Aging Quotes

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

“He doesn't know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief.”
― Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

“The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“Before forty, you think that exhaustion is something like a long-lasting hangover. But at forty you learn all about it. Even your passions exhaust you.”
― Kevin Barry

“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, The Beauty Myth

“The water doesn't know how old you are.”
― Dara Torres, Age Is Just a Number: Achieve Your Dreams at Any Stage in Your Life

“Where are the eyes of my childhood, those fearful eyes she had thirty years ago, the eyes that made me?”
― Annie Ernaux, I Remain in Darkness

“On devient jeune à soixante ans. Malheureusement, c'est trop tard”
― Pablo Picasso

“She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here--the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“He walked into the bathroom, wincing at himself in the mirror, that always more tired older brother.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

“Old folks live on memory, young folk live on hope.”
― Gayla Reid, All the seas of the world: A novel

“I Didn't Ask to Be a Senior Citizen (I Was Drafted)”
― Doug Jensen, Looking in the Rear View Mirror

“The key to successful aging is to pay as little attention to it as possible.”
― Judith Regan

“One of the many troubles of growing older is that it gets progressively harder to find a famous historical figure who hadn't yet amounted to anything by the time he was your age.”
― Sebastian Horsley

“At twenty-four she imagined with dread that she was growing old.”
― Jean Rhys

“When Mama starts to move across a room, people pay attention. You can never be sure she's not going to grab you by the top of the head to steady herself. And she's pretty free with that walking stick, too.”
― Bailey White, Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living

“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.”
― Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End

“In a sexual double standard as to who receives consumer protection, it seems that if what you do is done to women in the name of beauty, you may do what you like. It is illegal to claim that something grows hair, or makes you taller, or restores virility, if it does not. It is difficult to imagine that the baldness remedy Minoxidil would be on the market if it had killed nine French and at least eleven American men. In contrast, the long-term effects of Retin-A are still unknown--Dr. Stuart Yusps of the National Cancer Institute refers to its prescription as "a human experiment"--and the Food and Drug Administration has not approved it yet dermatologists are prescribing it to women at a revenue of over $150 million a year.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“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, Brother to Dragons

“As we age we begin to grasp at youthful bliss like a life raft in a sea of harsh reality.”
― Brad Herzog, Turn Left At The Trojan Horse: A Would-Be Hero's American Odyssey

“Too-lateness, I realized, has nothing to do with age. Too-lateness is potentially every moment. Or not, depending on the person and the moment. Perhaps there even comes a time when it's no longer too late for anything. Perhaps, even, most times are too early for most things, and most of life has to go by before it's time for almost anything and too late for almost nothing. Nothing to lose, the present moment to gain, the integration with long-delayed Now.”
― Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary

“It's finished. Everything went past, without me.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out altogether.”
― Saul Bellow

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

“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.”
― Herb Gardner, I'm Not Rappaport

“When you're a young man like yourself, life is full of wonders. Everything new. Everything an adventure. But as the years roll on, things become ordinary. Colors lose their vibrance. Stars lose their glitter. You become less in awe of the world. It loses its magic.

I don't see this as a painful thing. I think it's a mercy. I believe it's all just so it makes it easier to let the whole thing go when it's our time to pass on. But when you've lived as long as I have, the weight of the years and the tarnished luster of the world can break you down. And it's hard to be alive and be so broken.”
― Eric Powell

“old people have to go to children's or most often to rest homes where they are shunted into wheelchairs and made as fast as possible into zombies cause it's easier to handle a zombie, if you have to handle anything, than a human.”
― Kathy Acker, New York City in 1979

“Anyone ambitious, who lives to be old or even old, endures the inevitable loss of ambition’s fulfillment.”
― Donald Hall, A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety

“All are dead, and ourselves left alone amidst a new generation whom we know not, and who know us not.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“The mysteries of life include the external and the internal conundrums that each person encounters in a world composed of competing ideologies and agents of change. Conflicting ideas include political, social, legal, and ethical concepts. Agents of change include environmental factors, social pressure to conform, aging, and the forces inside us that made us into whom we are as well as the forces compelling us to be a different type of person.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls