Quotes About Aging

You merely pass the time, making millennia fly by.

I am unimaginably old—fifty. Only witches live to be fifty! Good women die in childbirth at seventeen as I nearly did. By fifty I should be dead or a crone—with my dark looks and my somewhat crooked spine—which I have always disguised with capes of multicolored silk. My youth is gone, but my vanity is not. How can I still dream of love at fifty? I must be mad!

Sometimes it seems both our kids and our parents were smarter than we were. We fell somewhere between our parents' thirties idealism and our kids' eighties cynicism. Somewhere deep down we still believe that all we need is love, love, love. Somewhere deep down we question how we got grey hair. How on earth did we get to be the grown-ups? The wonder is that our kids are growing up -- despite all that we did to destroy them.

You know, when you get old, you see that everything is a joke. All the things you were passionate about don't mean a thing. You only did them to keep busy.

My black hair, which used to glisten like wet violets on an ebony altar, is now a steely gray

Les religions commencent divines, elles finissent humaines. De manière générale, les institutions, comme les civilisations, foncent vers leur disparition, car le temps les vide. En vieillissant, la forme prend plus d'importance que le fond, le contenant compte davantage que le contenu. Ce qu'on appelle la décadence.

On occupe sa jeunesse à se préparer à vivre, sa vieillesse à se souvenir d'avoir vécu. Ce faisant, on rate le présent qui seul existe en tombant dans deux pièges, celui de l'avenir qui n'existe pas, celui du passé qui n'existe plus.

All age is a kind of tiredness, I think. When you're young, the lines never show. Every morning you wake unmarked, wiped clear by sleep. One day, though, you see lines that itch, as though some crumb of existence has been creased into your skin. They can never be smoothed away, and after a while you forget that this heavy, irritable feeling wasn't always there.

Somehow her later years had become a mirror of her lonely childhood.

In the mirror I see only the time-lapsed weather patterns of 1964.

You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute. You are avenged 1440 times a day.

You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute.

Old age is the verdict of life.

Il ne sert à rien de regretter sa jeunesse, Ni de maudire la vieillesse, Ni d'avoir peur de la mort, Ta vie, c'est la journée que tu es en train de vivre, Rien d'autre. Alors divertis-toi, sois heureux, Et sois prêt à partir. (p.424)

Ölüm yaÅŸam?m?z?n iki ucundan tutmakta: YaÅŸl?l?k ölüme, çocukluktan daha yak?n deÄŸildir.

After Georgie, something had changed in our marriage, and there was nowhere solid to put the blame. We were almost forty, and simultaneously our marriage had - I don' know - thickened, agglutinated, become oatmeal-like. Differences between us that had once provided sparks now seemed inefficient. Was there love? Yes, yes - but at the margins. At the center, there was administration.

Induratize (v.) To harden the heart. Among the inevitabilities of old age are that the heart is hardened twice; first figuratively, through experience and loss, and then literally, in the form of atherosclerosis.

We had agreed that "in love" had burned out after four years for us, the way it does for most of us, in two months or two years and, I guess, never for some lucky people. Instead of a trail of fire roaring through, those people get small candles steadily lighting the way home until death do they part, and only the young are stupid enough to think that those two old people, him gimping, her squinting, are not in love.

When I read that I thought, I am almost fifty years old and the rest of my life will be love and loss, and when I look down the road, I see a fat old woman and her dog, is what I see.

Instead of a trail of fire roaring through, hose people get small candles steadily lighting the way home until death do they part, and only the young are stupid enough to think that those two old people, him gimping, her squinting, are not in love.

It's human nature to be curious about people, and to be more curious about young people than old people. We want to cheer something on at the same time we want to tear it down. That's just so normal.

And you know, the baby boomers are getting older, and those off the rack clothes are just not fitting right any longer, and so, tailor-made suits are coming back into fashion.

One glimpse of that glistening, tan back, those rangy shoulders, the sweat-slicked black hair, and his libido woke up and started to pray to Cialis, goddess of horny middle-aged men.

His heart felt like an aging cardboard box in the rain. Only the memory of what he was supposed to be held him up.