Aging Quotes - Page 6

The more steps you take towards the end, the fewer steps you have to take towards the end!

I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge.

Emma Cline

She re-marked her lips with her lipstick. I saw sprays of silver in her coarse hair. I saw inscriptions of her years around her mouth, a solid crease between her brows from a lifetime of cynicism. The posture of a woman who had stood in a casual spotlight in every room she'd ever been in, not for gloss or perfection, for self-possession. Everything she touched she added an apostrophe to.

Stephanie Danler

To a man and woman, all of her elderly patients had been surprised to be old - which Avery privately regarded as a serious failure to pay attention.

Lionel Shriver

I am afraid that as people grow old there is a tendency for them to believe that what the past *ought* to have been it was.

Gore Vidal

In the seven years or so that had passed since I had last seen him, Sir Magnus Donners had grown not so much older in appearance, as less like a human being.

Anthony Powell

One’s capacity for hearing about ghastly doings lessens with age.

Anthony Powell

At eight-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change of position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death.

Gabriel García Márquez

Il arrive un âge où ils ne sont plus séduisants, ni «en forme», comme on dit. Ils ne peuvent plus boire et ils pensent encore aux femmes; seulement ils sont obligés de les payer, d'accepter des quantités de petites compromissions pour échapper à leur solitude. Ils sont bernés, malheureux. C'est ce moment qu'ils choisissent pour devenir sentimentaux et exigeants… J'en ai vu beaucoup devenir ainsi des sortes d'épaves. "A time comes when they are no longer attractive or in good form. They can't drink any more, and they still hanker after women, only then they have to pay and make compromises in order to escape from their loneliness: they have become just figures of fun. They grow sentimental and hard to please. I haveseen many who have gone the same way.

Françoise Sagan

Lines and greyness are nature's way of telling you not to fuck with someone - the equivalent of yellow and black lines on a wasp, or the markings on the back of a black widow spider.

Caitlin Moran

Old age teaches you in a very unkind way that things won’t necessarily get better. Not in this life. In fact, you can pretty much count on things degenerating. Being content is not a lack of ambition. It’s being able to rest and relax and know that your worth doesn’t come from what others think of you or even what you think of you.

Chris Fabry

I want that person you knew to return. But the truth is, this may be the best we achieve. Today, having her here and comfortable and not agitated…that may be as good as we get. Are you okay with that?

Chris Fabry

...is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?

Gore Vidal

Old age is having the name of a chiropractor in your wallet. It's cutting out coupons for the zeal of discounted small items and the practice of fine motor skills.

Dominic Smith

The only way that getting older can be a bad thing is if you are not fully living in the moment now.

Andrena Sawyer

As I've gotten older, I have taught myself to act "normal." I can do it well enough to fool the average person for a whole evening, maybe longer. But it all falls apart if I hear something that elicits a strong emotional reaction from me that is different from what people expect. In an instant, in their eyes, I turn into the sociopathic killer I was believed to be forty years ago.

John Elder Robison

A youth is susceptible to the influence of idealist notions. As a person ages, they notice a gap between their expectations and reality and they grow more pessimistic about the world and their ability to live up to the lofty notions that inspired a younger self.

Kilroy J. Oldster

I thought getting old meant getting wise. Or at least secure. I don't know why I thought that; I don't know any wise, secure old people. Maybe I inferred it from after-school specials. And I'd like to think by the time you die, you've figured something out. That you aren't lying there wondering what the hell just happened.

Kristin Hersh

Here we are, alone again. It's all so slow, so heavy, so sad. . . I'll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They've talked. They haven't said much. They've gone away. They've grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

I remember a new heaviness in my body, but maybe that's the work of time and my looking back.

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

I tan the easy way. I just wait for my liver spots to connect.

Martha Bolton

She went out socially with him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays with us to the end.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Charlotte views her younger selves with a certain detachment. They are herself, but other incarnations, innocents going about half-forgotten business.

Penelope Lively

We are no longer awkward younglings. Our enemies may be fearsome, but so are we. It is time we remind them of that.

Christopher Paolini

To what nadir of paltriness , pettiness, and squalor a man can sink! How could he change so! But is this really true to life? ---It is, it's all true to life, for anything can happen to a man. Your ardent youth of today would recoil in horror if you were to show him his own portrait as an old man. Once you set off on life's journey, once you take your leave of those gentle years of youth and enter the harsh, embittering years of manhood, remember to keep with you all your human emotions, do not leave them by the wayside, for you will not pick them up again! Grim and terrible is the old age which awaits us, and nothing does it give in return! The grave itself is more merciful than old age, for at least on the gravestone you will find written the words: 'Here a man lies buried!' but in the cold, unfeeling features of inhuman old age you can read nothing.

Nikolai Gogol

Know this: even if you’re like us and still doddering around above ground, someone out there from your past is probably pretty sure that you’re dead by now. (p.125 )

Michael Zadoorian

After a while, just staying alive becomes a full-time job. No wonder we need a vacation.

Michael Zadoorian

They had waited for too long, and the result was this hiatus, and the reflection that time and patience may bring poor rewards, that time itself, if not confronted at the appropriate juncture, can play sly tricks, and more significantly, that those who do not act are not infrequently acted upon.

Anita Brookner

Aging is scary but fascinating, and great talent morphs in strange and often enlightening ways.

Bruce Springsteen

Why is it amazing that I don’t act my age? Why should I act my age? Or more to the point, how is someone my age supposed to act? Old age is part fact, part state of mind, part luck, and wholly something best left for other people to ponder, not you or me. Why waste your time? I don’t.

Dick Van Dyke

Old age robs you of every last illusion, even the belief in your own goodness.

Jill Ciment

She resolved, at forty-some, that since she herself must die, she would do it as gracefully as possible, as free as possible from vomitings, moans, the ignominy of basins, bedsores, and enemas, not to mention the intenser ignominious dependence of weak knees and various torments of the troubled mind.

M.F.K. Fisher

..why sit on the sidelines of life at any age?

Dick Van Dyke

Time only goes in that one direction.

Kathleen Rooney

The worst thing about getting older is you discover that most of the performers in the shows you used to watch are now younger than you. Suddenly, everything become less believable.

Neil A. Hogan

I reflected how easy it is for a man to reduce women of a certain age to imbecility. All he has to do is give an impersonation of desire, or better still, of secret knowledge, for a woman to feel herself a source of power.

Anita Brookner

I'm just at the age when time speeds up in an odd way. Do you know what I mean? The winters come closer together and you learn to accept that you're not special anymore.

Ann Druyan

[O]ver the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying--in the supermarket, these old ladies won't get out of my way--but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.

Donald Hall

One of the many problems with aging is that you begin to think of yourself as a slob because your birthday suit can never be cleaned or pressed no matter how spotted or wrinkled it gets

Bob Smith

For youth, sexual love is whim; for the aged, luxury.

Bill Gaede

... we absolutely mustn't forget it. We mustn't forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don't want to think about (so it is to retirement homes that they entrust the care of accompanying their parents to the threshold, with no fuss or bother). And where's the joy in these final hours they ought to be making the most of? They're spent in boredom and bitterness, endlessly revisiting memories. We mustn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you're twenty and the next day you're eighty.

Muriel Barbery

More and more, he heard his spine playing stick games through his skin, singing old dusty words, the words of all his years.

Sherman Alexie

...our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood.

Jennifer Egan

They say that your powers of memory are at their peak when you're 26, and it's all downhill after that.

Lisa Jewell

I find no reason to think that aging is genetically determined. Genes do not provide information for the development of the individual beyond growth and the reproductive process in which the genes are transmitted to the next generation. Once past the reproductive stage, the individual has served the purposes of preservation of the species, and then he is on his own. The wrinkled human face is the victim of gravity and of cumulative errors in the reproduction of cells. Since aging is not programed, but is a badly improvised interference with youthful beauty, we have improvised an operation to counteract its effects. Aging is a form of misinformation. If we get the facts right, you will be able to read it in our faces. ("Motherhood")

William S. Wilson

In good truth he had started in London with some vague idea that as his life in it would not be of long continuance, the pace at which he elected to travel would be of little consequence; but the years since his first entry into the Metropolis were now piled one on top of another, his youth was behind him, his chances of longevity, spite of the way he had striven to injure his constitution, quite as good as ever. He had come to that period of existence, to that narrow strip of tableland, whence the ascent of youth and the descent of age are equally discernible - when, simply because he has lived for so many years, it strikes a man as possible he may have to live for just as many more, with the ability for hard work gone, with the boon companions scattered, with the capacity for enjoying convivial meetings a mere memory, with small means perhaps, with no bright hopes, with the pomp and the circumstance and the fairy carriages, and the glamour which youth flings over earthly objects, faded away like the pageant of yesterday, while the dreary ceremony of living has to be gone through today and tomorrow and the morrow after, as though the gay cavalcade and the martial music, and the glittering helmets and the prancing steeds were still accompanying the wayfarer to his journey's end. Ah! my friends, there comes a moment when we must all leave the coach with its four bright bays, its pleasant outside freight, its cheery company, its guard who blows the horn so merrily through villages and along lonely country roads. Long before we reach that final stage, where the black business claims us for its own speecial property, we have to bid goodbye to all easy, thoughtless journeying and betake ourselves, with what zest we may, to traversing the common of reality. There is no royal road across it that ever I heard of. From the king on his throne to the laborer who vaguely imagines what manner of being a king is, we have all to tramp across that desert at one period of our lives, at all events; and that period is usually when, as I have said, a man starts to find the hopes, and the strength, and the buoyancy of youth left behind, while years and years of life lie stretching out before him. The coach he has travelled by drops him here. There is no appeal, there is no help; therefore, let him take off his hat and wish the new passengers good speed without either envy or repining. Behld, he has had his turn, and let whosoever will, mount on the box-seat of life again, and tip the coachman and handle the ribbons - he shall take that journey no more, no more for ever. ("The Banshee's Warning")

Charlotte Riddell

The woman who undergoes this operation can sense the morphogenetic field at work in her face. She can feel the lines of force as they guide the embryonic cells into the patterns they must form. Why should a woman let her life be determined by tired collagens or by a shortage of zinc which weakens her electromagnetic field, the matrix of life? The goal of life is living. Life is a field of opportunity, guiding the individual forward along paths created by the meshed forces or objective possibilities as they interweave with a person's own potentialities. And this philosophy of life is now bodied forth in the faces of beautiful women. ("Motherhood

William S. Wilson

this one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood" "Normal Time" in New California Writing

Michael Chabon

The problem, Paulinus, is not that we have a short life, but that we waste time. Life is long and there is enough of it for satisfying personal accomplishments if we use our hours well. But when time is squandered in the pursuit of pleasure or in vain idleness, when it is spent with no real purpose, the finality of death fast approaches and it is only then, when we are forced to, that we, at last, take a good hard look at how we have spent our life- just as we become aware that it is ending. Thus the time we are given is not brief, but we make it so. We do not lack time; on the contrary, there is so much of it that we waste an awful lot

Seneca the elder

I think: by the time I'm old, nobody will be able to die any more.

Sara Baume

But now I remember, of course, I'm never going to be old.

Sara Baume

How did I go from being the maiden in a fairy tale to a wretched old maids so quickly? It happened almost without my realizing it...

Christina Baker Kline

Hi,’ Jake said. ‘I met you earlier today, but you were a lot younger then.’ ‘I was a lot younger ten minutes ago.

Stephen King

But I suppose it's part of being old to feel that way, half in one world and half in the other, all of it mixed together in my mind. No one's left who even knows my name. Folks call me Auntie, on account of I never could have children of my own, and I guess that suits me fine. Sometime it's like I've got so many people inside of me I'm never alone at all. And when I go, I'll be taking them with me.

Justin Cronin

Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.""Yes! It's like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won't ever be back.

Andrew Sean Greer

Where have the years gone, Ruby Rose? Sometimes I have to stop and think about how old I am. When I wake up in the morning, before I move this tired old body or look in the blasted mirror, I swear I'm still a young man. It just feels like yesterday. I don't know how it's gone so fast.

Lea Davey

This is exactly the sort of thing that makes traveling wonderful for me, the reason I defied everyone. The two of us together like we have always been, not saying anything, not doing anything special, just on vacation. I know nothing lasts, but even when you know that things are just about over, sometimes you can run back and take a little bit more and no one will notice.

Michael Zadoorian

I'm getting old, thought Eileen Calder. Old and worn out and cynical. And being cynical is a lot worse than being old or worn out.

Charles Sheffield

It's finished. Everything went past, without me.

Jennifer Egan

90/93-year-old Jacob wonders as he gazes at his aged reflection, 'When did I stop being me?

Sara Gruen

Previous 1 … 4 5 6 7 8 … 14 Next

Aging Quotes - Page 6

Related Topics