Quotes about Aging

When you're younger, you think of your age in fractions. 4 1/2, 5 1/2. You don't hear 36 1/2. You become 2, you turn 40, you reach 50, you make it to 60. By now you're going so fast you hit 70!

A sensual and intemperate youth hands over a worn-out body to old age.

As for wrinkles--Pshaw! Why shouldn't we have wrinkles? Honorable insignia of long service in this warfare.

Old age may have its limitations and challenges, but in spite of them, our latter years can be some of the most rewarding and fulfilling of our lives.

Old age has deformities enough of its own. It should never add to them the deformity of vice.

When I turned 40, I was like, huh. I accept myself more now. It was much more comforting.

Those thoughts come to me in the night, those thought and thoughts of becoming sick or helpless, of the nursing home, of lingering death. I gnaw again the old bones of the fear of what is to come, and grieve with a sisterly grief over Grandmam and Mrs. Feltner and the other old women who have gone before. Finally, as a gift, as a mercy, I remember to pray, 'Thy will be done,' and then again I am free and can go to sleep.

I'm going to live right on. Dying is none of my business. Dying will have to take care of itself. He came to me then, an old man weakened and ill, with my Nathan looking out of his eyes. He held me a long time as if under a passing storm, and then the quiet came.

I have got to the age now where I can see how short a time we have to be here.

Now, surely, I am getting old, for my memory of myself as a young man seems now to be complete, as a story told. The young man leaps, and lands on an old man's legs.

What a wonder I was when I was young, as I learn by the stern privilege of being old: how regardlessly I stepped the rough pathways of the hillside woods, treaded hardly thinking the tumbled stairways of the steep streams, and worked unaching hard days thoughtful only of the work, the passing light, the heat, the cool water I gladly drank.

Well, sir," Athey said, "where I used to be limber I'm stiff and where I used to be stiff I'm limber. Do you know what I'm talking about?