Quotes About Aging

I don't have the average thirty-eight year-old's body. I know my face looks old, but if you slid head first for sixteen years you'd be ugly too.

50 per cent of the people died before the age of thirty, and 90 per cent before the age of fifty.

My grandmother's hands floated like wings of bone in the dark, then they were birds, then small disks of light and then bones again, and then it was dawn.

In 1980, at independence, a man might expect to live to sixty and to see his children grow up strong and have children of their own, and if he was fortunate, a man might even live to see his great-grandchildren bring him gourds of beer before he died. But life expectancy dropped to fifty, and now it has collapsed, all the way down to thirty-three. It is hard to comprehend. At thirty-three, just as people should be in their prime, they suddenly sicken and die.

Only an idiot would have assumed, he mourned, that despite his years of folly and neglect, his first love would wait in limbo while he solved his life so that they could travel on together into a golden future, never having aged.

And I thought, Holy fuck, we're not dead. Together. As in not dead yet. Think of all the years we will be. Our bodies turn to caramel. [Naked Man Hides]

She thought it was too bad it didn't work the other way around, so you could get braver and smarter as you move up in years. But

The group called the Chowder Society had only a few rules: they wore evening clothes (because thirty years ago, Sears had rather liked the idea), they never drank too much (and now they were too old for that anyhow), they never asked if any of the stories were true (since even the outright whoppers were in some sense true), and though the stories went around the group in rotation, they never pressured anyone who had temporarily dried up.

When the senile patient awakens in the morning and asks for his mother, remind him that she is long since dead, that he is over eighty years old and living in a convalescent home, and that this is 1992 and not 1913 and that he must face reality and the fact that

But she looked—smaller. As if something in her had dwindled away, as if she had dried up. It was almost—age. Yet not quite. Could their separation have done this much damage? He doubted it. His wife, since he had seen her last, had become frail, and he did not like this; despite his animosity he felt concern.

What action would not be futile, when a man could look upon his own aged, yellowed skull? Better they should enjoy their temporary lives, while they still had them to enjoy.

I love him so much, Will! she managed to whisper shakily. And he looked old! He looked hungry and old and sad... Is it all coming on to us now, Will? We can't rely on anyone else now, can we... It's just us. But we en't old enough yet. We're only young... We're too young... If poor Mr Scoresby's dead and Iorek's old... It's all coming on to us, what's got to be done.

They sat for a while longer and then parted. For it was late and they were old and anxious.

Spring me from this role I play of the smothered son in the Jewish joke! Because it's beginning to pall a little at thirty-three!

To those not yet old, being old means you've been. But being old also means that despite, in addition to, and in excess of your beenness, you still are. Your beenness is very much alive. You still are, and one is as haunted by the still-being and its fullness as by the having-already-been, by the pastness. Think of old age this way: it's just an everyday fact that one's life is at stake.

His mother had died at eighty, his father at ninety. Aloud he said to them, I'm seventy-one. Your boy is seventy-one. Good. You lived, his mother replied, and his father said, Look back and atone for what you can atone for, and make the best of what you have left.

Terrifying encounters with the end? I'm thirty-four! Worry about oblivion, he told himself, when you're seventy-five! The remote future will be time enough to anguish over the ultimate catastrophe!

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

La vejez no es una batalla; la vejez es una masacre.

In her laugh was the admission of her captivity: to Norman, to menopause, to work, to aging, to everything that could only deteriorate further.

she was fifty-five and seared with hot flashes, and her daughter's was now the female form exuding the magnetic currents.

From the inter-Award banter of Mr. Bobby Slayton, professional comedian and master of ceremonies for the 1997 AVNAs: "I know I'm looking good, though, like younger, 'cause I started using this special Grecian Formula—every time I find a gray hair, I fuck my wife in the ass. [No laughter, scattered groans.] Fuck you. That's a great joke. Fuck you.

It is said a man doesn't get old while his mother lives. I think it's true. You are always a child in her eyes. It is irritating in the extreme. But you know, when they have gone, you'd give the earth just to hear them treating you like a child once more.

Is it not obvious? What is life but a betrayal? We start out young, full of hope. The sun is good, the world awaits us. But every passing year shows how small you are, how insignificant against the power of the seasons. Then you age. Your strength fails and the world laughs at you through the jeers of younger men. And you die. Alone. Unfulfilled. But sometimes . . . sometimes there will come a man who is not insignificant. He can change the world, rob the seasons of their power. He is the sun.