c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Time only goes in that one direction.
— Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk
The worst thing about getting older is you discover that most of the performers in the shows you used to watch are now younger than you. Suddenly, everything become less believable.
— Neil A. Hogan
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.
— Anita Brookner, Dolly
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... He felt that it would take all time, more than he could ever spare, to glue these strange cumbersome pictures into the scrap-book of his life.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I'm just at the age when time speeds up in an odd way. Do you know what I mean? The winters come closer together and you learn to accept that you're not special anymore.
— Ann Druyan, A Famous Broken Heart: A Fantasy Novel
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, This Side of Paradise
People talk about how wonderful the world must seem to children, and that's true enough. But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives. That's clearer to me every day. Each morning I am like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
The more steps you take towards the end, the fewer steps you have to take towards the end!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge.
— Emma Cline, The Girls
She re-marked her lips with her lipstick. I saw sprays of silver in her coarse hair. I saw inscriptions of her years around her mouth, a solid crease between her brows from a lifetime of cynicism. The posture of a woman who had stood in a casual spotlight in every room she'd ever been in, not for gloss or perfection, for self-possession. Everything she touched she added an apostrophe to.
— Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter
To a man and woman, all of her elderly patients had been surprised to be old - which Avery privately regarded as a serious failure to pay attention.
— Lionel Shriver, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047
I am afraid that as people grow old there is a tendency for them to believe that what the past *ought* to have been it was.
— Gore Vidal, Burr
In the seven years or so that had passed since I had last seen him, Sir Magnus Donners had grown not so much older in appearance, as less like a human being.
— Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement
One’s capacity for hearing about ghastly doings lessens with age.
— Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 4th Movement
At eight-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change of position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Il arrive un âge où ils ne sont plus séduisants, ni «en forme», comme on dit. Ils ne peuvent plus boire et ils pensent encore aux femmes; seulement ils sont obligés de les payer, d'accepter des quantités de petites compromissions pour échapper à leur solitude. Ils sont bernés, malheureux. C'est ce moment qu'ils choisissent pour devenir sentimentaux et exigeants… J'en ai vu beaucoup devenir ainsi des sortes d'épaves. "A time comes when they are no longer attractive or in good form. They can't drink any more, and they still hanker after women, only then they have to pay and make compromises in order to escape from their loneliness: they have become just figures of fun. They grow sentimental and hard to please. I haveseen many who have gone the same way.
— Françoise Sagan, Bonjour tristesse
Lines and greyness are nature's way of telling you not to fuck with someone - the equivalent of yellow and black lines on a wasp, or the markings on the back of a black widow spider.
— Caitlin Moran
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, Every Waking Moment
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?
— Chris Fabry, Every Waking Moment
...is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?
— Gore Vidal, Julian
Old age is having the name of a chiropractor in your wallet. It's cutting out coupons for the zeal of discounted small items and the practice of fine motor skills.
— Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
The only way that getting older can be a bad thing is if you are not fully living in the moment now.
— Andrena Sawyer
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, Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's
A youth is susceptible to the influence of idealist notions. As a person ages, they notice a gap between their expectations and reality and they grow more pessimistic about the world and their ability to live up to the lofty notions that inspired a younger self.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
I thought getting old meant getting wise. Or at least secure. I don't know why I thought that; I don't know any wise, secure old people. Maybe I inferred it from after-school specials. And I'd like to think by the time you die, you've figured something out. That you aren't lying there wondering what the hell just happened.
— Kristin  Hersh
These wrinkles are the hands of time,The journeys I’ve been onThey’ve seen me through a thousand days,And ev’ry victory wonThese fragile hands, With exposed bones,Are not a fearful sightBut rather, they, my faithful partners,Rocked babies through the nightThese eyes are weak, They see much less,Than yours they’ve seen much moreThey’ve guided me through birth, through death,Through grief, through hurt, through warThese ears can hear so very little,Yet they’ve learned to listen muchThey perk up not for gossip now,But for a heart to touchThose younger often look my way,With pity looks to giveYet this old body doesn’t mean I am dying,But rather, that I have lived
— Emily Nelson
Blessing Number One. Thank you for getting old because it means you are getting to live.
— Janet Turpin Myers, the last year of confusion
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, The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty
Growing old is a pathetic thing. It is full of limitations and reduction. It happens to us all, I know; but I think that it might not have to. I think it happens to those of us who request it. And in our current mind-set, our collective ennui, it is what we have chosen to do. But one day a mutant child will be born who refuses to age, who refuses to acknowledge the limitations of these bodies of ours, who lives in health until he is done with life, not until his body no longer supports him. He will live for hundreds of years, like Noah. Like Moses. This child's genes will be passed to his offspring, and more like him will follow. And their genetic makeup will supplant the genes of those of us who need to grow old and decay before we die. I believe that one day it will come to pass; however, such a world is beyond my purview.
— Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain
As people move through life, passing from the hopeful ignorance of youth into sobering adulthood, they inevitably face an increasingly nagging question: Is this all there is? Childhood can be painful, adolescence confusing; most people, expect that in adulthood things will get better. During the early years of adulthood the future still looks promising. But inevitably the mirror' shows the first white hairs and confirms the fact that those few extra pounds are not about to leave; eyesight begins to fail and mysterious pains begin to shoot through the body...' Where's all that money I was to have made? Where are all of the good times I was going to have?
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
As you get older you strip away the things you don't have time for, and then you are left with only the things you have time for. Your life gets skinnier and skinnier until you wonder why you go on. You go on because there are things that must get done. You become no longer a person so much as a place, an unfunny place where things come to get done.
— Jonathan Goldstein
A few years turned into more years, and more years turned into all years. Years have a habit of behaving like that.
— Fredrik Backman, Britt-Marie Was Here
An explanation of an old man’s mistakes. For I see now that what I have done, and not done, with regard to you, bears all hallmarks of the failings of age. Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they what it was to be young… and I seem to have forgotten lately…
— J.K. Rowling
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
In biblical times, they used to stone a few thirteen-year-olds with some regularity, which helped keep the others quiet and at home. The mothers were usually in the first row of stone throwers, and had to be restrained.
— Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
We watch our bodies and our brains slow down as younger bodies and brains zip past us, and we just accept it, not realizing there is a whole world offering to sharpen and improve us. We simply need to look for it.
— Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife
Nursing homes and rest homes are all the rage round here. Most of us will be in them before very long. Do you fancy that? Are you looking forward to it? No, neither am I. But I'm doing something about that. Just whisky and cigarettes, so far, mostly.
— Andrew Davies, Getting Hurt
Do not resent growing old, many are denied the privilege.
— Irish proverb
our dispassionate acceptance of attrition...[can] be matched by a full use of everything that has ever happened in all the long wonderful-ghastly years to free a person's mind from his body.
— M.F.K. Fisher, Sister Age
Longevity is highly over rated.
— Martin Kimeldorf, Writing an Obituary Worth Reading: A Guide to Writing a Fulfilling Life-Review
My mother and I looked at each other then, full in the face, more frankly than we'd done since I was small. I realized with a jolt that I was taller than she was by at least half a foot. When on earth had that happened? The realization made me want to sit down on the stairs and cry. It seemed to signify something terrible about the world: something that couldn't - or mustn't- be put into words. And I could see, looking down into her startled, anxious face, that my mother felt exactly the same way.
— John Wray
Recognising clichés is a sign of aging.
— Indu Muralidharan, The Reengineers
Time is a curious thing. When you have it before you, it's something you take for granted and it moves slowly. Then, as you get older, it accelerates. When I look back, it seems such a long distance travelled, so long ago, so dream-like.
— Bernard Sumner
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
So why aren’t more marketing companies targeting our age group? Why are there so many youth-oriented programs and advertisements on television today? Why are we being ignored? Don’t companies realize they are missing a huge market?Now granted, a visit to the local mall will show you there are a lot of teenagers hanging out there these days. But are they shopping? Are they spending money? No. They’re “hanging.” Contrary to what our skin might be doing, we members of the over-forty crowd don’t “hang.” We shop, and not just window shop either. We’re serious buyers. When we pick up an item and turn it over to see the price, we often carry it right on over to the checkout counter and pay for it. Why? Because we know the energy involved with picking up items. We don’t do it unless we’re committed.
— Martha Bolton, Cooking With Hot Flashes: And Other Ways to Make Middle Age Profitable
It occurred to Jeff that he had entered the vague phase of his life. He had a vague idea of things, a vague sense of what was happening in the world, a vague sense of having met someone before. It was like being vaguely drunk all the time.
— Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
Was the dementia of old age a blessing in disguise? No more thoughts. No more damage inflicted. No more memories of damage survived.
— Janet Turpin Myers, the last year of confusion
Let us cherish and love old age; for it is full of pleasure if one knows how to use it. Fruits are most welcome when almost over; youth is most charming at its close; the last drink delights the toper, the glass which souses him and puts the finishing touch on his drunkenness. Each pleasure reserves to the end the greatest delights which it contains. Life is most delightful when it is on the downward slope, but has not yet reached the abrupt decline.
— Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
He couldn't be more than forty-five, but Murray Miles was stooped, old before his time. The mountains of Alberta had the ability to bend those who lived here.That, or it broke them.
— Danika Stone, Edge of Wild
Aging is harder for beautiful people, and Anna was beautiful.
— Marina Keegan, The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories
They were growing closer and closer every day, and Charlotte was finding something magical at Wildflower, something she never thought she would find again—love.
— Lindsay Detwiler, Then Comes Love
My features have blunted with the passage of time, my reflection only faintly resembles how I see myself. Gravity demands payback for the years my body has resisted it.
— Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
We have a solemn pact.' Kaye nodded to Mother and looked over at Em talking to some neighbors. 'If one of us is unconscious in the hospital, the others will make sure it's pulled.''The plug?' Ruth asked.'The chin hair,' said Kaye, eyeing Ruth with some alarm. 'You're off the visitors list. Mother, make a note.
— Louise Penny
My countenance in my old-age does injustice to my heart. John Quincy Adams
— Paul C. Nagel, John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life
I feel as if I am being left out, as though I’m some straggler and people can’t quite remember to stay back for me.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
the real essence of our lifetime lies in the time of our lives
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
As she drove the familiar route to the school, she considered her magnificent new age. Forty. She could still feel "forty" the way it felt when she was fifteen. Such a colorless age. Marooned in the middle of your life. Nothing would matter all that much when you were forty. You wouldn't have real feelings when you were forty, because you'd be safely cushioned by your frumpy forty
— Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies
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, Treatises on Friendship and Old Age
It occurred to Jeff that he had entered the vague phase of his life. He had a vague idea of things, a vague sense of what was happening in the world, a vague sense of having meant someone before. It was like being vaguely drunk all the time.
— Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
My fiftieth year had come and gone,I sat, a solitary man,In a crowded London shop,An open book and empty cupOn the marble table-top.While on the shop and street I gazedMy body of a sudden blazed;And twenty minutes more or lessIt seemed, so great my happiness,That I was blessed and could bless.
— W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
We must stand up against old age and make up for its drawbacks by taking pains. We must fight it as we should an illness. We must look after our health, use moderate exercise, take just enough food and drink to recruit, but not to overload, our strength. Nor is it the body alone that must be supported, but the intellect and soul much more.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero, Treatises on Friendship and Old Age
How can you become old in spirit? Only by carrying the past, isn't it? If you carry sixty years of burden with you, you're sixty years old. If you don't carry anything, you're like a newborn. The physical body may develop limitations, but the way you are has no limitations. It simply has no limitations. You are this many years old or that many years old simply because you carry that many years of garbage with you.
— Sadhguru, Mystic's Musings
Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.
— Leon Trotsky
Odder still how possessed I am with the feeling that now, aged 50, I’m just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are. Therefore all this flitter flutter of weekly newspapers interests me not at all. These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism. And to alter now, cleanly and sanely, I want to shuffle off this loose living randomness: people; reviews; fame; all the glittering scales; and be withdrawn, and concentrated.
— Virginia Woolf
Grow old along with me--the best is yet to be,
— Robert Browning
And since a more convincing argument could not be found—aside from a fatal accident or suicide—this way was chosen: a process of galloping senescence.
— Mircea Eliade, Youth Without Youth
Old age. I don't know when it really starts, and I'm not interested in finding out. Julia pretty much ignored the whole thing, and that may be the only real lesson there is for the end of our days. Just pretend like it isn't happening, until you have no choice but to accept reality. If you're lucky, like Julia, you'll die peacefully in your sleep after having enjoyed a dinner of onion soup.
— Karen Karbo, Julia Child Rules: Lessons on Savoring Life
It appears to me that in spite of myself I have been dragged to this inevitable point where old age must be undergone. I see it there before me; I have reached it; and I should at least like so to arrange matters that I do not move on, that I do not travel farther along this path of infirmities, pains, losses of memory and disfigurement. Their attack is at hand, and I hear a voice that says, `You must go along, whatever you may say; or if indeed you will not, then you must die,' which is an extremity from which nature recoils. However, that is the fate of all who go on a little too far.
— Marie de Rabutin-Chantal de Sévigné
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, the Wedding & Disaster of Felona Mabel
He remembers what I forget and I remember what he forgets. It's too late for either of us to make another old friend.
— Abigail Thomas, What Comes Next and How to Like It
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, Blueprints
There are only four kinds of people in the world.Those who have been caregivers.Those who are currently caregivers.Those who will be caregivers, and those who will need a caregiver.
— Rosalyn Carter
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.
— Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill
Her face is silting up, like a pond; layers are accumulating. Every once in a while, when she can afford the time, she spends a few days at a spa north of the city, drinking vegetable juice and having ultrasound treatments, in search of her original face, the one she knows is under there somewhere; she comes back feeling toned up and virtuous, and hungry.
— Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride
Napping is divine, but I no longer have all the time in the world.
— Abigail Thomas, What Comes Next and How to Like It
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, The Tsar of Love and Techno
I was young once and slender and pretty and I made the most of it. It's somebody else's turn now.
— Abigail Thomas
Wow. Look at the lines in your face, Missy. It's like your bitterness just dug in and stayed.
— Shelly Laurenston, The Mane Event
The compensation of growing old...was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained - at last! - the power which adds the supreme flavor to existence, - the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.
— Virginia Woolf
At the other end of the room the three old men discussed infirmities
—  exchanging symptoms in undertones as boys might speak of lust.
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, Vector a Modern Love Story
He'd grown eager to hand off his things, as if the weight of his possessions kept him tethered to this earth, and by giving them away, he could snip those strings.
— Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles
The machine itself receives some of the same feelings. With over 27,000 on it it's getting to be something of a high-miler, and old-timer, although there are plenty of older ones running. But over the miles, and I think most cyclists will agree with this, you pick up certain feelings about an individual machine that are unique for that one individual machine and no other. A friend who owns a cycle of the same make, model and even same year brought it over for a repair, and when I test rode it afterward it was hard to believe it had come from the same factory years ago. You could see that long ago it had settled into its own kind of feel and ride and sound, completely different from mine. No worse, but different.I suppose you could call that a personality. Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it. This personality constantly changes, usually for the worse, but sometimes surprisingly for the better, and it is the personality that is the real object of motorcycle maintenance. The new ones start out as good-looking strangers, and depending on how they are treated, degenerate rapidly into bad-acting grouches or even cripples, or else turn into healthy, good-natured, long-lasting friends.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
The years are going by us like huge birds, whom Doom and Destiny and the schemes of God have frightened up out of some old gray marsh.
— Lord Dunsany, A Dreamer's Tales
Those whose lives have been an exercise in the pitting of their wits, or the selling of their talents, time and strength, to those who pay the piper, can even in their old age, even with their wits partially gone, automatically practise defences, and appeal for aid. But not so those who have never asked, who have never bargained.
— Norah Houlton
Nobody likes the "A" word, but everyone ages. You can have an aging in place master suite that looks like a resort hotel, rather than a rehab hospital room.
— Jamie Gold
.. at a certain age we learned to see right through it, and that age is now.
— Anna Quindlen
And I'm not going to get any thinner or any younger, my ass is going to hit the ground, if it hasn't already--and I want to be with somebody who can still see me in here. I'm still in here. And I don't want to be resented or despised for changing...I'd rather be alone.
— Zadie Smith
Something I really enjoy about older couples is that they really have given up on getting everything right. They don't sweat the imperfections.
— Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke
...as he was combing his hair in front of the mirror...only then did he understand that a man knows when he is growing older because he begins to look like his father.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
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, The Swan Gondola
As you ripen, you’ll notice that time is the weirdest thing in the world, that these surprises are relentless, and that getting older is not a stroll but an ambush.
— Andrew Solomon
They say older folks need less sleep, so I must not be old yet.
— Paul Carlson, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2012 December
People don't get gentler as they get older but rather, harder.
— Catherine Bailey, The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery
Past age fifty-five, I experienced the advancement of exquisite fabric choices, paint distinctions that were celestial in scope, yet so many other man-made objects, such as people, became drab, redundant and boring.
— Carol A. Elliott
One of the things I dread about becoming an adult is that sooner or later you begin letting sentimentality get in the way of simple logic. False feelings are allowed to clog the works like raw honey poured into the tiny wheels of a fine timepiece.
— Alan Bradley, As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust
We're always trotting out some story of a ninety-seven-year-old who runs marathons, as if such cases were not miracles of biological luck but reasonable expectations for all. Then, when our bodies fail to live up to this fantasy, we feel as if we somehow have something to apologize for.
— Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
All things left her, allBut one. Her highborn courtlinessAccompanied her to the end,Beyond the rapture and its eclipse,In a way like an angel's. Of ElviraThe first thing that I saw - such years ago -Was her smile and also it was the last.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers
There is a line in Verlaine I shall not recall again,There is a street close by forbidden to my feet,There's a mirror that's seen me for the very last time,There is a door that I have locked till the end of the world.Among the books in my library (I have them before me)There are some that I shall never open now.This summer I complete my fiftieth year;Death is gnawing at me ceaselessly.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers
Never give up hope. If you do, you'll be dead already.--Dementia Patient, Rose from The Inspired Caregiver
— Peggi Speers, The Inspired Caregiver: Finding Joy While Caring for Those You Love
It's not cold in here, you're just dying.
— Sarah Silverman
All are dead, and ourselves left alone amidst a new generation whom we know not, and who know us not.
— Thomas Jefferson
I am a fading phantasmagoria. Time has left me in partial glory."--Fidelis O Mkparu
— Fidelis O. Mkparu
How much longer would we go on being old young people? They wavedgoodbye to me. I was moved by Annette. She and I wereexactly the same age, and she'd become one of those slightlyfaded Danish beauties who used to attract me when I wastwenty. They were older than I was at that time, and I wasgrateful for their tender protection.
— Patrick Modiano
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
[The thief-taker] was conspicuous by his age, I should estimate he is in his middle fifties, and by a bearing, I am tempted to call it dignity, wanting in the others. He has a good head of hair, only a bit thin on top, blond going grey, and sea green eyes. He has an excellently carved set of teeth, but displays them rarely. He has a trim figure, unusual in a profession that consists largely of loitering around taverns, but any illusion that he is especially fit is dispelled when he begins to move, for he is a little bit halt, and a little bit lame, stiff in the joints and given to frequent sighs and grimaces that hint at pains internal.
— Neal Stephenson
I am tarred and feathered with Time.
— Ogden Nash
Folks double my age and older often run down a conversation tracking a vanishing world that will, with the passing of their memory, vanish entirely.
— Charles D'Ambrosio
We are on red alert when it comes to how we are perceiving ourselves as a species. There’s no desire to be an adult. Adulthood is not a goal. It’s not seen as a gift. Something happened culturally: No one is supposed to age past 45...
— Frances McDormand
Accepting one's age and mortality is a sign that you've now become an adult. Once you realize you no longer fit in the same jeans you did when you were 30, and the spicy foods you loved when you were younger now like to revisit you at 2 AM, you come to realize that with aging comes adjustment. And, aging isn't a bad thing - it sure beats the alternative!
— James Arlen Dennis
You believed you could transcend the body as you aged, she tells herself. You believed you could rise above it, to a serene, nonphysical realm. But it’s only through ecstasy you can do that, and ecstasy is achieved through the body itself. Without the bone and sinew of wings, no flight. Without that ecstasy you can only be dragged further down by the body, into its machinery. Its rusting, creaking, vengeful, brute machinery.
— Margaret Atwood, Stone Mattress: Nine Tales
We keep making decisions, every day, half without thinking, half against our will. If we don't fight back, if we allow ourselves to change, to be changed, then once it's done we have to do other things, and on and on until the person we wanted to be is so far away in the past that we only remember her, longingly, as if she were a beloved stranger.
— Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything
And since when had I become the guy that things happened to ten years ago?
— Jim Butcher, Skin Game
You get tired of always wondering anew why life has to take the place of youth.
— Gary Lutz, Divorcer
In the old pieces of furniture almost as in the old paintings, dwells the charm of the past, of the faded which becomes stronger in a man when he reaches an advanced age.
— Adalbert Stifter, Indian Summer
I don't know who to write to anymore... They've changed their souls, that's a way to be disloyal, to forget, to keep talking about something else.
— Céline
John had written that normal fantasy ("normal" in the T.S. Kuhn sense) was written for the moderately educated class suffering from ennui. It was for folks stuck doing dull, repetitive work, growing old while not getting laid half often or variously enough, watching other, less deserving people (the privileged and the crooks) scoop up your share of fun. So then the fantasy generates the exciting world where you're given a heroic purpose and an opportunity to use those very powers you have suspected that you had but never have been able to locate and use, except in destructive ways when shit-faced.
— Don Webb, The Double: An Investigation
No one likes to talk about the positive parts of getting older and aging into orphanhood, how with your parents you often bury a lot of things you were never able to confront or fix or let go of.
— Jill McCorkle, Life After Life
After all these years, his best friend is malaria.Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old battles.
— Louis Bayard, Roosevelt's Beast
At thirty either you are perfect or nothing.
— Aporva Kala, Life... Love... Kumbh...
John had written that normal fantasy ("normal" in the T.S. Kuhn sense) was written for the moderately educated class from suffering ennui. It was for folks stuck doing dull, repetitive work, growing old while not getting laid half often or variously enough, watching other, less deserving people (the privileged and the crooks) scoop up your share of fun. So then the fantasy generates the exciting world where you're given a heroic purpose and an opportunity to use those very powers you have suspected that you had but never have been able to locate and use, except in destructive ways when shit-faced.
— Don Webb, The Double: An Investigation
Perhaps this was part of growing older, to undergo hideous alterations in the deepest certainties, in love, in lovers, finally in one's self.
— Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles
Wart meets Merlin for the first time – only for Merlin, who lives backwards, it's the last time. The old wizard weeps and the boy can't understand why. It's a powerful expression of the gulf between the ancient and the young.
— Philip Womack
An old man with overalls walked by
—  I don't think old people should wear overalls
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]
— Marco Vichi, Death in August
No one can turn back the clock. Lie about your age if you want, but we're all going in the same direction.
— Emma Woolf, The Ministry of Thin
I call the Change of Life "Orchids" because menopause is such an ugly word. It's got men in it for goddsakes.
— Lisa Jey Davis, Getting Over Your Ovaries: How to Make 'The Change of Life' Your Bitch
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.
— Jane Tara, The Happy Endings Book Club
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, City Solipsism: A Short Story
When I was suddenly thrust into what everyone calls menopause (Orchids) earlier than my body planned, I decided someone needed to take charge on so many levels. It was time to not only change the vernacular, but to speak up and say "Hey! This isn't an old lady's disease! We aren't old! We are strong and dammit, we are beautiful and sexy too!
— Lisa Jey Davis, Getting Over Your Ovaries: How to Make 'The Change of Life' Your Bitch
I know what's wrong with me - I could never stand still for death! Which you've got to do by a certain age, or be ridiculous - you've got to stand there nobly and serene, and let death run his tape on your arms and around your belly and up your crotch until he's got you fitted for that black suit. And I can't, I won't!... So I'm left with wrestling with this anachronistic energy which God has charged me with and I will use it till the dirt is shoveled in my mouth! Life! Life! Fuck death and dying!
— Arthur Miller, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan
I am growing old of course, but I am still in the early stages of disintegration, and regarded as just about cool enough by some fashionable young ppl to be permitted to think aloud.
— Pete Townshend
Rich old people are more attractive than poor old people, so by all means, try to get rich before age sets in. Otherwise, you'll just be playing catch-up for the rest of your life and that will just wear you out, let me tell you.
— Jill Conner Browne, The Sweet Potato Queens' Big-Ass Cookbook
Pre-forty, you can wash your face with Tide and use Vaseline for moisturizer, toss on a little mascara and lip gloss, and you're a friggin' cover girl. Those of us on the slippery slope that is the Other Side of Forty can testify-- those days are so over. You pore over labels promising everything short of actual rebirth-- you will buy most of them for an average of $450 per quarter once-- and none of them will work. You will still be getting older and poorer with every passing purchase.
— Jill Conner Browne, The Sweet Potato Queens' Big-Ass Cookbook
Mother is fading for him, her face receding into shadows, her memory diminishing with each passing day, leaking like sand from a fist.
— Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
Getting older is a question of coming to terms with the fact that you’ll never know the secrets
—  and the resulting equilibrium is what gives the illusion of actually knowing them.
If old age is good for anything it's good for being generous.
— William Kuhn, Mrs. Queen Takes the Train
Reading lives is the primary activity. Reading literature, although we engage in it more intentionally and more mindfully, is the secondary one. We are able to do the latter only insofar as we are already doing the former. As with narrative in general, then, reading our lives is not merely a metaphor for how we make sense of our lives. It is how we make sense of our lives.
— William L. Randall, Reading Our Lives: The Poetics of Growing Old
I've put one foot before another and the years have passed, the time marked by late rent payments and the appearance of wrinkles - tiny ones, on the corners of my eyes. They are a reminder of my youth, and of the hourglass that we all live in, grains of sand slipping through the gap of time, each granule adding another wrinkle, another pocket of fat, another sag that I will fight to overcome, another grey hair to pluck or dye.
— Alessandra Torre, The Dumont Diaries
By the time men get to be of our age, Mr. Vaiden, about all any new acquaintance can do is to remind them of somebody else. You know at times I have thought that is why we die. We become more and more intricately linked with the past, until finally we drift completely into it...and we are dead.
— Thomas K. Stribling
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
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, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
Once when he was still young, I saw a bit of his scalp showing through his hair and I was afraid. But it was just a cowlick. Now sometimes it shows through for real, but I feel only tenderness.
— Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation
I think it's reasonable to suppose that one could oscillate between being biologically 20 and biologically 25 indefinitely.
— Aubrey de Grey
Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry, aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.
— Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.Wrong, I want to say.In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
it had been a winter of deadening seriousness, when all the illusions and bright dreams of my early twenties had withered and died. I did not yet have the interior resources to dream new dreams; I was far too busy mourning the death of the old ones and wondering how I was to survive without them. I was sure I could replace them somehow , but was not sure I could restore their brassy luster or dazzling impress .
— Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides
There should be an age limit for patients, he thinks as he takes off his shoes. You just have to say to them, "You lived long enough. From now on, think of what's left as a bonus, a gift without an exchange slip. It hurts? Stay in bed. It still hurts? Wait: Either you'll die or it'll pass.
— Etgar Keret, פתאום דפיקה בדלת
That’s what getting old is: When you can no longer bear the consequences of being wrong.
— Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine's Law
There is something the child sees that he does not see; something the child hears that he does not hear; and this something is the most important thing of all. Because he does not understand it, his understanding is more childish than the child's and more simple than simplicity itself; in spite of the many clever wrinkles on his parchment face, and the masterly play of his fingers in unravelling the knots.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life
Heyday, now that is a funny word ain't it? Part of a heyday is, you don't never know you are having yourself one till later when it's all over with, long gone.
— Lee Smith, On Agate Hill
I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car.I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
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.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
It is only the rooms of the present I wish to inhabit.
— Regina O'Melveny, The Book of Madness and Cures
Age and illness made one a dualist
— Ursula K. Le Guin
(You know you've reached middle-age if...) when you hear 'Boys in the hood' you think of the Ku Klux Klan.
— Joey Green, You Know You've Reached Middle Age If . . .
At 11, I could say ‘I am sodium’ (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.
— Oliver Sacks
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.
— Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man
Living this long's not as wonderful as people think. I mean, you get the same amount of youth as everyone else, but a great big extra helping of being very old and deaf and creaky.
— Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith
In these days of physical fitness, hair dye, and plastic surgery, you can live much of your life without feeling or even looking old. But then one day, your knee goes, or your shoulder, or your back, or your hip. Your hot flashes come to an end; things droop. Spots appear. Your cleavage looks like a peach pit. If your elbows faced forward, you would kill yourself. You’re two inches shorter than you used to be. You’re ten pounds fatter and you cannot lose a pound of it to save your soul. Your hands don’t work as well as they once did and you can’t open bottles, jars, wrappers, and especially those gadgets that are encased tightly in what seems to be molded Mylar. If you were stranded on a desert island and your food were sealed in plastic packaging, you would starve to death. You take so many pills in the morning you don’t have room for breakfast.You lose close friends and discover one of the worst truths of old age: they’re irreplaceable. People who run four miles a day and eat only nuts and berries drop dead. People who drink a quart of whiskey and smoke two packs of cigarettes a day drop dead. You are suddenly in a lottery, the ultimate game of chance, and someday your luck will run out. Everybody dies. There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God.
— Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing
Age doesn't arrive slowly, it comes in a rush. One day nothing has changed, a week later, everything has. A week may be too long a time, it can happen overnight. You are the same and still the same and suddenly one morning two distinct lines, ineradicable, have appeared at the corners of your mouth.
— James Salter, All That Is
I felt old. Again. It had been happening a lot lately. I did not live the life of an old lady, but I could hear it beckoning to me, like a mermaid on a rock."— Michelle Tea, "Paris: A
— Clint Catalyst
Nothing comes back. The eye sees for a moment, the ear hears, but look, now it is gone.
— Eva Figes, Ghosts
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 Interestings