Quotes About Aging

It occurred to her, sadly, and not for the first time, that as you grew older you became busier, and time went faster and faster, the months pushing each other rudely out of the way, and the years slipping off the calendar and into the past. Once, there had been time. Time to stand, or sit, and just look at daffodils. Or to abandon housekeeping, on the spur of the moment, walk out of the back door and up the hill, into the lark-song emptiness of a summer morning.

Elfrida's vision of an old folks' home was a little fuzzy, on account of her never having been in one.

He appears to Paul like an old man, choking up with half-remembered things, as though there were a great struggle going on inside him to find, in among all that was half-remembered, those moments which had been absolute and true.

I felt like a lonely cat, an aging tom ridden by obscure rage, looking for torn-ear trouble. I clipped that pitch off short and threw it away. Night streets were my territory, and would be till I rolled in the last gutter.

Uncle Claudie Windham's life has weathered to the color of wisdom.

I wish that, at the end of life, when things were truly done, there was something to look forward to. Something more pleasure-oriented. Perhaps opium, or heroin. So you become addicted. So what? All-you-can-eat ice cream parlors for the extremely aged. Big art pictures books and music. EXTREME palliative care, for when you've had it with everything else: the x-rays, the MRIs, the boring food, and the pills that don't do anything at all. Would that be so bad?

I wonder what the years have gathered in the bags. I bet it's like looking through old trunks, old letters and photographs, an old shoe or two.

See my gray hair. I know I look like an old woman. I'm thirty-eight. My hair turned gray overnight.

let's all be reminded that no matter what our age, we're all growing older! We're racing toward those later years and the finish line that follows — so why not learn to run that race with grace and joy?

Old Jiko is supercareful with her time. She does everything really really slowly, even when she's just sitting on the veranda, looking out at the dragonflies spinning lazily around the garden pond. She says that she does everything really really slowly in order to spread time out so that she'll have more of it and live longer, and then she laughs so that you know she is telling you a joke.

Now that I think of it, maybe she loves him because all his problems give her so much to pray about, and when you're as old as she is , and your body is like enough already, you need some pretty powerful reasons to stay alive.

We place such crazy importance on physical appearance in our image-obsessed culture, on youth and beauty to define our sense of self-worth, that aging, by default, becomes a kind of defect, something secret and corrosive and shameful.

Then she said, with piteous defiance, If I could love her, the Good Lord could, and he won't be too hard on an old lady who didn't have an easy life.

We're in a transient state - why hate our present selves? Let's save the energy for when we are eighty, when we are perhaps above, or beyond, changing. Then we can hate, if hate we must.

When you attain my age you will understand one of life's great secrets: Luxury is best appreciated in small portions. When it becomes routine it loses its allure.

When you get old," she had said on the occasion of her brother Tom's dying, "you don't have much emotion. It goes. At about seventy, I'd say. All those things and people you were passionate about, angry or adoring or longing, they all go, and a kind of dull calm takes over. I

I thought if I were beautiful enough, all my dreams would come true. But you don't steady beautiful forever; one day you wake up and it's gone, and then where are you? Dreams are made with blood and sweat and tears.

For when an old man relives his life, he lives it only by dwelling upon his memories; and when wisdom in an old man has outgrown the immediate impressions of life, the past viewed from the quiet of memory is something different from the present in all its bustle. The

For when an old man relives his life, he lives it only by dwelling upon his memories; and when wisdom in an old man has outgrown the immediate impressions of life, the past viewed from the quiet of memory is something different from the present in all its bustle. The time of work and of strain, of merrymaking and of dancing is over. Life requires nothing more of the old man and he claims nothing more of it. By

People change when they get older. They get more . . . cautious. They've been hit harder and more often. It doesn't mean they're stupid or timid—Mom

Not a lad anymore; old flesh doesn't heal like young. Learn to like it; when you're hurting, you're not dead.

one man long as a life and thin as a lie, a second who seems to lack a spine, and a third whose lower lip juts, whose belly tends to squashiness, whose hair is thinning and greasy and worming over the tops of his ears, and between whose eyebrows is the tell-tale furrow that will, as he ages, deepen into the scar of a bitter, angry man.

I'm lucky yes I am don't argue I'm the luckiest bastard in the world. And: how wonderful it was to have before him the stretching, shady avenue of years, the prospect of growing old in the presence of her gentleness.

I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape it. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape it. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape it. There is no way to escape being separated from everyone I love, and all that is dear to me. My actions are my only true belongings. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.