Quotes About Aging

And, as I mused, the years fell away, hair sprouted on the vast steppes of my head, where never hair has been almost within the memory of man.

I waited for my thighs and butt to uncramp. Of course, they didn't know the loosening rule. They were screaming things like *Are you crazy? Do you know we're thirty-five years old? Sit down and feed us a Twinkie!

I felt like I was hobbling, like one oof the old crones from Act I of Macbeth - God knows my hair felt scraggy enough that I must have looked the part.

It was one of the most disgusting spectacles I've ever seen-- this white-haired old man, who should have been thinking of the hereafter, standing there lying like an actor.

Boil the whole question of old age down, and what it amounts to is that a man is young as long as he can dance without getting lumbago, and, if he cannot dance, he is never young at all.

How the clock moves on, relentlessly, with such assurance that it eats the years. The days are small and transitory grapes, The months grow faded, taken out of time. It fades, it falls away, the moment, fired by that implacable artillery and suddenly, only a year is left to us, a month, a day, and death turns up in the diary.

The older you get, the stronger the wind gets — and it's always in your face.

It takes a long time to grow young.

Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old only by deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul.

Ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in the making. You learned to ration your commitment to them. This moment in this tent already had the quality of remembered experience. Or perhaps he was simply getting old. But then, after all, in trench time he was old. A generation lasted six months, less than that on the Somme, barely twelve weeks.

I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.

Because we're human. Like everyone else. And the older we get, the more human we get. The more human we get, the more painful everything becomes.

I mourn for the quicksilvery racehorse passage of time. Its swiftness has caught me with the same ineffable start that comes to every man and woman who lives long enough. It remains as the single great surprise of any life. In

And each year, I lose a little bit more of what made me special as a kid. I don't think as much or question as much. I dare nothing. I put nothing on the line. Even my passions are now frayed and pathetic.

Among the worst things about growing old is the loss of those irreplaceable friends who added richness and depth to your life.

Because I've gotten older, I worry that there will be a steep decline in my talent, but I promise not to let the same thing happen to my passion for writing.

I studied their relationship with something approaching awe because I could not figure out what made it work. I felt love between these two people but it was a love without flame or passion. There were also no rancors or fevers, no risings or ebbings of the spirit to chart, just a marriage without weather, a stillness, a resignation, just windless days in the Gulf Stream of their quiet aging.

Throughout my career I've lived in constant fear that I wouldn't be good enough, that I'd have nothing to say, that I'd be laughed at, humiliated—and I'm old enough to know that fear will follow me to the very last word I'll ever write. As

she will die the way all old people in America die . . . from humiliation, incontinence, boredom, and neglect.

Eventually she will die the way all old people in America die. . . from humiliation, incontinence, boredom and neglect.

Old soldiers never die - they're just thrown on the scrap heap!

an aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick…

Foolish old earth, returning and repeating itself, over and over. Never misses a show. How can you bear it, you ancient tart, giving the identical performance again and again, evenings and matinées, while the theatre crumbles around you, the lines in the script unchanging, to say nothing of the make-up, the costumes, the extravagant gestures … Tomorrow and tomorrow and the day after that …

Ávila was one of those fortunate Mediterranean men for whom aging seemed to be more an asset than a liability. Over the years, his stiff black stubble had softened to a distinguished salt-and-pepper beard, his fiery dark eyes had relaxed to a serene confidence, and his taut olive skin was now sun-drenched and creased, giving him the aura of a man permanently squinting out to sea.