Quotes & Sayings About Aging And Life

An utter success,' her stepdaughters confided to
Margaret as they prepared to take their leave. 'The handsome king! That spoof!' Still the rain persisted, and the bishop had lost his hat. Maids danced in and out. Where was the bishop's hat? Alone at the window, Margaret didn't hear. The reflection of the parlor was yellow and warm. She watched it empty out. Then, an interruption. A voice came at her side: 'What do you look at with such interest, Lady Cavendish?' What did she see in the glass? She saw the Marchioness of Newcastle. She saw the aging wife of an aged marquess, without even any children to dignify her life. — Danielle Dutton

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

Most people think that aging is genetic and yet if your parents lived to age 80+ that will add three years to your life. — Deepak Chopra

I am persuaded that feminism is not at the root of political correctness. The actual source is much nastier and dares not speak its name, which is simply hatred for old people. The question of domination between men and women is relatively secondary - important but still secondary - compared to what I tried to capture in this novel, which is that we are now trapped in a world of kids. Old kids. The disappearance of patrimonial transmission means that an old guy today is just a useless ruin. The thing we value most of all is youth, which means that life automatically becomes depressing, because life consists, on the whole, of getting old. — Michel Houellebecq

Where have the years gone, Ruby Rose? Sometimes I have to stop and think about how old I am. When I wake up in the morning, before I move this tired old body or look in the blasted mirror, I swear I'm still a young man. It just feels like yesterday. I don't know how it's gone so fast. — Lea Davey

Me, I've seen 45 years, and I've only figured out one thing. That's this: if a person would just make the effort, there's something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there's always something you can learn. I read somewhere that they said there's even different philosophies in razors. Fact is, if it weren't for that, nobody'd survive. — Haruki Murakami

I love opera. Si. But I am old. No passion in my life, you know? I work, I walk slowly now through my years ... but opera! I see, I hear that passion, Eva. Is like the passion of youth. And I live again. I feel something. — J.J. Brown

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

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. — Jeffrey Eugenides

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

Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table
it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket
that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep. — Virginia Woolf

Seriously, however, I learn a lot about my physical life in the aging and changing of my body. — Malcolm Boyd

Before I tell you my story," Jasper said. "you must understand that there are places in our world, Bella, where the life span of the never-aging is measured in weeks, and not centuries. — Stephenie Meyer

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. — Alfred Tennyson

Aging people should know that their lives are not mounting and unfolding but that an inexorable inner process forces the contraction of life. For a young person it is almost a sin and certainly a danger to be too much occupied with himself; but for the aging person it is a duty and a necessity to give serious attention to himself. — Carl Jung

To continue what one had been doing
which was Dante's idea of hell
is, I came to see, and the vision frightened me, easy in one's sixties. — Carolyn G. Heilbrun

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

That's because both the job title and the job itself have never existed before. We used the term 'ground-breaking' to describe this position because that is exactly what it is." Leonard Scott leaned forward. "The current Administration is committed to solving the greatest problems of our time - climate change, sustainability, the deficit, the impending crisis stemming from shortfalls in Social Security and Medicare, healthcare, and the problems that our nation faces as a result of an aging population. We are implementing a plan that will address all of these issues and will revolutionize the way that this country looks at retirement. Rather than continuing on in a bankrupt, broken system that meets the needs of no one, we are going to introduce American seniors to a new way of life - a holistic community that will engage them like nothing ever has before. — Alexandra Swann

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

It's odd when I think of the arc of my life, from child to young woman to aging adult. First I was who I was. Then I didn't know who I was. Then I invented someone and became her. Then I began to like what I invented. And finally I was what I was again ... Anna Quindlen — Anna Quindlen

And I'm a really happy person, I enjoy life. I think you see that on people. I think there's nothing more aging than misery. — Michelle Pfeiffer

We seem to have reached the age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away. — Jim Broadbent

A twenty-three-year-long study in Ohio determined that people who saw growing older as something positive lived a whopping seven and a half years longer than those who didn't. (356) — Victoria Moran

A useful education served women best, More thought. To 'learn how to grow old gracefully is perhaps one of the rarest and most valuable arts which can be taught to a woman.' Yet, when beauty is all that is expected or desired in a woman, she is left with nothing in its absence. It 'is a most severe trail for those women to be called to lay down beauty, who have nothing else to take up. It is for this sober season of life that education should lay up its rich resources,' she argued. — Karen Swallow Prior

It's the kind of story we learn over and over again about everything in the world: your life starts out as a wild open frontier that you explore until the forces of time or history or civilization or nature intervene, and then suddenly it's all gone, it all weathers and falls down and gets built over; everyone dies or moves away or becomes a grainy photograph, and yes, at some point you just get fat and fall off a streetcar. Progress--it dumps you on your aging and gigantic ass! — Wendy McClure

A boy from Brooklyn used to cruise on summer nights.
As soon as he'd hit sixty he'd hold his hand out the window,
cupping it around the wind. He'd been assured
this is exactly how a woman's breast feels when you put
your hand around it and apply a little pressure. Now he knew,
and he loved it. Night after night, again and again, until
the weather grew cold and he had to roll the window up.
For many years afterwards he was perpetually attempting
to soar. One winter's night, holding his wife's breast
in his hand, he closed his eyes and wanted to weep.
He loved her, but it was the wind he imagined now.
As he grew older, he loved the word etcetera and refused
to abbreviate it. He loved sweet white butter. He often
pretended to be playing the organ. On one of his last mornings,
he noticed the shape of his face molded in the pillow.
He shook it out, but the next morning it reappeared. — Mary Ruefle

Real vision dies only when life dies. Once we live, we hope, we yearn for and we aspire to have something! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Just Imagine. No illness. Ever. No pain. No aging or frailty of any kind. No loss or grief or tears. And obviously no more dying, not even if the stars shattered into motes and the moon disintegrated like a corpse beneath the sea. — Toni Morrison

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. — Colson Whitehead

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. — Lisa J. Shultz

Youth is marked by a breathtaking novelty that diminishes with each year of age - until life becomes a delusive struggle to break routines, escape the ordinary, and rediscover the joy of discovery. — Zack Love

The progress of her aging seemed to occur in fits and starts, not so much a matter of physical growth as a deepening self-possession, as if she were coming into ownership of her life. — Justin Cronin

You always thought older people were wiser. It's not that. It's just that our relatives are dead and we're able to speak freely. — Ariel Gore

Today I know I was right. The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia. My Sunday columns were there, life an archeological relic among the ruins of the past, and they realized they were not only for the old but also for the young who were not afraid of aging. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes... — F Scott Fitzgerald

Arthur said, You must know that you don't love children for being good or bad. I know you know that.
Why do you love them?
Because you do, said Arthur. Because they don't know what's coming and maybe you do. — Jane Smiley

[I]t was the knowledge that I was surrounded by adults with lives that I could never imagine living. It was the humming noise inside me that told me to do something and found nothing to do that meant anything, the bit of me that was like a fly smashing itself again and again on a windowpane. It was the futility of aging ... It was the realization that this was life, and I didn't belong here. — Maggie Stiefvater

I'm broken, I have a crack in me for all my life. I was made a woman prematurely, criminally early, and initiated into life from its worst side, in the false, boulevard interpretation of a self-confident aging parasite from former times, who profited from everything and allowed himself everything. — Boris Pasternak

The unawakened mind tends to make war against the way things are. To follow a path with heart, we must understand the whole process of making war within ourselves and without, how it begins and how it ends. War's roots are in ignorance. Without understanding we can easily become frightened by life's fleeting changes, the inevitable losses, disappointments, the insecurity of our aging and death. Misunderstanding leads us to fight against life, running from pain or grasping at security and pleasures that by their nature can never be satisfying. — Jack Kornfield

Hollywood is the kind of town that likes to make everything larger than life: movie premieres, aging actress' lips, and murders. Actors come from all over the world to find their sliver of fame on the street of L.A. Many stars rise, but many more fall. — Rob Manuel

I think [aging] has nothing to recommend it. You don't gain any wisdom as the years go by. You fall apart, is what happens. People try and put a nice varnish on it, and say, well, you mellow. You come to understand life and accept things. But you'd trade all of that for being 35 again. — Woody Allen

You can do this (this thing, where your body will cease to produce hormones and your skin, hair, muscles and bones ... basically every part of you will notice, go into withdrawals, and stage a coup). Be prepared for this mentally, and you'll own this thing. — Lisa Jey Davis

The aging process is totally minimizing. Life in general is pretty minimizing because you have a lot of big ideas, and you have to battle the mistaken delusions and instability that come with youth. — Natasha Lyonne

We can't avoid age. However, we can avoid some aging. Continue to do things. Be active. Life is fantastic in the way it adjusts to demands; if you use your muscles and mind, they stay there much longer. — Charles H. Townes

[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) — Victoria Moran

The curse of mortality. You spend the first portion of your life learning, growing stronger, more capable. And then, through no fault of your own, your body begins to fail. You regress. Strong limbs become feeble, keen senses grow dull, hardy constitutions deteriorate. Beauty withers. Organs quit. You remember yourself in your prime, and wonder where that person went. As your wisdom and experience are peaking, your traitorous body becomes a prison. — Brandon Mull

The only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love. The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love. — Anais Nin

Though Charles II both craved and enjoyed female companionship till the end of his life, there is no question that by the cold, rainy autumn of 1682 his physical appetites had diminshed considerably. The Duchess of Portsmouth was, after all, more than twenty years his junior; and there comes a time in nearly every such relationship when the male partner is simply unable to fully accommodate the female partner. Or as Samuel Pepys tartly noted in his diary, the king yawns much in council, it is thought he spends himself overmuch in the arms of Madame Louise, who far from being wearied, seems fresher than ever after sporting with the king. — Antonia Fraser

Day by day we increase in age. Step by step we reduce the number of our steps. When you grow old, you shall see life differently and you shall get a better understanding of the journey of life: how you lived it and how you should have lived it! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Everyone for whom I would have cried has already died. — Kathryn Orzech

And the view was suddenly clear to me. The world opened out to its grim beyonds and I realized that, at forty, one must learn the rigors of acceptance. Capitalize it: Acceptance. I needed to accept what was put before me
be it a watery grave in Ireland's only natural fjord, or a return to the city and its grayer intensities, or a wordless exile in some steaming Cambodian swamp hole, or poems or no poems, or children or not, lovers or not, illness or otherwise, success or its absence. I would accept all that was put in my way, from here on through until I breathed my last. — Kevin Barry

What we know for sure from our work and from others' is that mice have a life span of 1,000 days, dogs have 5,000 days, and we humans have 29,000 days. Recognizing that the duration is limited, and aging is inevitable, focus the attention on enhancing the quality of the days you have. — S. Jay Olshansky

I want to be able to remember it all, not just the books but the newsrooms and the playgroups and the bad jokes and the holiday traditions. In my mind I can walk through the house where I grew up even though I have not been inside it for decades ... I want to be able to walk through the house of my own life until my life is done. I want to hold on to who and what I have been even as both become somehow inevitably less. — Anna Quindlen

Hester, meanwhile, says we should live all of life back to front. We should be born old and age younger. Our baptism should be a ritual of our funeral. We should die as infants, content in our mothers' arms, having lost all our learning and all sense of disappointment. If only we could die, she says, not knowing we'd ever grieved. — Timothy Schaffert

Old age teaches you in a very unkind way that things won't necessarily get better. Not in this life. In fact, you can pretty much count on things degenerating. Being content is not a lack of ambition. It's being able to rest and relax and know that your worth doesn't come from what others think of you or even what you think of you. — Chris Fabry

I would love to make a film about aging that would take place before the war. It would follow the stages in the life of a woman who would not have at her disposal the resources of today like cosmetic surgery, creams and pills. — Roman Polanski

What would life be like if everybody insisted you must have actually built such-and-such a thing by yourself? I'd be an old man and have nothing to show for the aging. — Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

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. — Eve Chase

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

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 go to the shelf and pick out a few poetry books to take with me. A few old favorites and a few I haven't gotten to yet. As I slip the books into my carry-on, it occurs to me that there really are a lot of poems about death, that I've always read many poems about dying, but had almost never noticed them before. They were always the ones I lightly skimmed, and I thought that maybe I could start reading these poems more carefully. It was almost nothing, but it was also a decision about my life. — Jacob Wren

It was the ultimate cautionary tale, the moral being Don't fall, as if they were made of glass. In a sense they were
their fragility was irrefutable, medically proven
and yet Emily detested the inevitable rundown of accidents and tragedies, the more fortunate clucking their tongues and counting their blessings, all the while knowing it was just a matter of time. She didn't need to be reminded that she was a single misstep from disaster, especially here, without Henry, surrounded by the survivors of an earlier life. — Stewart O'Nan

MODERN SCIENTIFIC CAPABILITY has profoundly altered the course of human life. People live longer and better than at any other time in history. But scientific advances have turned the processes of aging and dying into medical experiences, matters to be managed by health care professionals. And we in the medical world have proved alarmingly unprepared for it. — Atul Gawande

Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life - it has given me me . It has provided time and experience and failures and triumphs and time-tested friends who have helped me step into the shape that was waiting for me. I fit into me now. I have an organic life, finally, not necessarily the one people imagined for me, or tried to get me to have. I have the life I longed for. I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I would be. — Anne Lamott

I used to think that eighty was a very old age. Now I am ninety. I do not think this any more. As long as you are able to admire and to love, you are young. — Pablo Casals

The imaginary audience for my life is growing small and silent. — Mason Cooley

For sure we live in a youth-obsessed culture that is constantly trying to tell us that if we're not young and glowing and "hot," we don't matter. But I refuse to buy into such a distorted view of reality. And I would never lie about or deny my age. To do so is to contribute to a sickness pervading our society - the sickness of wanting to be what you're not. I know for sure that only by owning who and what you are can you step into the fullness of life. I feel sorry for anyone who buys into the myth that you can be what you once were. The way to your best life isn't denial. It's owning every moment and staking a claim to the here and now. You're not the same woman you were a decade ago; if you're lucky, you're not the same woman you were last year. The whole point of aging, as I see it, is change. If we let them, our experiences can keep teaching us about ourselves. I celebrate that. Honor it. Hold it in reverence. And I'm grateful for every age I'm blessed to become. — Oprah Winfrey

He put his hand on his forehead and scoured the French department of his memory for a word. He knew it was in there. He'd put it in almost fifty years before and hadn't had cause to remove it. But for the life of him he couldn't find it. — Colin Cotterill

By the age of twenty, you know you're not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you're not going to be a dentist or any kind of professional. And by thirty, darkness starts moving in- you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy and successful. By thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life, and you become resigned to your fate ...
... I mean, why do people live so long? What could be the difference between death at fifty-five and death at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five? Those extra years ... what benefit could they possibly have? Why do we go on living even though nothing new happens, nothing new is learned, and nothing new is transmitted? At fifty-five, your story's pretty much over. — Douglas Coupland

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

My parents are aging and there are difficult issues. It's strange to have children at the beginning of life and parents nearing the end. — Amy Waldman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death was silence, loss, guilt. And anger. But life led that way, anyway. From birth, it was a slow, long march to the grave. Who said that? She couldn't remember now. But it was true. They were born dying. If they were very lucky, the dying was called aging. They reached toward if as if they were satellites in unstable orbits. And then when they got there, they were just dead. One moment in time separated the living from the ghosts. — Michelle Sagara West

Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later... that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. ~Tom Wolfe — Tom Wolfe

Aging offers certain rewards that youth cannot. It represents the culmination of our efforts in building self-knowledge, families, friendships, careers, and the sense of self that comes from facing whatever adversity we may have encountered. Aging is to be honored. Youth certainly has its own set of rewards, but to dwell on them to the exclusion of those that come later in life causes a stagnation of the self. It keeps us from experiencing an appreciation of living an entire (ital) life, not just the beginning. When we're really old we will likely measure our lives by how well we loved, how well we were loved, and by what we created, whether that be family, work, art, or friendships. Even if we have chosen to have them, we will probably not measure our lives collagen injection by collagen injection. — Joyce T. McFadden

Our first youth is of no value; for we are never conscious of it, until after it is gone. But sometimes
always, I suspect, unless one is exceedingly unfortunate
there comes a sense of second youth, gushing out of the heart's joy at being in love; or possibly, it may come to crown some other grand festival in life, if any other such there be. This bemoaning of one's self ... over the first, careless, shallow gayety of youth departed, and this profound happiness at youth regained,
so much deeper and richer than that we lost,
are essential to the soul's development. In some cases, the two states come almost simultaneously, and mingle the sadness and the rapture in one mysterious emotion. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Just say it, she thought. Say what everyone in this bunker is thinking. Say what we all know to be true. The truth that we are all going to die down here, and death is the end. Nobody wakes up to a heaven or paradise. Your life will be gone. You will be gone. Forever. Uncover the truth. Tear off the bandages of delusion. Open your hearts and minds to the real world. We were doomed the day we were born. We lived and we will die and the only immortals are the people who did something worth remembering while they lived. My genetics are prime. I am pleasing to the eyes of man and machine. A dripping fountain of pleasure. Their organic sanctuary. And in time? Aging. Fading. Graying. What am I? Who am I? What makes me human? Emotions? My conscience? The soul is an old testament myth. No one shall ascend anywhere except into annihilation. The dust of earth and stars are the only eternals, she said. — C.J. Anderson

A life of peace, purity and refinement leads to a calm and untroubled old age. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

I feel as if I'm going through a mid-life crisis. I don't feel very attractive and it's like I'm frigid or something. I'm aging and it makes me very sad. — Kola Boof

It is lovely to meet an old person whose face is deeply lined, a face that has been deeply inhabited, to look in the eyes and find light there. — John O'Donohue

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

It gave her a sudden sense that it was now her turn to grow old, to find the world changing, sliding away from the old ways of being and behaving, so that you were gradually a stranger to the place you lived in. The woman priest with jogging clothes and a BlackBerry gave Mary a glimpse of what life must have been like for her mother as she grew older. — John Lanchester

I AM a little worn out, raddled, squashed, downtrodden, shot full of holes. Mortars have mortared me to bits. I am a little crumbly, decaying, yes, yes. I am sinking and drying up a little. I am a bit scalded and scorched, yes, yes. That's what it does to you. That's life. I am not old, not in the least, certainly I am not eighty, by no means, but I am not sixteen any more either. Quite definitely I am a bit old and used up. That's what it does to you. I am decaying a little, and I am crumbling, peeling a little. That's life. Am I a little bit over the hill? Hmm! Maybe. But that doesn't make me eighty, not by a long way. I am very tough, I can vouch for that. I am no longer young, but I am not old yet, definitely not. I am aging, fading a little, but that doesn't matter; I am not yet altogether old, though I am probably a little nervous and over the hill. It's natural that one should crumble a bit with the passage of time, but that doesn't matter. — Robert Walser

Frankie," she said softly, "do you know what my idea of heaven is? A place where the windows are always clean, and the people I want can always come to dinner. — Helen Hudson

There's nothing quite like the sight of two dozen half-naked octogenarians. We enter the stage of life as dolls and exit as gargoyles. — Anthony Marra

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. — Lauren Groff

Three, 300, or 3,000 - these are the number of unknown days, a week, a year, or a decade, each far too precious little and yet, poignantly too much at the same time, to see an irrevocably declined loved one languish and suffer. That fear-ridden, irreversible release lingers in the doorway, but hesitates for reasons we don't understand, leaving us to weep with a mixture of angst and gratitude all at the same time. It is finally ushered all the way in, to comfort and carry our loved one to that Better Place. When the time finally comes, we can be enveloped in a warm cloak of long-awaited acceptance and peace that eases our own pain. It quiets the grief which has moaned inside of us, at least some, every single one of those bittersweet days, weeks... or years. — Connie Kerbs

I've been going through photos of my mother, looking back on her life and trying to put it into context. Very few people age gracefully enough to be photographed through their aging. — Jamie Lee Curtis

The myth of self-sufficiency demands optimism without end, downplays life's challenges, and shames us when, inevitably, we fall short. — Ashton Applewhite

Health is normal. The human body is a self-repairing, self-defending, self-healing marvel. Disease is relatively difficult to induce, considering the body's powerful immune system. However, this complicated and delicate machinery can be damaged if fed the wrong fuel during the formative years ... Healthy living with nutritional excellence throughout life can slow the decline of aging. It can prevent the years and years of suffering in ill health that is so common today as people get older and become dependent on medical treatments, drugs, and surgery. Nutritional excellence is the only real fountain of youth. — Joel Fuhrman

Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored. — Joan Didion