Aging Quotes

“Do you suppose you will look the same when you are an old woman as you do now? Most folk have three faces—the face they get when they’re children, the face they own when they’re grown, and the face they’ve earned when they’re old. But when you live as long as I have, you get many more. I look nothing like I did when I was a wee thing of thirteen. You get the face you build your whole life, with work and loving and grieving and laughing and frowning.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

“Youth. I don't seek it through another because I have it within; it's a state of mind, a spirit that is free, and a mind that is playful. The shell of my being is altered by the effects of time, but nothing will tarnish a soul that will never forget what its like to experience creation with endless wonder and appreciation. Each time I see the first snowfall of the season I feel it's the first time I've seen it at all.”
― Donna Lynn Hope

“You know what getting married is? It's agreeing to taking this person who right now is at the top of his form, full of hopes and ideas, feeling good, looking good, wildly interested in you because you're the same way, and sticking by him while he slowly disintegrates. And he does the same for you. You're his responsibility now and he's yours. If no one else will take care of him, you will. If everyone else rejects you, he won't. What do you think love is? Going to bed all the time?”
― Jane Smiley

“When we’re young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren’t that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young, erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I’ve never much minded this myself.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.”
― Colum McCann, Fishing the Sloe-Black River

“This is the true wine of astonishment: "We are not over when we think we are.”
― Alice Walker

“Like the culture that created me, I am receding into the past at a rate of knots. Soon I'll need a whole row of footnotes if anybody under thirty-five is going to comprehend the least thing I say.”
― Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories

“One of the odd things about middle age...was the strange decisions a man discovers he’s made by not really making them.”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“When I grow up I want to be an old woman.”
― Michelle Shocked

“The old man had been tanned by the light of too many beer signs, and it just goes to show that you can’t live on three packs of Chesterfields and a fifth of bourbon a day without starting to drift far too fuckin’ wide in the turns.”
― Daniel Woodrell, The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do

“You grow weary of being treated as the enemy simply because you are not young anymore; because you dress unexceptionally.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“Each night when she prepared for bed she smeared her face with some new unguent which she hoped illogically would give back the glow and freshness to her vanishing beauty.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Let me tell you something, honey. When your boobs fall south and that pretty skin of yours looks like you’ve been tanning in a nuclear war zone, you’ll see what I mean about independence. When the looks are gone, all you’ve got left is your spirit, and ya gotta use it until you lose it. That and the occasional sponge bath from Francisco, but soon his ass will be just as wrinkly as mine. Beauty fades, but a strong will keeps ya young and springy.

-Miss Velma”
― Rachael Wade, Love and Relativity

“It is we who move through time, not the reverse. When we walk beyond any one of life’s instants, it becomes nothing more than a receding milestone. We can look back, but we cannot retrace our steps. The past remains stationary, while we are doomed to move ever onwards. To do otherwise is against nature.”
― Andrew Levkoff, The Other Alexander

“If I knew I was going to live so long, I'd have taken better care of myself.”
― Mickey Mantle

“My theory is that, as with our children, as with every surface of that geodesic dome inside the 8-Ball, every age we've ever been is who we are.”
― Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith

“One quarter of Medicare beneficiaries have five or more chronic conditions, sees an average of 13 physicians each year, and fills 50 prescriptions per year.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care

“He did not want to feel old. He did not want to feel the weight of his age hovering above him, mocking him out of the core of a man’s pride, waiting to descend upon his mind and body.”
― William Sarabande, Walkers of the Wind

“The more candles on my cake means I get a little more exercise in blowing them out.”
― Donna Lynn Hope

“Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciting received analyses of current events. All the Manor residents watched television day and night, informed to the eyeballs like everyone else and rushed for time, toward what end no one asked. Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else's, but their many experiences' having taught them so little irked Lou. One hated tourists, another southerners; another despised immigrants. Even dying, they still held themselves in highest regard. Lou would have to watch herself. For this way of thinking began to look like human nature--as if each person of two or three billion would spend his last vital drop to sustain his self-importance.”
― Annie Dillard, The Maytrees

“But comes a time for a woman when she stops thinking of herself as a girl, as a person of possibilities. She starts looking at the plain facts of herself. Her body that’s become the body that she has and her habits becoming the habits that she’s written in stone. Her “haves” being the ones she’s got and maybe not getting anymore.”
― Breena Clarke, River, Cross My Heart

“I once laughed at the vanity of women of thirty or forty who whitened their ruddy old skin with lead, but now I know such salves are not disguises for old crones who wish to catch a young husband. Instead they are only a mask we wear so that we can, for a little while, still recognize ourselves.”
― Rebecca Johns, The Countess

“He thinks of the rotten parachute they played with as kids in Arcadia: they hurtle through life aging unimaginably fast, but each grasps a silken edge of memory that billows between them and softens the long fall.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“Almost as soon as it was lit it began to sound as though it were running down, but in fact it would continue to run down for a long time. He knew the feeling.”
― John Crowley, Little, Big

“Let us not be bored”
― Joe Buberger

“Torka extended a conciliatory hand and laid it upon the old man’s shoulder. “Umak, Manaravak, Dak, and Tankh and Chuk will walk at my side. We will miss your strength, courage, and wisdom, but a man in possession of these qualities is needed here”.

They left Grek standing at the edge of camp with his spear in hand and his pack frame on his back. As Torka walked on without looking back he wondered if he had ever done anything in his life as difficult as that.

”You had no choice.” Umak came to walk beside him with Dak and Companion at his side. Manaravak and the two boys trotted on ahead.

Torka eyed Dak and Umak without slowing his step. “Do you two imagine that you will never be old?”

Dak replied with his usual curtness. “When I am old, I will have sense enough to know when it is time to step aside and let younger men take my place on the hunt”.

"It would seem the best thing to do,” Torka agreed. “But will you know when you are old? Or will your years sneak up on you like hunters tracking caribou… one after the other, each looking just the same until the stalking cloaks fall away and the spears of truth come out to wound you… until one day you are a young man trapped and rattling around in an old man’s skin, still believing that your old bones can do all the things they once did in your youth and trying to prove it even if it kills you?”
― William Sarabande, Walkers of the Wind

“The problem with aging was not that death was near, for death was always near. The problem with aging was that a woman began to carry too many memories within her.”
― Stant Litore, Strangers in the Land

“Dans le monde moderne on pouvait être échangiste, bi, trans, zoophile, SM, mais il était interdit d'être vieux. (La possibilité d'une île, Daniel 1,15)”
― MICHEL HOUELLEBECK

“In my youth I loved climbing and scrambling up rocks and mountains: now I seldom intrude on the dweller of a second story, and my greatest enemy or friend may avoid me altogether on the third; so humbled is the aspiring spirit of my youth.”
― Edward John Trelawny, Adventures Of A Younger Son

“Time erodes people, and when you are old enough you weigh nothing. It's comforting to know that I will never be as frail.”
― Maija Haavisto, The Atlas Moth