Quotes About Aging

I look at being older and gaining wisdom. I've learned to stay fit and healthy. I accept my body, my life, and my circumstances.

Wrinkles ought to be worn as a badge of honour, as a mark of survival if not wisdom.

Save now, so you are not dependent on your children when you are old

Quit smoking in the hope of growing old. It takes a long time to write. People go to books for wisdom and older authors tend to have more of it.

Assuming, as you grow older, that you're the guardian of the world's wisdom, even if you haven't necessarily lived enough to know what's right and wrong.

one of the most heartbreaking conditions of life on Earth is that most of the animals we love... die so long before we do.

The end of health or of vigor is sad. [p. 149]

It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.

Our bodies are the burial grounds of dead time.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.

All of the diseases that modern medicine declares war on never seem to touch any of those ninety-year-old farmers who have lived on bacon and eggs and butter for almost a century. The media, following current low-fat medical wisdom, calls that a paradox. We don't.

All bodies are slow in growth but rapid in decay.

But in all that suffering, the most painful suffering of all was the consciousness that it was banal, had all been discovered a long time ago, and was known to all the generations past, all just a repeated series, stamped out by our genes, That the universe was filled to its edges groans as alike as two notes, that those particular groans formed one great groan similar to the shrill parliament of the sparrows and that groan became an interstellar roar, the inaudible groan of the aging cosmos.

The money's no better in retirement, but the hours are!

The first sign of senility is loss of memory. I forget the other two.

We'll be friends until we're old and senile, then we'll be new friends.

What shall I do with this ageing me? Neither floating nor sinking, I drift, tossed by the waves of years.

She had the kind of looks that had probably been quite pretty in high school, but were now worn down by years of smoking cigarettes, raising children, and the disappointment of being married to an asshole.

We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.

She was older, no longer the wicked limber girl with the stalled Vespa, but no less beautiful to me for that: whatever elliptical beauty Cassie possesses has always lain not in the vulnerable planes of color and texture but deeper, in the polished contours of her bones.

I pictured every inch of what she would look like now: the crow's-feet from smiles I hadn't seen, the softness of her belly from kids who weren't mine, all her life that I had missed written on her body in Braille for my hands to read.

At first he wondered if he might be too old to get accustomed to it at all, but his body has come through for him.