Best 924 quotes in «aging quotes» category

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.

I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the cliches and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the cliches and conventions of the young.

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

I see an actress smoking a cigarette in an old Fred McMurray movie. She’s clever and beautiful and manipulative. I feel envy. I suddenly wish I smoked cigarettes and was as clever and beautiful and manipulative as she. I want to be that way at the restaurants I visit, as I’m walking to my car, with certain friends who might understand. The actress has played her part well; she’s made me want to emulate her base desires if only for a while. Does that make me impressionable, a fool, or someone who will recognize the deepest secrets of her heart? I fight hard to stay young—to keep the lines from further etching my face and hands and breasts, presumably to trick the world into believing I am young. I’m an actress playing a part. I’m afraid to tell the truth. I fear losing those younger or becoming those older. In the presence of youth, a sort of unseen age-osmosis occurs within me. The years drop away and I don’t want to leave. It’s utterly selfish but I don’t care. After all, I’m no older than they—I’ve just been so longer. I was nineteen only yesterday and they don’t retire nineteen-year-old actresses.

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

It behooves me to remember as I advance in age that death is an inevitable part of the life cycle rather than a medical failure.

The older you get, the closer your loves are to the surface. She was breathing rarefied air, the ether you come upon at high altitudes. I understood finally how long-held grievances and petty smallnesses might get burned off, and pure creativity and humour remain.

I think aging is hard for everyone.” Amara swiped a red bliss potato with crème fraîche and caviar off a passing tray. “But it’s definitely harder for women. And I think even more so for beautiful women. Because if so much of your identity and your value is tied up in your looks and how the world responds to your physical appearance, what do you do when that changes? How do you see yourself then? Who do you become?

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

I think adults must get sort of worn away over time, like rocks out at sea, but remain who they are, just slower and grayer with those funny vertical wrinkles in front of their ears. But the young are a different shape from one week to the next. To know us is to run alongside us, like someone trying to shout through the window of a moving train.

This is the true wine of astonishment: "We are not over when we think we are.

I thought that once I got to this city nothing could ever catch up with me because I could remake my life daily. Once that had made me feel infinite. Now I was certain I would never learn. Being remade was the same thing as being constantly undone.

It is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before.

It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.

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.

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

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.

It is warm, I am alive, I am calm and sad, I hardly know why. In this existence so even, so tranquil, and so gentle as I have here, I am in an element that weakens me morally while strengthening me physically; and I fall into melancholies of honey and roses which are none the less melancholy. It seems to me that all those I love forget me, and that it is justice, because I live a selfish life having nothing to do for any one of them.

It paid barely a living wage, but he stayed with it—gradually and in the end gratefully arriving at the point in life when you understand there are no great changes ahead.

It pleased him to see that things, and not only people, suffered the wear and tear of age. [53 yr old Inspector Bordelli's view]

I told him some of my best stories: the one about the sewer and the train tracks and the neighbor's dogs. Weylyn seemed unimpressed. "What? You got something better?" Weylyn smiled, "I was young once, too.

It's as if we look at each other from distant shores and the river between widens and roars and darkens till our faces are pale shards of the moon in the deep night. More ideas of the boys we were than the men we are.

It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.

It’s not loving a man that makes life harder for gay guys, it’s homophobia. It’s not the color of their skin that makes life harder for people of color; it’s racism. It’s not having vaginas that makes life harder for women, it’s sexism. And it’s ageism, far more than the passage of time, that makes growing older harder for all of us.

It's very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed twenty-two, you'd always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It's growth. It's more than the negative that you're going to die, it's also the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.

It takes courage to dream, to face our futures and the limiting forces within us. It takes courage to be determined that, as we slow down physically, we are going to grow even more psychologically and spiritually. Courage, the philosopher Aristotle taught us, is the most important of all the virtues, because without it we can’t practice any of the others. Courage is the nearest star that can guide our growth. Maya Angelou said we must be courageous about facing and exploring our personal histories. We must find the courage to care and to create internally, as well as externally, and as she said, we need the courage “to create ourselves daily as Christians, as Jews, as Muslims, as thinking, caring, laughing, loving human beings.

It was dawning on the wizards that they were outside the University, at night and without permission, for the first time in decades. A certain suppressed excitement crackled from man to man. Any watch trained in reading body language would have been prepared to bet that, after the click, someone was going to suggest that they might as well go somewhere and have a few drinks, and then someone else would fancy a meal, and then there was always room for a few more drinks, and then it would be 5 a.m. and the city guards would be respectfully knocking on the University gates and asking if the Archchancellor would care to step down to the cells to identify some alleged wizards who were singing an obscene song in six-part harmony, and perhaps he would also care to bring some money to pay for all the damage. Because inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.

It may be that I am no longer able to joke--that it is no longer a satisfactory defense mechanism. Some people are funny, and some are not. I used to be funny, and perhaps I’m not any more. There may have been so many shocks and disappointments that the defense of humor no longer works. It may be that I have become rather grumpy because I’ve seen so many things that have offended me that I cannot deal with in terms of laughter.

It was difficult to imagine that a full day hadn't yet passed since we boarded the airliner in New York. I paused. Medieval man believed that one was placed beyond the touch of time, and therefore aging, while attending Mass. What, I wondered, would he have made of those hours we left up in the sky? I would not change my watch until I gave the matter more thought.

I used to pass every car on the highway. Now every car passes me.

It was not Hansu that she missed, or even Isak. What she was seeing again in her dreams was her youth, her beginning, and her wishes--so this is how she became a woman.

I used to be a poet. My words were traded in marketplaces like pieces of gold. Merchants bought my verses for as much as they paid for saffron and Indian jade. Now I am old... drunk on wine and candle fumes. Alone in this barren room, I speak my psalms to the night air so as to entertain moths before they go off to die. I used to be a poet and my words were gold.

I've always figured it that you die each day and each day is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you've died a couple of thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand.

I've never stopped wanting to cross the equator, or touch an elk's horns, or sing Tosca or screw James Dean in a field of wheat. To hell with wisdom. They're all wrong: I'll never be through with my life.

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.

I wasn't always this way. But the friction of life has a way of turning sharp edges into smooth ones, smooth edges into sharp ones, until you've become a duller, slightly misshapen version of your former self.

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?

Little by little she had been discovering the uncertainty of her husband's step, his mood changes, the gaps in his memory, his recent habit of sobbing while he slept, but she did not identify these as the unequivocal signs of final decay but rather as a happy return to childhood.

Looking back on it now, I'd say one's thirties are a cruel age. At this point, I think of them as a time I whiled away unaware of the tide that can suddenly pull you out, beyond the shallows, into the sea of hardship, and even death

Looking at death can be life-affirming. It doesn’t need to mire us in thoughts of uselessness, nihilism, self-recrimination, and indifference to the future. Just a reminder that our days are numbered invites us to consider our blessings, strengthen our resolve to carry on, and escalate our compassion for all creatures, great and small.

MAGISTRATE Don't men grow old? LYSISTRATA Not like women. When a man comes home Though he's grey as grief he can always get a girl. There's no second spring for a woman. None. She can't recall it, nobody wants her, however She squanders her time on the promise of oracles, It's no use...

Make the second 50 the best 50

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.

Maturity/experience: the beguiling texture of stones subjected to years of furious seas.

Middle school is for being like everyone else; middle age is for being like yourself. (430)

Maybe this is what growing old was like, she thought. Maybe the world gets smaller and smaller until there's nothing but the walls around you to show you where you end and the rest of the world begins.

Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.

Metaphor, Evie thought as she stepped off the curb as the light changed, was for the young. Or, at any rate, for the younger than she.

No one in the world is really over 28. I wish I had known that when I thought I was 40.

It was then I realized that no one can escape his age, and that my dangerous contempt had melted like ice the moment someone was kind enough to show they cared about me, and in a way that suited me.