—I can take it." "Oh,

Then why not slow down a little? What happened? You've got Viagra with an expiration date or something?

But the most valuable lesson he taught me was this: Every day we get older, and some of us get wiser, but there's no end to our evolution. We are all a mess of contradictions; some of our traits work for us, some against us.

In our old age, smaller pleasures assume greater importance, don't you think?

Not true, I got macular degeneration." Mrs. Teichner winked. "Or maybe I'm just a degenerate!

The problem with living so long is that you see too many people pass before you.

I'm not old, but I've misused my body and let others misuse it, and I think it shows.

But what she hadn't realized was that this imaginary respect she craved was only granted to older men. She hadn't understood that when her body started to weaken and sag, when her beauty faded, she would become invisible.

For a second, I see into the future: she's old and grey, she has senile dementia and can't remember my name. The thought pretty much breaks my heart in two.

How fortunate that science hasn't cracked human immortality. It's a great blessing that we can outlive old wars. And old warriors.

To a man of certain age... all young ladies start to look delightful. It's the first symptom of senility.

she had switched from counting her years not up from birth, but back from death—a grab-bag of time not growing, but shrinking, use it or lose it.

Miles repented his younger sexual reticence altogether, now. Profoundly. We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn't even know it. And Bel had been beautiful, in its own ironic way, living and moving at ease in a body athletic, healthy, and trim.

Ista flushed. "I am afraid I have no talent for"—she swallowed—"dalliance. When I was young I was too stupid. Now I'm old, I am too drab." Too stupid then too mad then too drab then too late. "I'm just not the sort.