Quotes About Aging

But Mama taught me that a girl's good looks soon fade, while what's in her heart just keeps getting more beautiful.

You don't get old until you replace dreams with regrets.

obsession with beauty (longing for beauty / fear of aging).

Though a country be sundered, hills and rivers endure; And spring comes green again to trees and grasses Where petals have been shed like tears And lonely birds have sung their grief. ... After the war-fires of three months, One message from home is worth a ton of gold. ... I stroke my white hair. It has grown too thin To hold the hairpins any more.

elderly guests were already setting about their business--the business, that is to say, of those who in fact had no business on this earth save that of cautiously steering their respective failing bodies along paths free from discomfort and illness in the direction of the final illness which would exterminate them.

Harry's voice had matured like old port wine, it was deep and rich and liquid.

He wished only to live as a free man upon the fruits of his labor, and grow old in the natural rhythms of the earth; instead of which he was cursed, so he felt, always to be an object of disgust, or horror, which is only disgust with a portion of fear superadded- always to be in the eyes of the world a monster.

In quelle settimane invecchiai di parecchi anni, imparai molte cose sullo spirito e su quella sacca simile a una pera, grossa come un pugno e divisa in quattro cavità che chiamiamo cuore.

For oh dear, it is a spartan business, this growing old, this cleaving to life, because it demands that you jettison so much that once had been the very zest and pith of life, and why? So that life, pithless, and sans zest , may continue, and the flesh, oh, the flesh, the sins of the flesh - they are as motes in a fading sunbeam. And how I do miss them.

Nobody touches you after seventy except doctors, as a rule. A sister, if you're lucky enough to have one. Undertakers.

He considered old age and its mutilations and wondered what it would do for him: examples presented themselves to his mind, not only of mental decay, physical weakness, gout, stone and rheumatism, but of boastful mendacious garrulity, intense and peevish selfishness; timidity if not cowardice, dirt, concupiscence, avarice.

Years had passed, and years had a bad name: a verse of Horace floated into his mind: Singula de nobis anni praedantur euntes; eripuere jocos, Venerem, convivia, ludum… and for a moment he tried to make a tolerable English version; but his The years in passing rob us of our delight, of merriment and carnal love, of each in turn, all sport and dining out… did not please him and he abandoned the attempt.

God,' he thought, 'never let me outlive my wits.

He considered old age and its mutilations and wondered what it would do for him:

Why, to be sure, something sad seems to happen to your great men and your admirals, with age, pretty often: even to your post-captains. A kind of atrophy, a withering-away of the head and the heart. I conceive it may arise from Ã¢â'¬Â¦

When I was 19 and I had lots of hope. Now, of course, I have none whatever. One wouldn't. One doesn't. I have a hope for a painless death. That's all that bothers me. Paul Bowles to Richard de Combray

will you still need me, will you still feed me when I'm sixty-four

He turned away and stumped on down the road leaving her to follow. The view from the back was that of an old man, thin, frail, intolerable to live with, intolerable to think of as one day not being there because then she would have nothing to live for herself.

He was twenty-five but had that elongated bony English look of not yet having completed the process of growing-up and filling out which meant in a few years he would suddenly appear middle-aged as well as beefy because to men like this everything seemed to happen at once round about the age of thirty; everything except white hair which was reserved for retirement and was equally sudden and the only sign that old age had arrived.

Someone who seems doddery is perhaps not doddery at all but only an older person absorbed in squinting concentration, as though on an ultimate trip, memorizing a scene, grateful for being alive to see it.

she looked a hundred years older, as stale and ruined as yesterday's oatmeal.

At a certain age you stop being a child and start raising your parents ...

he was turning sixty-two, not an age of life-altering shocks but only of subtle diminishments.

Zelda is worried about the regular death that happens when you grow too old. -Henry