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Aging Quotes


"Ageing is not easy, Sennhora Castro. It's a terrible, incurable pathology. And great love is another pathology. It starts well. It's a most desirable disease. One wouldn't want to do without it. It's like yeast that corrupts the juice of grapes. One loves, one loves, one persists in loving-the incubation period can be very long- and then, with death, comes the heart break. Love must always meet its unwanted end."


"But women living in fear of aging, and pulling painful and expensive tricks to hide it from the world, does not say something amazing about us as humans."


"Some people do not really hate aging, they merely love the colour black."


"The only things that old age comes standard with: grey hair and wrinkles. Wisdom and intellect are earned."


"The baby boomers are getting older, and will stay older for longer. And they will run right into the dementia firing range. How will a society cope? Especially a society that can't so readily rely on those stable family relationships that traditionally provided the backbone of care?"


"Granny Weatherwax had a primal snore. It had never been tamed. No one had ever had to sleep next to it, to curb its wilder excesses by means of a kick, a prod in the small of the back, or a pillow used as a bludgeon. It had had years in a lonely bedroom to perfect the knark, the graaah, and the gnoc, gnoc, gnoc unimpeded by the nudges, jabs, and occasional attempts at murder that usually moderate the snore impulse over time."


"Those times are over and gone, and good-riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we're the thick-waisted generation, dragging along our children behind us and carrying our parents on our backs. And we're in charge, while the figures who used to command our respect are wasting away."


"Everything about aging in my experience so far has been a plus. Except the death part!"


"If you don't know how to grow old, don't start learning how to grow old."


"Then, for no reason I could tell you, I tossed the spool again, even though Elaine had asked me not to. Maybe only because, in a way, him chasing a spool was like old people having their slow and careful version of sex - you might not want to watch it , you who are young and convinced that, when it comes to old age, an exception will be made in your case, but they still want to do it."


"Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised."


"Age is always advancing and I'm fairly sure it's up to no good."


"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."


"You talk a lot about this amazing flow of time but you hardly see it. you see a women, you think that one day she'll be old, only you don't see her grow old. But there are moments when you think you see her grow old and feel yourself growing old with her: this is the feeling of adventure."


"Old-age sucks, but the alternative doesn't look that great, either."


"A man who lives long enough will be a boy twice."


"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."


"When you're twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It's only when you get to twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect you've been looking at the map upside down, and not until you're forty are you entirely sure. By the time you're sixty, take it from me, you're fucking lost."


"I've been playing the game of life for over 52 years now and I don't feel one day younger or older than I am. Maybe its I just don't feel."


"A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbours: he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost: and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him before he can come near their camp."


"Old Age homes are civilization's dumpsites for human beings who it cannot exploit further."


"I think that, with age, people come to realize that death is inevitable. And we need to learn to face it with serenity, wisdom and resignation. Death often frees us from a lot of senseless sufferings."


"With regard to things such as independence, mental capabilities, and sexuality, a very old man is nothing but a gigantic infant with white hair and wrinkles."


"One of the shocks of a 50th birthday is realizing the fundamental fact that your youth is irrevocably over."


"Oh, once you've been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn't want you back. Veronica settled herself in a rattan chair and adjusted her hat just so. "We-by whom I mean anyone over sixty-commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman's memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight."


"When you start believing that you are too old to enjoy something, you lose so much joy in your life."


"Sixty-nine was an interesting age--an age of infinite possibilities--an age when at last the experience of a lifetime was beginning to tell. But to feel old--that was different, a tired, discouraged state of mind when one was inclined to ask oneself depressing questions. What was he after all? A little dried-up elderly man, with neither chick nor child, with no human belongings, only a valuable Art collection which seemed at the moment strangely unsatisfying. No one to care whether he lived or died..."


"Old age is catching up with me, or am I catching up with it?"


"When men age they're called sophisticated. When women age they ain't called at all."


"Getting older comes with abilities. Being old comes with disabilities."
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