Quotes about Aging

Growing old is inevitable, growing up is a choice.

Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.

We buy books, we go to gyms, we expend a lot of brain power on trying to hold back time, when we should be celebrating the miracle of being here in this world.

35/10

Brushing out my daughter's dark
silken hair before the mirror
I see the grey gleaming on my head,
the silver-haired servant behind her. Why is it
just as we begin to go
they begin to arrive, the fold in my neck
clarifying as the fine bones of her
hips sharpen? As my skin shows
its dry pitting, she opens like a small
pale flower on the tip of a cactus;
as my last chances to bear a child
are falling through my body, the duds among them,
her full purse of eggs, round and
firm as hard-boiled yolks, is about
to snap its clasp. I brush her tangled
fragrant hair at bedtime. It's an old
story – the oldest we have on our planet –
the story of replacement.

the belly may be kept firm through numerous pregnancies
by means of sit-ups     jogging     dancing     (think of Russian ballerinas)
    & the cunt
as far as I know is ageless     possibly immortal     becoming simply
more open     more quick to understand     more dry-eyed     than at 22

which

after all     is what you were dying for     (as you ravaged
islands of turtles     beehives     oysterbeds     the udders of cows)
desperate to censor changes which you simply might     have let play
over you         lying back     listening         opening yourself
    letting the years make love the only way
        (poor blunderers)
            they know

Hooked for two years now on wrinkle creams     creams for
crowsfeet     ugly lines (if only there were one!)
any perfumed grease     which promises     youth     beauty
not truth     but all I need on earth     I've been studying
     how women age

Once when she felt herself growing older, she said to the mirror, "Why am I afraid of birthdays?"  "Because," the mirror said, "there is something you have always wanted to do which you have been afraid of doing and you know time is running out."  And she ran from the mirror as quickly as she could because she knew in that moment she was not afraid and she wanted to seize the time.

To each of man's ages the Lord gives its own anxieties.

Schopenhauer's wonderful piece on 'An Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual': how the continuities of a lifetime seem, in the end, to have been plotted out by a novelist - all the accidents, apparently uncoordinated as they first occur, concurring finally toward the shaping of an order.

'In Guatemala our bus got stuck in the mud - it was aways getting stuck! The driver said, "I need five strong men to move the bus." (There were plenty of guys on the trip.) Joe, in his seventies, was the first one out of the bus.' (Lynne Kaufman)

I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind."

We grow neither better nor worse as we get old, but more like ourselves.

It is sad to grow old, but nice to ripen.

Of all the self-fulfilling prophecies in our culture, the assumption that aging means decline and poor health is probably the deadliest.

Many ancient traditions worldwide maintain that humans not only inherently possess the potential for fully incarnating light at the physiological level, but that some have already achieved it, and millions more will do so in the very era in which we live. The historical literature “suggests that there are unusual physical, as well as psychological, consequences in humans to the attainment of the exalted state of mind known as enlightenment,” writes biochemist Colm Kelleher. “These reported changes include, but are not limited to, sudden reversal of aging, emergence of a light body and observed bodily ascension.” While many of these descriptions associate the lightbody with death, Kelleher makes it clear that a number of reports indicate that “transformation of the body can happen independently of death.”

As we get older, the future gets shorter and the past gets longer, but the present deepens.

Perhaps love makes us grow old before our time and makes us young again when youth has passed.

I don't need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.

What am I lying here for? . . . We are lying here as though we had a chance of enjoying a quiet time. . . . Am I waiting until I become a little older?

Disappointment, without anger, is the mark of an old soul.

Not being disappointed, Dennis, is the mark of a really old soul.

And trusting life so thoroughly that every step on its path is valued more than where it was supposed to take you, is the mark of eternal youth.

We turn not older with years, but newer every day.

he who sees age on the outside of things is doomed to underestimate the vitality of raisins.

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.

John Quincy Adams is well. But the house in which he lives at present is becoming dilapidated. It is tottering up on its foundation. Time and the seasons have nearly destroyed it. Its roof is pretty well worn out. Its walls are much shattered and it trembles with every wind. I think John Quincy will have to move out of it soon. But he himself is quite well, quite well.