Quotes About Aging

easing up on seventy, an age when a man might be forgiven follicular failure.

Peter was easing up on seventy, an age when a man might be forgiven follicular failure. But Rebecca forgave him nothing. She told herself that this was not because he

First we were so young and then we were so busy and then one day we awoke to discover that we were an age we once thought of as old.

particularly if they've had a few kids. It's hard to communicate to our male counterparts that one of the greatest gifts of growing older is trusting your own sense of yourself; their investment in their reflected image was not forged in childhood, as ours was.

and that when he was past work he should be shot and buried.

I don't want to die with grey hair', she told a friend. 'It's so depressing.')

Her past is behind her, her future is of little concern. She moves towards the grave, at her own speed.

Later on, when you're older, you won't be able to enjoy anything any more. You'll say, "Oh, I read that twenty years ago in some book." You'd better hurry if you want to catch a husband or fall in love, since everything is bound to be a disappointment to you. You already know all there is to know in theory. But in practice? That's another story!

Prettiness fades after a few years, but elegance only increases with age.

If you always dreamed of writing a novel or a memoir, and you used to love to write, and were pretty good at it, will it break your heart if it turns out you never got around to it? If you wake up one day at eighty, will you feel nonchalant that something always took precedence over a daily commitment to discovering your creative spirit? If not--if this very thought fills you with regret--then what are you waiting for?

What if you wake up at sixty and realize that you forgot to wake up, and you never became the person you were born to be, and now your hair is falling out?

What if you wake up some day, and you're 65… and you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life?

Most of us don't notice how great we look until years, even decades later. Not long ago, I was looking at photos of myself at various ages and weights—way before the neckular deterioration began, way before the fanny pack of menopause—and I could see how gorgeous I must have looked to everyone else.

Also, I have a pouch below my belly, whereas I'd always had a thin waist before. Now there's this situation down there, low and grabbable. If it had a zipper, you could store stuff in there, like a fanny pack.

I am positive of only a few things in life, and one is that if you want to have a decent middle and old age, you have to get exercise almost every day.

What finally helped was an image from a medieval monk, Brother Lawrence, who saw all of us as trees in winter, with little to give, stripped of leaves and color and growth, whom God loves unconditionally anyway. My priest friend Margaret, who works with the aged and who shared this image with me, wanted me to see that even though these old people are no longer useful in any traditional meaning of the word, they are there to be loved unconditionally, like trees in the winter. When

I suddenly have two stomachs—a regular tummy and another one below that, which I call the subcontinent. This older body is both amazingly healthy and a big disappointment.

Spring is sweet, the baby season; summer is the teenage season -- too much energy, too much growth and beauty and heat and late nights, none of them what they are cracked up to be. Fall is the older season, a more seasoned season. The weather surrounds you instead of beating down on you.

Here we are, older, scared, numb on some days, enraged on others, with even less trust than we had a year ago. The devastating pandemic, and the federal government's confused and deadly response, was simply the final straw to a few years of crushing developments.

Old age on a good day is a dance we don't know the steps to: we falter. We may not be going in the direction we'd anticipated, or have any clue at all about which way to turn next.

The years are cruel. They rob us of our health and our friends and our hopes, and give nothing back. - Pg. 146

I'm so sorry, my dear," she said quietly. "It's a shock, even though he was old. Pieces of our lives being chipped away reminds us of our own fragility, and how precious life is.

But when they get old we can't be bothered. We say they're going to die soon anyway. Wot's the point in spending time and money on them?

As one grew older, one remembered only the energy, the optimistic side of being young. Time removed many of the agonies of uncertainty, self-doubt, loneliness, and the confusion that can hurt so much. Maybe it was just as well. Age brought its own diffucult pains.