Quotes & Sayings About Aging Well

But age became him as it did the oaks and the cedars. — Thomas Burnett Swann

You don't get to decide your part in the school play, but you do get to decide whether or not you play it well. — Cynthia Lewis

I now urge friends and acquaintances to have conversations with their aging parents and within their families while their parents are still relatively healthy and of sound mind. — Lisa J. Shultz

Your best is good enough. — Vivian E. Greenberg

Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image. He still saw himself, in his mind's eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed ... Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went. — Philip K. Dick

Am I aging? The pros and the cons? Well, you know a lot more, at least until the time you start forgetting it all. Actually, aging can be a fun process, to some degree. — Clint Eastwood

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

When I started this song I was still thirty-three The age that Mozart died and sweet Jesus was set free Keats and Shelley too soon finished, Charley Parker would be And I fantasized some tragedy'd be soon curtailing me Well just today I had my birthday I made it thirty-four Mere mortal, not immortal, not star-crossed anymore I've got this problem with my aging I no longer can ignore A tame and toothless tabby can't produce a lion's roar. — Harry Chapin

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

At forty-two, I was still holding up pretty well, but my once effortlessly lean body now look as though it belonged in a Dove firming cream ad -- the one where they give women permission to have thighs. When I unbuttoned my jeans at night, I swore I heard the same sound that Pillsbury dough made when I twisted the cylindrical container. My hair was beginning to gray, and when I smiled, the parentheses around my mouth remained. My least favorite position in yoga class was the downward dog because, as I hung my head downward, I always felt the skin from my face was about to splatter against my mat like a pancake batter hitting the griddle. So being called the top model by a young Italian was a wonderful souvenir, though cheaper than the toys sold outside the Pantheon in Rome. — Jennifer Coburn

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

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

Architecture is about aging well, about precision and authenticity. There is much more to the success of a building than what you can see. I'm not suggesting that gestural architecture is always superficial, but solid reasoning has its place. — Annabelle Selldorf

I am optimistic. But I also know that, with time, I'm beginning to fight issues of aging as well as long-term paralysis. — Christopher Reeve

It may well be that the pictures of Courbet, Manet, Monet and their like contain beauties which escape the notice of such old romantic heads as ours, already streaked with silver threads. — Theophile Gautier

I experience the age I am now as an age at which I must ensure that I already am what I insist or believe I am going to be. — Justin Smith

I feel different, better, about my personal life as well as my professional life. So much confidence comes simply because I have reached this very good age. Women my age today are forging new ground. Society stops defining us by our reproductive capacity, sexual attractiveness, or other traditional measures, so we become liberated from stereotype. We are freed to grow into our full selves.

I couldn't have allowed myself to feel so positive in the past. When I was at the height of my film career, I didn't have the kind of respect I now have from the theatrical community. I hadn't yet proved that I have the chops for the stage. But now I have a stature I've never before enjoyed.

Virginia Woolf herself observed that when her Aunt Mary left her enough money to live on, her financial independence meant she "need not hate" or "flatter any man." She said this was of even more value to her freedom and autonomy than the right to vote. — Kathleen Turner

But nothing happened there now of a nature to provoke a disturbance. There were no complaints to the management or the police, and the dark glory of the upper galleries was a legend in such memories as that of the late Emiel Kroger and the present Pablo Gonzales, and one by one, of course, those memories died out and the legend died out with them. Places like the Joy Rio and the legends about them make one more than usually aware of the short bloom and the long fading out of things. ("The Mysteries of the Joy Rio") — Tennessee Williams

Age only matters when one is aging. Now that I have arrived at a great age, I might as well be twenty. — Pablo Picasso

Labor force participation peaked in early 2000, so its decline began well before the Great Recession. A portion of that decline clearly relates to the aging of the baby boom generation. But the pace of decline accelerated with the recession. — Janet Yellen

He doesn't translate well into our generation. — Donald Sutherland

To remain conscious and continent was her new goal. — Louise Penny

It's my birthday, by the way, and as of 2:05 this morning (the time of my birth in the middle of a snow storm on the Fort Dix army base in New Jersey) I'm 52 years old. I decided to say that because there's such pressure in our culture for women ... well, for everybody ... to stay perpetually young. And that's never going to change if we (women especially) don't embrace, enjoy, and take pride in each and every age that we pass through. I'm not young, I'm half a century old, and grateful to have made it this far. And I have this to say to the young women coming on behind me: 52 feels pretty damn good! — Terri Windling

Aging happy and well, instead of sad and sick, is at least under some personal control. We have considerable control over our weight, our exercise, our education, and our abuse of cigarettes and alcohol. With hard work and/or therapy, our relationships with our spouses and our coping styles can be changed for the better. A successful old age may lie not so much in our stars and genes as in ourselves. — George Vaillant

How can we be a polis when 95 percent of us would rather watch aging housewives bicker on TV than express a well-formed opinion of our own? — Jade Chang

The bookstore had no musty "old books" smell, and instead it had a nice oaky aroma, similar to the way Laurence imagined the whiskey casks would be before you put Scotch into them for aging. This was a place where you would age well. — Charlie Jane Anders

What mothers need, as well as fathers, spouses, and the children of aging parents, is an entire national infrastructure of care, every bit as important as the physical infrastructure of roads, bridges, tunnels, broadband, parks and public works. — Anne-Marie Slaughter

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

When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun - that "life" is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays - whenever. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, 'Well then, exactly what was it I was having - that interlude - the scrambly madness - all that time I had before? — Douglas Coupland

You do know, I hope, that no man under the age of forty can even approach fascinating. — Tasha Alexander

Fear is the oldest and strongest emotion known to man, something deeply inscribed in our nervous system and subconscious. Over time, however, something strange began to happen. The actual terrors that we faced began to lessen in intensity as we gained increasing control over our environment. But instead of our fears lessening a well, they began to multiply in number. We started to worry about our status in society- whether people liked us, or how we fit into the group. We became anxious for our livelihoods, the future of our families and children, our personal health, and the aging process. Instead of a simple, intense fear of something powerful and real, we developed a kind of generalized anxiety. — Robert Greene

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

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

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

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

I haven't been out driving at this time of night in many years, much less in an unfamiliar area. These are the things that scare you as you get older. You understand night all too well, all its attendant meanings. You try to avoid it, work around it, keep it from entering your house. Your weary, ornery body tells you to stay up late, sleep less, keep the lights on, don't go into the bedroom - if you have to sleep, sleep in your chair, at the table. Everything is about avoiding the night. Because of that, I suppose that I should be scared out here in the dark, but I am finally past that, I think.
(p.204) — Michael Zadoorian

Bourbon's the only drink. You can take all that champagne stuff and pour it down the English Channel. Well, why wait 80 years before you can drink the stuff? Great vineyards, huge barrels aging forever, poor little old monks running around testing it, just so some woman in Tulsa, Oklahoma can say it tickles her nose. — John Michael Hayes

You'll get younger not from what you read but from what you apply in your life. (192) — Victoria Moran

I don't like the fact that I have to get older so fast, but I like the fact that I'm aging so well. — Dustin Hoffman

It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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

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

As we grow old...the beauty steals inward. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Even when people aren't suffering from illness or aging, our unfulfilled cravings and the cessation of temporary pleasures, as well as the dissonance between our expectations and reality, lead to dukkha. — Sara Wilson

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

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

If courage wasn't a standard result of aging it meant that the young could somehow acquire it as well. — Lawana Blackwell

I can't tell you how many doctors try to sell me a facelift. I've even gone as far as having someone talk me into it, but when I went over and looked at pictures of myself, I thought 'What are they going to lift?' . Frankly, I think that in the art of aging well there's this sexuality to having those imperfections. It's sensual. — Sharon Stone

There isn't a thing I can't do now that I didn't do when I was twenty-one ... which gives you an idea of how pathetic I was when I was twenty-one. (That's a lie, but I might as well tell you something right here at the beginning of the book. Anytime I can get a laugh I'm not going to let the truth interfere with it.) — George Burns

He had been raised on a few bedrock certainties: the Victorian spirit of duty, the personal need for responsibility, for doing what had to be done. He had demonstrated his adherence to this code by taking on his father's debts, as well as the burdens of his aging and ailing mother and of his manic-depressive sister. That same code now had him at war with himself. Happiness was within his grasp, but seizing it meant abandoning his responsibility to Mayo. If he cut her loose, he could save himself. But he would also cut her lifeline. — A.M. Sperber & Eric Lax

She is one of those ladies who is more beautiful at sixty than she could possibly have been at twenty. (how I hope someone says that about me someday)! — Mary Ann Shaffer

But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone. — Alice Sebold

Intelligence, goodness, humanity, excitement, serenity. Over time, these are the things that change the musculature of your face, as do laughter, and animation, and especially whatever peace you can broker with the person inside.
It's furrow, pinch, and judgement that make us look older - our mothers were right. They said that if you made certain faces, they would stick, and they do. But our mothers forgot that faces of kindness and integrity stick as well. — Anne Lamott

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

Refire - an attitude of embracing the years ahead with enthusiasm rather than apathy. — Morton Shaevitz

[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 idea for me came when I was watching a 60 Minutes segment about resveratrol, the chemical in red wine that lets you live longer, supposedly. And they were like, "Who knows, maybe one day it will help to cure aging." And I thought, "Well, if they did that, we'd all kill each other." And then I laughed, and then I thought about how precisely that would happen. That's how the book came to be. — Drew Magary

My aunt must have been perfectly well aware that she would not see Swann again, that she would never leave her own house any more, but this ultimate seclusion seemed to be accepted by her with all the more readiness for the very reason which, to our minds, ought to have made it more unbearable; namely, that such a seclusion was forced upon her by the gradual and steady diminution in her strength which she was able to measure daily, which, by making every action, every movement 'tiring' to her if not actually painful, gave to inaction, isolation and silence the blessed, strengthening and refreshing charm of repose. — Marcel Proust

Why is it that places thousands of miles from my childhood village home send me back, opening the sluice-gates of the past? Well, we are all emigrants from the homeland of our childhoods. It may be, then, that the natural place to meet ourselves as children is 'abroad', and that includes the foreign country of our growing up and aging. So it is that the personal, physical feeling of departure from the time of childhood may merge in a special symbiosis with geographical departure, biography and geography resonating now on a single wavelength. — Georgi Gospodinov

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. — Morton Shaevitz