Quotes About Aging

As you get older, the lordosis of your spine tips

In a year, fewer than three hundred doctors will complete geriatrics training in the United States, not nearly enough to replace the geriatricians going into retirement, let alone meet the needs of the next decade. Geriatric psychiatrists, nurses, and social workers are equally needed, and in no better supply.

It requires vigilance over nutrition, medications, and living situations. And it requires each of us to contemplate the unfixable in our life, the decline we will unavoidably face, in order to make the small changes necessary to reshape it. When the prevailing fantasy is that we can be ageless, the geriatrics uncomfortable demand is that we accept we are not.

Our most cruel failure is in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognise that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one's story is essential to sustaining meaning in life.

The median income of people eighty and older is only about $15,000. More than half of the elderly living in long-term-care facilities run through their entire savings and have to go on government assistance-welfare-in order to afford it.

In the course of a normal lifetime, the muscles of the jaw lose about 40 percent of their mass and the bones of the mandible lose about 20 percent, becoming porous and weak.

We're always trotting out some story of a ninety-seven-year-old who runs marathons, as if such cases were not miracles of biological luck but reasonable expectations for all. Then, when our bodies fail to live up to this fantasy, we feel as if we somehow have something to apologize for.

There's no escaping the tragedy of life, which is that we are all aging from the day we are born.

Some will be alarmed by the prospect of a doctor's writing about the inevitability of decline and death. For many, such talk, however carefully framed, raises the specter of a society readying itself to sacrifice its sick and aged. But what if the sick and aged are already being sacrificed—victims of our refusal to accept the inexorability of our life cycle?

Studies find that as people grow older they interact with fewer people and concentrate more on spending time with family and established friends. They focus on being rather than doing and on the present more than the future.

When the prevailing fantasy is that we can be ageless, the geriatrician's uncomfortable demand is that we accept we are not. *

Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman: "Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.

For more than half a century now, we have treated the trials of sickness, aging, and mortality as medical concerns. It's been and experiment in social engineering, putting our fate in the hands of people valued more for their technical prowess than for their understanding of human needs. That experiment has failed... we seek a life of worth and purpose, yet are routinely denied the conditions that might make it possible, there is no other way to see what modern society has done.

When lipofuscin accumulates in sweat glands, the sweat glands cannot function, which helps explain why we become so susceptible to heat stroke and heat exhaustion in old age.

When women grow old and cease being women, they get beards on their chins; I wonder what men get when they grow old and cease to be men?

Well, you know, just some old man all alone. God, I hope I don't end up alone like that. Some pathetic old woman with nobody to go on a whale watch with.

Then you get pubic hair and everything changes. Pubic hair signals the beginning of your demise. After pubic hair comes high school, college, work. By the time you've started working, you're ruined. And you will never make a friend as completely and easily as you did when you still wiped your nose on your sleeve.

When I'm old and gray, I want to have a house by the sea. And paint. With a lot of wonderful chums, good music, and booze around. And a damn good kitchen to cook in.

I don't know wheter I am getting older and more demanding, or whether the human race is degenerating, but the world didn't seem to be so barren of intelligence in my youth.

Véra expressed a desire even to hurry it along. "I wish it would go all white," she sighed in 1948, when it was very nearly there. "People will think I married an older woman," her husband protested, to which, without blinking, Véra replied, "Not if they look at you.

In his late thirties, pushing forty: the shadow line. Time to accept the terms of the unsigned contract, there without the asking; the knowledge that what binds others applies to you, too, that there are no exceptions to the rule: though it was contrary to nature, one had to grow old.

You're moping because you aren't all you once were," she'd snapped. "Well, get over it. We're none of us what we once were. We all get old. We lose the use of our knees, or our faculties. But you know what? Life goes on. And there's still plenty of it to enjoy.

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been. —Madeleine L'Engle

A sedici anni siete giovani e ridicoli, dopo sarete solo ridicoli