Quotes & Sayings About Aging

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. — Rita Dove

Despite what anti-aging ads say, growing older can be better. I feel better in my skin, 100 percent. You have greater effects of gravity, but the better sense of yourself you have is something I wouldn't trade. Women who lie about their age - 'why?' — Demi Moore

Growing old is humbling and it takes effort to accomplish this stage of life with dignity. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I just feel like this skin is mine. It's aging every day and the tattoos are aging with me. So, I'm going to be an old piece of paper one day with a lot of work on it. — Maria Dahvana Headley

Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi looks in the mirror and sees a playboy of the old school. And men such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Charlie Sheen no doubt look at Berlusconi and think, 'Role model!' Women, of course, know otherwise. They see him as an aging, pathetic buffoon. — Graydon Carter

In the past 40 years, the United States lost more than a million farmers and ranchers. Many of our farmers are aging. Today, only nine percent of family farm income comes from farming, and more and more of our farmers are looking elsewhere for their primary source of income. — Tom Vilsack

Though Jonah felt transfixed inside his own childhood, no one else saw him as a child. He was already over the hump of middle age, heading rapidly toward those year that no one like to speak of. The best parts had already passed for people Jonah's age. By now you were meant to have become what you would finally be, and to gracefully and unobtrusively stay in that state for the rest of your life. — Meg Wolitzer

The number of Canadians providing or expecting to provide eldercare in need is already a staggering statistic. Baby boomers are aging and this figure is likely to grow substantially.The Caregiver's Guide for Canadians will provide you with valuable advice to help you provide good eldercare while balancing all the demands on your time. It provides practical, realistic guidance; encouragement and insights to help you care for elders in need. — Rick Lauber

Miss Redmond is aging, and will never marry, and will die smelling of attics. — Morrissey

I don't have a fear of aging or a fear of death. — S. Jay Olshansky

though aging reduces speed, it increases experience and understanding — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

You might be on the back nine of life, but it's good to finish strong. — Morton Shaevitz

Do not fear the aging of the body for it is the body's way of seeking the root. — Laozi

I think there's a settled quality, there's a gravitas that comes with aging and with being a parent because you certainly come to recognize that there's nothing else that takes greater priority than raising your children. — Benjamin Bratt

A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby. — John Steinbeck

Curiously, just as much if not more mindless behavior can creep into our most momentous closures and life transitions, including our own aging and our own dying. Here, too, mindfulness can have healing effects. We may be so defended against feeling the full impact of our emotional pain - whether it be grief, sadness, shame, disappointment, anger, or for that matter, even joy or satisfaction - that we unconsciously escape into a cloud of numbness in which we do not permit ourselves to feel anything at all or know what we are feeling. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

We are slowly isolating the genes involved with the aging process. We do not have the fountain of youth, but I think, in the coming decades, we will unravel the aging process at the genetic level. — Michio Kaku

The past is gone. It went by like dusk to dawn. — Steven Tyler

Careless of waste, wallowing in refuse, exterminating the enemies ... despising age, denying human natural history, fabricating pseudotraditions, swamped in the repeated personal crises of the aging preadolescent; all are familiar images of American society. They are signs of private nightmares of incoherence and disorder in broken climaxes where technologies in pursuit of mastery create ever-worsening problems - private nightmares expanded to a social level. — Paul Shepard

We place such crazy importance on physical appearance in our image-obsessed culture, on youth and beauty to define our sense of self-worth, that aging, by default, becomes a kind of defect, something secret and corrosive and shameful. — Ruth Ozeki

That's what children eventually were for their aging parents: custodians of technology, free personal IT departments keeping them from disappearing forever from the universal cloud. — Christopher Bollen

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

Einstein once postulated that if you traveled at an enormous rate of speed, time would actually slow down relative to the world you left behind,
so that seeing the future without aging alongside it was at least theoretically, possible. — Mitch Albom

The second Cocoon questions that and deals much more directly with the value of living in the real world with its trials and tribulations. I would say it's about that and not about aging or death. — Daniel Petrie

Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove. — Ashleigh Brilliant

Our body does get old, but our spirit, never. If we write well enough, we might even live forever. — A.A. Patawaran

Life is most delightful on the downward slope. — Seneca The Younger

I am appalled that the term we use to talk about aging is 'anti'. Aging is human evolution in its pure form. Death, taxes and aging ... We are ALL going to age and soften and mellow and transition. — Jamie Lee Curtis

Every person has the right to look and feel like a million bucks. — Mehmet Oz

They rarely look at Baba
the teenagers
and then only with cold indifference, or even subtle disdain, as if my father should have known better than to allow old age and decay to happen to him. — Khaled Hosseini

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

Sometimes I want to clean up my desk and go out and say, "Respect me; I'm a respectable grown-up!" and other times I just want to jump into a paper bag and shake and bake myself to death. — Wendy Wasserstein

The Alzheimer's Association is what I am passionate about. My grandfather had it. My mom has it. It's a horrible disease, and with our aging population, it's a growing problem. It's terrible to lose your brain and your power to be conscious or in the moment. — Graham Shiels

In the past men were handsome and great (now they are children and dwarfs), but this is merely one of the many facts that demonstrate the disaster of an aging world. The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in decline, the whole world walks on its head, blind men lead others equally blind and cause them to plunge into the abyss, birds leave the nest before they can fly, the jackass plays the lyre, oxen dance. Mary no longer loves the contemplative life and Martha no longer loves the active life, Leah is sterile, Rachel has a carnal eye, Cato visits brothels, Lucretius becomes a woman. Everything is on the wrong path. In those days, thank God, I acquired from my master the desire to learn and a sense of the straight way, which remains even when the path is tortuous. — Umberto Eco

I'm much younger than I look, I promise." Nora's smile broadened. "I'm aging horribly. — Tiffany Reisz

But I knew it was pure masturbation, because down in my gut I wanted nothing more than a clean bed and a bright room and something solid to call my own at least until I got tired of it. There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detatched. — Hunter S. Thompson

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

Short as life is, some find it long enough to outlive their characters, their constitutions and their estates. — Charles Caleb Colton

We start our sometimes tedious, sometimes exciting, often times sad and stressful march to the grave the moment we're born, so it might as well be a march worth remembering. — Donna Lynn Hope

I thought I heard Billy sniffling and I asked him what was wrong. He said, "Mal, you haven't heard, have you?"
"Heard what?"
"Coach Bryant died this morning."
I don't remember saying another word. I don't remember hanging up the telephone or even leaving the phone booth. It was the saddest moment of my career.
I just leaned up against the aging brick wall of the coffee shop and cried. — Mal Moore With Steve Townsend

I want to age nicely. Rather than being afraid of aging, I want to take each year coolly and age gracefully. — L.Joe

After a burglary of all her most valued and treasured possessions, Winston Churchill's aging mother wrote: "That burglar relieved me of an obsession. For years, I've had to take houses big enough to hold all these bibelots. I am almost grateful to him." — Anne Sebba

If we remain surrendered to God, we've already died to everything decay and death could ever threaten to take away. Our treasure is no longer in things that moths can eat and thieves can steal (Matthew 6:19-20). Our heart is no longer set on things that aging and misfortune can affect. Our life is securely hidden in Christ, whose love never changes (Colossians 3:1-3). In fact, to the extent that we're surrendered to God every moment, we've "been crucified with Christ and [we] no longer live, but Christ lives in [us]" (Galatians 2:20). — Gregory A. Boyd

It took nearly a year to finish the ever-changing [marriage candidates] list, with the assistance of his sister and his aging spinster aunt, who lorded over their affairs as the self-appointed voice of cultivated reason. During this time, Gabriel struggled to convince straight-from-Oxford Tristan that he must marry, produce heirs, and maintain the family dukedom for Gabriel himself wouldn't marry. He knew he simply did not have the compulsion to inflict that sort of aggravation on a woman. — Olivia Parker

The way she told it, the English counties are littered with aging spinsters who accidentally displayed a spark of intelligence at a debutante dance and were banished forever from civilized society — Michelle Cooper

Aging is no accident. It is necessary to the human
condition, intended by the soul. We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus the final years have a very important purpose: the fulfillment and confirmation of one's character. — James Hillman

I've never been willing to lie about my age. Why on earth would I want to tell people I'm 35, which I'm not, and have them say, 'Oh that's nice,' when I could tell them I'm 47, which I am, and have them look at me and go, 'Whoa!'. I'm not afraid of aging. I stopped being afraid of life a long time ago. — Sharon Stone

Basically, when it comes to women, both aging and eating are somehow shameful. — Emma Woolf

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. — Dave Barry

It's hard to feel middle-aged, because how can you tell how long you are going to live? — Mignon McLaughlin

The important part of growing older was the growing part. Resisting change meant forever standing still, which was a sad way to live. — Barbara Delinsky

I'm not an aging gracefully type. But I do believe in aging with grace. — Danielle Steel

But space shrinks when you get old, and things lose their wonder, and the wisest thing to do then is to try your best to sleep. — Dexter Palmer

To care for those who once cared for us is one of the highest honors. — Tia Walker

The more steps you take towards the end, the fewer steps you have to take towards the end! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

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

the real essence of our lifetime lies in the time of our lives — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

That's what getting old is: When you can no longer bear the consequences of being wrong. — Matthew Woodring Stover

I don't know how you feel about old age ... but in my case I didn't even see it coming. It hit me from the rear. — Phyllis Diller

It seems there is an ideal degree of aging which is admired. Things should not be new, but neither should they be rotten with age (except in New Orleans, which fosters a cult of decay). — Stewart Brand

Yes, aging can be tough and rough ... But it is possible to approach the ultimate without staggering and even with a kind of glow, like a radiant sunset. — Norman Corwin

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 industry is aging! — David J. Anderson

We can never skip growing old. As we grow older, we understand old things and things of old times better! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Just as apples when unripe are torn from trees, but when ripe and mellow drop down, so it is violence that takes life from young men, ripeness from old. This ripeness is so delightful to me that, as I approach nearer to death, I seem, as it were, to be sighting land, and to be coming to port at last after a long voyage. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Jesus said, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them" (Mt 5:17). Yet Paul could say, "Christ is the end of the law" (Rom 10:4); "you also died to the law through the body of Christ" (Rom 7:4); and "Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law" (Gal 3:25). Hebrews states, "By calling this covenant 'new,' he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and aging will soon disappear" (Heb 8:13), and "The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming" (Heb 10:1). The Matthew text is the key one, for Jesus is asserting that the Torah has not been abrogated and in fact is intact in him. — Grant R. Osborne

My memory plays me odd tricks these days [...] Age spares us nothing, old friend. Like ancient trees, we die from the top. — Gore Vidal

I'm no cook. When I want lemon on chicken, I spray it with Pledge. — Joan Rivers

Dysfunctional muscles are generally not diseased, aging, or broken. They are starved of motion. — Pete Egoscue

All of us face hard choices in our lives. Some face more than their share. We have to decide how to balance the demands of work and family. Caring for a sick child or an aging parent. Figuring out how to pay for college. Finding a good job, and what to do if you lose it. Whether to get married - or stay married. How to give our kids the opportunities they dream about and deserve. Life is about making such choices. Our choices and how we handle them shape the people we become. For leaders and nations, they can mean the difference between war and peace, poverty and prosperity. — Hillary Rodham Clinton

What we've done, it seems to me, is allow women to get older, but not to age. — Caryl Rivers

One thing that I really like to do is, I'll look in the mirror, and I'll imagine that I'm rapidly aging, until I'm just a skull. — Anna Akana

The books I read when I was twenty completely changed when I read them when I was sixty. — Sarah Addison Allen

Encino is a small community in the San Fernando Valley smashed up against and completely indistinguishable from all other Valley communities. You can drive from one to the other, passing the same dry cleaners, dubious sushi restaurants, and gas stations, without so much as a sign to mark your transition. It does, frankly, matter much where are you. If anything at all marks Encino from its clone neighbors, it's that it isn't aging quite as well. Sherman Oaks and Woodland Hills have kept their figures and shown up on time for regular collagen injections while Encino is really starting to let itself go. — Ashley Ream

A wedding is allegedly one of the most wondrous experiences in a woman's life. All attending her presence are to make the occasion completely about her. Her beauty in that sliver of time is to be suspended in eternity so that ten years, thirty pounds and two kids later, she may sigh at the princess she once was. — Kenn Bivins

A great deal of the American medical community's resources is geared to addressing the cosmetic needs of both women and men whom fear that by showing the deleterious effects of aging their marital relationship is in jeopardy. The most ethical plastic surgeons decline to perform impetuous work; the less ethical, but often the wealthiest professionals, perform all requested work irrespective of the long-term viability of the services rendered. The plastic surgeon's sales pitch is predictable: everyone can receive the face that he or she can afford. — Kilroy J. Oldster

You've climbed too many mountains and crossed too many rivers to stop and turn back now. — Eleanor Brownn

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

The politics of the exile are fever,
revenge, daydream,
theater of the aging convalescent.
You wait in the wings and rehearse.
You wait and wait. — Marge Piercy

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

After years of investigating aging populations, researchers' answer to the question of how much is not much. If all you do is walk several times a week, your brain will benefit. Even — John Medina

There is nothing that anyone can get past a forty-five-year-old woman." We laugh hard, the first honest sound I make that afternoon, or in many days, each of us feeling the ravages of experience, our debt to enduring. We are not to be fucked with. We rule. Even as we age and help our children push past us, as we worry about the estimate for the roof, forget things we meant to do, regard our widening bodies, we rule. We've returned again and again to our original selves for another look; we have refined our purpose. Changes we thought we'd been resisting have anyway been wrought, and they have made us unbreakable. — Susanna Sonnenberg

We have the means right now to live long enough to live forever. Existing knowledge can be aggressively applied to dramatically slow down aging processes so we can still be in vital health when the more radical life extending therapies from biotechnology and nanotechnology become available. But most baby boomers won't make it because they are unaware of the accelerating aging process in their bodies and the opportunity to intervene. — Ray Kurzweil

The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It's not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it's the resentment that settles on your face — Quentin Crisp

The easy path of aging is to become a thick-skinned, unbudging curmudgeon, a battle-ax. To grow soft and sweet is the harder way. — James Hillman

With age, gone are the forevers of youth. Gone is the willingness to procrastinate, delay, to play the waiting game. Now each day is a treasure beyond compare ... because there are so few such diadems left. — Joe L. Wheeler

Although generally our sight diminishes with age; I submit that our vision improves. The older we get, the more clearly we see our life's decisions played out to their logical conclusions. — David C. Maloney

Did you just call me old? I really prefer the word 'experienced'. — Morgan Freeman

My home State of North Carolina ranks 12th in the United States for increased aging population and, according to a national report, 41st in overall health. According to this same report, individuals aged 50+ are the least healthy. — Howard Coble

Experts in aging make a distinction between passive aging and purposeful aging. Successful, purposeful aging calls for continued involvement, relationships, discipline, and an attitude of faith. — George Sweeting

Having spent all my life among academics, I can tell you that hearing how wrong they area is about as high on their priority list as finding a cockroach in their coffee. The typical scientist has made an interesting discovery early on in his or her career, followed by a lifetime of making sure that everyone else admires his or her contribution and that no one questions it. There is no poorer company than an aging scientist who has failed to achieve these objectives. — Frans De Waal

You can open up a centenarian's brain, and you'll see some areas that look like that of a 50-year-old or of a 110-year-old. You can have variation in the basic process of aging, called senescence, in different parts of the same body. — S. Jay Olshansky

I figure I'm still good for painting until 95 or thereabouts. — Bern Will Brown

Life is brief, young maiden, fall in love; before the crimson bloom fades from your lips, before the tides of passion cool within your hips, for those of you who know no tomorrow. (Gondola no Uta) — Kouhei Kadono

Aging is harder for beautiful people, and Anna was beautiful. — Marina Keegan

But if we are truly happy inside, then age brings with it a maturity, a depth, and a power that only magnifies our radiance. — David Deida

If I can challenge old ideas about aging, I will feel more and more invigorated. I want to represent this new way. I want to be a new version of the 70-year-old woman. Vital, strong, very physical, very agile. I think that the older I get, the more yoga I'm going to do. — Jamie Lee Curtis

Well, I'd like to think I am, and I'd also like to think that we're all having a lot more fun getting older than we pretend. It was interesting to me when I first started working on this book that I'd mentioned that I was writing a memoir about aging and everybody would moan and groan and carry on. — Anna Quindlen

Janey accuses me of chasing jailbait. She bursts into angry tears, asking if it's because she's getting older. It's true. She's aging more noticeably every day - while I am standing still. I prefer the stillness here. I am tired of Earth. These people. I am tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives. — Alan Moore

Lion's mane may be our first 'smart' mushroom. It is a safe, edible fungus that appears to confer cognitive benefits on our aging population. — Paul Stamets