Quotes About Aging

I am getting old and the sign of old age is that I begin to philosophize and ponder over problems which should not be my concern at all.

They don't want to be grown-ups. They're so rich they don't think they have to get old. They lived down here when they were twenty-three and they want to relive their bohemian days, except not crammed into a tiny apartment with roommates who never flush the toilet. I didn't have bohemian days. I worked.

older, I've got a clear space around me I didn't have before. I wonder if that's like a future, or a place where a future will be.

When you're forty, half of you belongs to the past -- and when you're seventy, nearly all of you.

You know, I looked at my face in the mirror this morning, and I like being old. My face has more content and when I train in the gym now, I am not training to be strong or handsome - just better than I was yesterday. These days the race is just against myself.

My body looks like 30 but my face looks like 50. But I cannot walk bare-chested in the streets. I like to do these movies to challenge myself physically.

The fears of old age disturb us, yet how few attain it?

It's a bit traumatic," she noted, "to see your father, who took long walks with you, sailed with you, could out-jump you, and suddenly you look up and you see him walking on crutches—trying, struggling in heavy steel braces. And you see the sweat down his face, and you hear him saying, 'I must get down the driveway today—all the way down the driveway.

In the second photo I am thirty years old. My face has hardened. The jaws are accentuated. The mouth is bitter and mean. I look like a hoodlum in spite of my eyes, which have remained gentle. Their gentleness is almost indiscernible because of the fixity of gaze imposed upon me by the official photographer. By means of these two pictures I can see the violence that animated me at the time: from the age of sixteen to thirty.

Getting old always means a hardening of the main trait of one's character.

different for other reasons as well. Education took fewer years and lives were shorter, so development happened faster at each life stage. That meant more independence for young children; more working and dating for teens; marriage, children, and jobs for those in their late teens and early 20s; feeling old by 45; and death in one's 60s.

Gray hairs seem to my fancy like the soft light of the moon, silvering over the evening of life.

What makes old age so sad is not that our joys but our hopes cease.

Our birthdays are feathers in the broad wing of time.

Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It's more often a succession of jerks.

Yes, I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness, sad as an eagle without wings, sad as a violin with only one string and that one broken, sad as a woman who is growing old. Sad, sad, sad...

You wanted to believe that getting older, growing up, would change everything, transform you into the amazing person you were meant to be. But what if it didn't? What if you had to stay you forever?

Because what were older women meant to do with themselves, besides prop up everybody else's lives and drink too much wine at book club meetings? No one, Laura was convinced, was as invisible and as easily dismissed as the tribe of women like herself, with short gray hair and glasses.

I'm getting old... Soon I'll be thirty, and then forty, and then fifty; and do you think any one will love me then if I deal in subterfuges and evasions? Character, my dear girls, is a plant of slow growth, and the seeds must be planted early.

Why do old men grow huge beards as if to proclaim a manhood that has long since fled?

She was a woman who had never been beautiful, but who took care to appear as if she might once have been.

It's unusual in a culture where adult children take care of their aging parents that Lydia's mother even had a savings account.

Death doesn't frighten me now I can think peacefully of ending a long life.

My sight is bad, my hearing is bad, I feel bad, but I don't suffer, I don't complain.