Quotes About Aging

My pristine grief was intermittently marred by dread. I thought of the chilling words a friend of mine had once used to explain why his older sister had married a man she did not love when she was reaching the end of her childbearing years: She had run out of runway.

One day you are very young and then suddenly you are thirty-five and it is Time. You have to reproduce, or else.

Fertility meant nothing to us in our twenties; it was something to be secured in the dungeon and left there to molder. In our early thirties, we remembered it existed and wondered if we should check on it, and then—abruptly, horrifyingly—it became urgent: Somebody find that dragon! It was time to rouse it, get it ready for action. But the beast had not grown stronger during the decades of hibernation. By the time we tried to wake it, the dragon was weakened, wizened. Old.

I got married a few years later—we all did. As we reached our thirtieth birthdays, my friends and I were like kernels of popcorn exploding in a pot: First one, then another, and pretty soon we were all bursting into matrimony. There were several years of peace, but then the pregnancies started popping. I found this unsettling.

From the minute the dragon of our fertility came on the scene, we learned to chain it up and forget about it. Fertility meant nothing in our twenties; it was something to be secured in the dungeon and left there to molder. In our early thirties, we remembered it existed and wondered if we should check on it, and then - abruptly, horrifyingly - it became urgent: Somebody find that dragon!

In her ninety-fourth year of life, Tanya still talks about her late husband with rancid disgust.

MAGISTRATE Don't men grow old? LYSISTRATA Not like women. When a man comes home Though he's grey as grief he can always get a girl. There's no second spring for a woman. None. She can't recall it, nobody wants her, however She squanders her time on the promise of oracles, It's no use...

How can it ever be right to wreck A man because he's time by the clock As an elderly man grizzled and gray, Who long ago struggled at your side Mopping the copious Manly sweat from his brow When he bravely fought at Marathon In defense of our city.

Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time.

Evening may therefore be called 'the old age of the day,' and old age, 'the evening of life,' or, in the phrase of Empedocles, 'life's setting sun.

Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age.

Things speed up as you circle the drain. Armistead Maupin on ageing

Well … everything gets old after a while. I personally get a little sick of wrecking my liver at The Lion for the privilege of tricking with some guy whose lover is in L.A. for the weekend.

Even by the twenty-second century, no way had yet been discovered of keeping elderly and conservative scientists from occupying crucial administrative positions. Indeed, it was doubted if the problem ever would be solved.

Children grow fast in this low gravity. But they don't age so quickly—they'll live longer than we do." Floyd stared in fascination at the self-assured little lady, noting the graceful carriage and the unusually delicate bone structure.

Our children grow old and elbow us into the grave.

Mr. Halloran had been crying, but this was not unusual; since he had been made to realize that he would not, now, be vouchsafed a second run at youth he cried easily and often.

I think they want the same things you do, only you would... inherit them, so to speak, just by growing up. Things like excitement, and new experiences, and all kinds of strange and wonderful things happening; you get them anyway, just by the process of growing older, but for them... they've already outgrown all they know and they want to try it all over again. Even at my age, you keep thinking you've missed so much, and you get older all the time.

As he grew older, his voice became rusty and only the weeping remained—but it was the sort of weeping that could move a wall, or wake the dead.

They had lied. Time was not a friend that healed all wounds ;it was the enemy that ravaged and murdered youth.

Woman A often thinks about growing old. At the same time, she often thinks back to those years when old age seemed a very distant thing, more like an option than a law of nature.

But that's what age is, isn't it? Slo-mo castration.

Youth burdened with the full knowledge of how sad and painful aging is I would not call youth at all

It is widely believed that although animals don't know that one day they'll die, many of them do know when they're actually dying. So at what point does a dying animal become aware of what's happening? Could it possibly be a long time before? And how do animals respond to aging? Are they completely puzzled, or do they somehow intuit what the signs mean? Are these foolish questions? I acknowledge that they are. And yet they preoccupy me.