Quotes About Aging

Peter Drucker told me that retirees have not proved to be the fertile source of volunteer effort we once thought they would be. They cut their engines off and lose their edge. Peter believed that if you do not have a second or parallel career in service by age forty-five, and if you are not vigorously involved in it by age fifty-five, it will never happen.

The tendency of old age to the body, say the physiologists, is to form bone. It is as rare as it is pleasant to meet with an old man whose opinions are not ossified.

If history proves two things, one is that the avant-garde almost always gets assimilated, and two, young people get older.

Somehow I had reached an age when being in love with a beautiful woman was beyond my reach because I was now bald and my face was full of wrinkles, yet the cats loved me the way girls used to love me when I was young.

Maybe age is kinder to us than we think. With my bad eyes, I can't see how bad I look, and with my rotten memory, I have a good excuse for getting out of a lot of stuff.

I've watched my peers get better with age and hoped that would happen with me.

The Church has its problems, but the older I get, the more comfort I find there.

I like my heroes to be alive," she told me. "I like them to grow old.

I like my heroes to be alive," she told me. "I like them to grow old." I, too, admire my idols more for the lines on their faces, for the bumps and bruises, the cuts and scar tissue.

That's the hard part about sport: as men we haven't started to be in our prime, but as athletes we are old people. I needed support. I lost trust and did stupid things.

Young men speak about the future because they have no past, and old men speak of the past because they have no future.

As we age we begin to grasp at youthful bliss like a life raft in a sea of harsh reality.

She handed him an old class photograph, the color not so much fading as greening from age. Fifteen kids flanked by two teachers, one a far younger Peggy Joyce. The years had not been unkind to her, but they'd passed anyway.

An old man hobbled by, his prescription bag death-gripped between his gnarly hand and the top of his walker. He glared at Adam, or maybe that was just the way he looked at the world now. Adam

Megan looked into Agnes's frightened face. Agnes had been so sharp just a few years back—funny and cutting and wonderfully ribald.

Peter Flannery had that athlete-gone-to-seed look. His once-golden locks had thinned and fled. His features were malleable. He wore a rayon three-piece suit—I hadn't seen one in a while—and the vest even had the pocket watch attached to a faux gold chain.

An old dog traipsed into the room on rigid legs. It looked like he was trying to wag his tail, but the result was a pitiful sway. He managed to lick Myron's hand with a dry tongue.

One measures oncoming old age by its deepening of Proust, and its deepening by Proust. How to read a novel? Lovingly, if it shows itself capable of accomodating one's love; and jealously, because it can become the image of one's limitations in time and space, and yet can give the Proustian blessing of more life.

I see no human beings. My phone never rings. I'm so very old and so very lonely. I hear from no one.

Cal had told her all girls had it, it was natural as breathing, it was a sign they were growing up, and they had it until they were in their fifties. At the time, Jean Louise was so overcome with despair at the prospect of being too old to enjoy anything when it would finally be over, she refrained from pursuing the subject.

Atticus's wisdom; he was growing old and he wanted to die safe in the knowledge that his daughter could fend for herself.

Jem, she's old and ill. You can't hold her responsible for what she says and does. Of course, I'd rather she'd have said it to me than to either of you, but we can't always have our 'druthers.

Jem, she's old and ill. You can't hold her responsible for what she says and does.

living in the same house, married to the same woman, doing the same things in the same way until arthritis stiffened him, cataracts dimmed him, muscles failed and cancers ate him.