Aging Quotes

Eve Ensler

I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense. (xxvi)

Núria Añó

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

Pat Summitt

Someday, I suppose I’ll give up, and sit in the rocking chair. But I’ll probably be rocking fast, because I don’t know what I’ll do without a job.

Alain De Botton

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

Colson Whitehead

As time went on, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral weapons, an idea or improbable plan or some sort of formulation about how best to move through the world. An idea that will let us be. Protect us and keep us safe. But a weapon nonetheless.

W.B. Yeats

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

Gabriel García Márquez

Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.

Mark Twain

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.

Dave Barry

As you get older; you've probably noticed that you tend to forget things. You'll be talking with somebody at a party, and you'll know that you know this person, but no matter how hard you try, you can't remember his or her name. This can be very embarassing, especially if he or she turns out to be your spouse.

Yoko Ono

Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence.
Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance.
Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence.
Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.

Andy Rooney

It's paradoxical that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn't appeal to anyone.

George Orwell

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.. George Orwell
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

Martin Amis

And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.

Lynsay Sands

Birthdays could be such a bummer when you were older than the country you lived in.

Sara Gruen

Sometimes when you get older - and I'm not talking about you, I'm talking generally, because everyone ages differently - things you think on and wish on start to seem real. And then you believe them, and before you know it they're a part of your history, and if someone challenges you on them and says they're not true - why, then you get offended.

Alain De Botton

One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.

Herb Gardner

Nat: Maybe you broke something.
Midge: I know. Never fall down, never fall down!
Nat: Ah, it's nothing. I fall down every morning. I get up, I have a cup of coffee, I fall down. That's the system. Two years old, you stand up and then BOOM! seventy years later, you fall down again.

Dante Alighieri

The wisest are the most annoyed at the loss of time.

Brian Rathbone

Wisdom is the reward for surviving our own stupidity.

Nora Ephron

It's always hard to remember love - years pass and you say to yourself, Was I really in love, or was I just kidding myself? Was I really in love, or was I just pretending he was the man of my dreams? Was I really in love, or was I just desperate?

Saul Bellow

The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out altogether.

Cheryl Strayed

You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.

Auliq Ice

The older I get the less I care what other people think of me. Therefore the older I get the more I enjoy life.

Giacomo Leopardi

Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age.

Ana Monnar

Good thing I'm aging, otherwise I'd be dead.

Meg Rosoff

Time erodes us all.

Jennifer Egan

So this is it ⎯ what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty.

Elisabeth Elliot

George Macdonald said, 'If you knew what God knows about death you would clap your listless hands', but instead I find old people in North America just buying this whole youth obsession. I think growing older is a wonderful privilege. I want to learn to glorify God in every stage of my life.

Gayla Reid

Old folks live on memory, young folk live on hope.

Bauvard

If all women revealed their age, men would have nothing to hide from each other.

Tracey Ullman

As I get older, I just prefer to knit.

Peggi Speers

Never give up hope. If you do, you'll be dead already.-Dementia Patient, Rose from The Inspired Caregiver

Crystal Woods

As we get older, it matters less where you are and more who you're with.

Jacob M. Appel

Marriage is like a series of opposing reflections, inverse images getting ever smaller like nesting dolls, each one of your trying to squeeze yourself smaller to fit inside the hopes of the other, until one of you cracks or stops existing.

Robin Caldwell

Age did not have to prohibit or inhibit a woman’s ability to make money or a living. Age did not diminish a woman’s usefulness as a self-employed person or entrepreneur. Age did not limit the ways in which a woman made money through self-employment or entrepreneurship.

Meg Rosoff

And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly, with desire. My old man's brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else's gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of helpless, selfless love, to behold itself, illuminated, in the golden light of another's eyes.

Roman Payne

The youthful body untouched decays the fastest, for no living hands record its splendor; and here youth and time are wasted.

Tom Ford

Everyday is one less day.

Charles Bukowski

a life can change in a tenth of
a second.
or sometimes it can take
70
years.

Lord Dunsany

The years are going by us like huge birds, whom Doom and Destiny and the schemes of God have frightened up out of some old gray marsh.

Andrew Solomon

As you ripen, you’ll notice that time is the weirdest thing in the world, that these surprises are relentless, and that getting older is not a stroll but an ambush.

Richelle E. Goodrich

It's strange how in childhood it feels like tomorrow won't come until the end of forever, but in adulthood it feels like the end of forever could come tomorrow.

P.K. Page

I had forgotten such innocence exists,/forgotten how it feels/ to live with neither calendars nor clocks

Ogden Nash

I am tarred and feathered with Time.

Ann Marlowe

Never has nostalgia held stronger sway; never has the belief in the redemptive possibilities of the future seemed so laughable.

A.J. Darkholme

The older you get, the faster time passes in your mind, so use your time according to what is most important.

Timothy W. Tron

The magnitude of any one day is compromised by its passing quickly into the next, a mere moment in time which soon fades into the collective memory of our past.

Tennessee Williams

I don't ask for your pity, but just for your understanding – not even that – no. Just for some recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.

Tennessee Williams

Chance, you've gone past something you couldn't afford to go past; your time, your youth, you've passed it. It's all you had and you've had it.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

The Oak

Live thy Life,
Young and old,
Like yon oak,
Bright in spring,
Living gold;

Summer-rich
Then; and then
Autumn-changed
Soberer-hued
Gold again.

All his leaves
Fall'n at length,
Look, he stands,
Trunk and bough
Naked strength.

Ginnetta Correli

A tip for increased sales or in situations of life or death: Try to always refer to the lady as Miss. or Ms. Using the term: Ma'am could piss her off.

Rasmenia Massoud

I envy you, your youth. Every woman is still a dream, a thing that can’t exist. Even when you touch her, a creature too beautiful to be real or to cause real pain. It’s different for old men. We have more old wounds from these dreams.

A.J. Darkholme

In the grand scheme of life, nobody grows old keeping their soul unblemished.

C.S. Lewis

It is very rarely that a middle-aged man finds an author who gives him, what he knew so often in his teens and twenties, the sense of having opened a new door.

Paul Kropp

The joy of reading with our children doesn't stop as they, and we, get older; it simply changes.

Naomi Wolf

Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.

Chuck Palahniuk

Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. Most women know this feeling of being more and more invisible everyday.

Pat Benatar

I've enjoyed every age I've been, and each has had its own individual merit. Every laugh line, every scar, is a badge I wear to show I've been present, the inner rings of my personal tree trunk that I display proudly for all to see. Nowadays, I don't want a "perfect" face and body; I want to wear the life I've lived.

Naomi Wolf

Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.

Naomi Wolf

Health makes good propaganda.

Naomi Wolf

The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.

Naomi Wolf

The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her "beauty.

Naomi Wolf

Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient pool, into man-made women.

Victoria Moran

[G]rowing into your future with health and grace and beauty doesn’t have to take all your time. It rather requires a dedication to caring for yourself as if you were rare and precious, which you are, and regarding all life around you as equally so, which it is. (267-268)

Naomi Wolf

What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?

Naomi Wolf

The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold.

Or, if your ad revenue or your seven-figure salary or your privileged sexual status depend on it, it is an operable condition.

Naomi Wolf

When [beauty pornography is] aimed at men, its effect is to keep them from finding peace in sexual love. The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman-known, marked, lined, familiar - -who hands him the paper every morning.

Naomi Wolf

Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control.

Naomi Wolf

Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete.

Naomi Wolf

What editors are obliged to appear to say that men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women.

Naomi Wolf

The surgeons' market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women's faces or bodies that social change won't cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.

Naomi Wolf

Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.

Anna Quindlen

.. at a certain age we learned to see right through it, and that age is now.

Zadie Smith

And I'm not going to get any thinner or any younger, my ass is going to hit the ground, if it hasn't already-and I want to be with somebody who can still see me in here. I'm still in here. And I don't want to be resented or despised for changing...I'd rather be alone.

Diana Athill

An important aspect of the ebbing of sex was that other things became interesting. Sex obliterates the individuality of young women more often than it does that of young men, because so much more of a woman than a man is used by sex.

Jacob M. Appel

I used to dream of true love; now I'm open to false, but convincing....

Ali Shaw

Die Jahre, die man auf dem Buckel hatte, waren zu nichts mehr nutze: Man brauchte sie ungelebt, einen ganzen Vorrat davon. Denn je älter man wurde, desto mehr Dinge gingen zu Bruch.

Agnostic Zetetic

Fighting makes us feel alive, until it kills us. If it doesn’t kill us, the pain of sitting alone with ourselves, quietly, under constant assault by our own thoughts and memories of war can easily be enough to make us wish we’d died in battle instead.

John Wilmot

Before I got married I had six theories about raising children; now, I have six children and no theories.

Peter De Vries

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.

Jenny Offill

Once when he was still young, I saw a bit of his scalp showing through his hair and I was afraid. But it was just a cowlick. Now sometimes it shows through for real, but I feel only tenderness.

Karen Jones Gowen

In her daydreams, they aged miraculously, she still trim with a blond ponytail, standing next to her strong, tall husband with his thick, curly dark hair and straight white teeth. Money was never an issue.

J. Matthew Nespoli

Old Age- You can tell when you're getting old when you stop taking drugs for fun and start taking them to keep you alive.
-character Jackson Rockenberger (Broken)

Kat Kaelin

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been." _Mark Twain (Author)

Stewart O'Nan

I'm sorry you don't like coming back here," her mother often said, to cap whatever petty dust-up they'd had. How could Emily explain: it wasn't her mother or Kersey she'd disowned, but her earlier self, that strange, ungrateful girl who strove to be first at everything and threw tantrums when she failed.

Fidelis O. Mkparu

I am a fading phantasmagoria. Time has left me in partial glory."-Fidelis O Mkparu

Jane Tara

It’s this freedom that’s the key to becoming visible again. Not caring what others think is freeing. Expressing yourself any way you want is freeing. Having opinions, emotional wisdom, spiritual understanding…these things free you. And in freedom, we find power.

Gabrielle Zevin

The easiest way to get old is to be technologically behind...

Dara Torres

The water doesn't know how old you are.

Andy Lane

In the end, the slow decay of the body didn't matter. We all continue on, renewing ourselves, through our offspring. They are what matter. They are what survives.

F.T. McKinstry

The older a wizard grows, the more silent he becomes, like a woody vine growing over time to choke a garden path, deep and full of moss and snakes, running everywhere, impenetrable.

Morton Shaevitz

There’s nothing wrong with accumulating wealth, receiving recognition for your efforts, and having some power and status-what’s wrong is when you think that’s who you are.

Theodore Roethke

I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.

Anne Fortier

Courage has no age.

Roman Payne

It is only in the peach innocence of youth that life is at its crest on top of the wheel. And there being only life, the young cling to it, they fear death... And they should! ...For they are in life.

Frederick Dodson

It is my opinion that enjoying yourself in the present and loosening your definition of time slows the aging process.

Roman Payne

Everything was brighter and more colorful in those years, as if my youth was ending in an explosion of unreal passion. Memories like these make my life sacred and holy.

Patricia L. Steffy

After 25 the only thing you’ll be precocious at is death.

Alyscia Cunningham

Many people define beauty as skin deep, but I’ve found the beauty in physical and superficial changes that continue throughout the life of a woman.

Victoria Moran

Our society on a whole is trained to see young women. There are proportionally far more of them on magazine covers, on TV, and in films than int the actual population. As a result, we have a citizenry taught to see the young and ignore the not-so-young. It isn’t conscious; it’s Pavlovian. (13)

Pope John Paul II

Men are like wine-some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age.

Gabriel García Márquez

...her own experience was beginning to tell her that an alert old age can be more keen than the cards.

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