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Aging Quotes

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Aging Quotes

“When I was younger, I would cling to life because life was at the top of the turning wheel. But like the song of my gypsy-girl, the great wheel turns over and lands on a minor key. It is then that you come of age and life means nothing to you. To live, to die, to overdose, to fall in a coma in the street... it is all the same. It is only in the peach innocence of youth that life is at its crest on top of the wheel. And there being only life, the young cling to it, they fear death... And they should! ...For they are in life.”

“The greatest incidence of breast cancer in american women appears within the ages of 40 to 55. These are the very years when women are portrayed in the popular media as fading and desexualized figures. Contrary to the media picture, I find myself as a woman of insight ascending into my highest powers, my greatest psychic strengths, and my fullest satisfactions. I am freer of the constraints and fears and indecisions of my younger years, and survival throughout these years has taught me how to value my own beauty, and how to look closely into the beauty of others. It has also taught me to value the lessons of survival, as well as my own perceptions. I feel more deeply, value those feelings more, and can put those feelings together with what I know in order to fashion a vision of and pathway toward true change.”

“You see? Silbermann assures us that this technique has added years to the sexual life of his patients. But, of course, one must be a born fighter to profit by it. In this respect we are rather backward in France; a certain lack of persistence and determination causes us to lose out in the race of pleasure. It’s different in the United States. There are people band together, organize group therapy sessions, make pornographic films, found institutes and clinics, all dedicated to combating the Decline of erection. America is the largest true phallocracy. By comparison, we French are a sorry lot of quitters.”

“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.”

“There was a car in the back of the lot, under a fruitful tree. Feet on the steering wheel was a beautiful woman who sought and received harmony. She didn’t measure time by hours or minutes. She measured it by phrases like, “After this glass of red.” She never stopped the car until “the right final song plays.” She didn’t count her days Monday–Friday, but existence to her was checkpointed by the names of people she met last. She didn’t listen to rules about when it was okay to fuck—the first date or third—because when the moments asked for love, she had it. She didn’t sleep when it was dark, she slept when she was fully exhausted, and so worked until drainage, trusting her body was smart enough to solve itself during sleep. She was sleeping right now—aged with the kind of thin wrinkles that told you resveratrol gave a good fight. This was a woman embracing the wild, various interests of the heart. You may have thought freedom was attained by irresponsibility, by the immature seeking the easy, but it took great discipline to be free. You could call her homeless or you could call her earthbound, indecisive or multi-talented, unemployed or honest, spacey or intelligent. What good were words to describe a kind of radiant harmony best explained by her accomplished snoring?”

“"Penelope." The Atrox called her by her old name, his voice brutal and at the same time alluring. "I've come to take back my gift." "I surrender it easily," she said. "Your immortality was always a curse." He touched her and a burst of silver sparks burst into the air. His fingers stole the warmth from her body, draining the power of the elixir. At once she began to wrinkle, lines crinkling over her hands, veins becoming ropy under paper-thin skin. She could feel death's cold breath on her shoulder, but it didn't frighten her.”

“His beautiful silver hair had turned snow white over the course of just a few days following Chubb's death, and in a way this made him seem younger: made him seem to fit the white caliche landscape even better, and blend in. His skin was turning whiter, too, even after he had been out in the sun, It was beautiful, watching him get old-ancient-now that I had realized he too was going to die. This time I could understand it. It was like watching some graceful diver plunge in slow motion-the slowest-from the top of an improbably high cliff, down to the cool river below.”

“Jane has been dead for more than two decades. Earlier this year I grieved for her in a way I had never grieved before. At eighty-six, I was sick and thought I was dying. Twenty and twenty-one years ago, every day of her dying for eighteen months, I stayed by her side. It was miserable that Jane should die so young, and it was redemptive that I could be with her every hour of every day. Last February I grieved again, this time that she would not sit over me as I died.”

“I am leery of suggesting the idea that endings are controllable. No one ever really has control. Physics and biology and accident ultimately have their way in our lives. But the point is that we are not helpless either. Courage is the strength to recognize both realities. We have room to act, to shape our stories, though as time goes on it is within narrower and narrower confines. A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.”

“I am afraid of the run-up to death, because I have had to watch that. But I think that many of us who are on the last lap are too busy with the baggage of old age to waste much time anticipating the finishing line. We have to get used to being the person we are, the person we have always been, but encumbered now with various indignities and disabilities, shoved as it were into some new incarnation. We feel much the same, but clearly are not. We have entered an unexpected dimension; dealing with this is the new challenge.”

“I am born as the sun, But then turn into the moon, As my blonde hairs turn Grayish-white and fall to The ground, Only to be buried again, Then to be born again, Into a thousand suns And a thousand moons. HYMN OF THE DIVINE DANDELION by Suzy Kassem Copyright 1993-1994 - A SPRING FOR WISDOM”

“The mental pictures I have of my parents and grandparents and my childhood are beginning to break up into small fragments and get blown away from me into empty space, and the same wind is sucking me toward it ever so gently, so gently as not even to raise a hair on my head (though the truth is that there are very few of them to be raised). I'm starting to take the idea of death as the end of life somewhat harder than before. I used to wonder why people seemed to think that life is tragic or sad. Isn't it also comic and funny? And beyond all that, isn't it amazing and marvelous? Yes, but only if you have it. And I am starting not to have it. The pictures are disintegrating, as if their molecules were saying, "I've had enough," ready to go somewhere else and form a new configuration. They betray us, those molecules, we who have loved them. They treat us like dirt.”

“One word absent from a sentence, or misinterpreted incorrectly, can change the entire meaning of a sentence. One word can change the meaning of everything. Before you believe anything about God or anybody, ask yourself how well do you trust the transmitter, translator or interpreter. And if you have never met them, then how do you know if the knowledge you acquired is even right? One hundred and twenty-five years following every major event in history, all remaining witnesses will have died. How well do you trust the man who has stored his version of a story? And how can you put that much faith into someone you don't know?”

“Life Looks Lasting by Stewart Stafford Why should evening's last hues Get short shrift by rays of morn? Or contented looks of jaded age Be void by stung slits, newborn? The skull's opalescent orbs shut, A lifetime's sense memories kept, Amnesia's windfall revisited in spirit, In corridors of déjà vu, windswept. Though not the peeled eyes of youth Nor intoxicated with passionate ire, Scarcity unveils beauty in mundanity, Visions consumed by a funeral pyre. © 2026, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”

“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.”

“This may have been the single biggest difference between my teenage self and my middle-aged self: that I'd once been roiling with thoughts and opinions and yearnings that I suspected were strange or shameful or simply inexpressible, and therefore didn't express them. As I got older, it wasn't the thoughts and opinions and yearnings that went away; only, over time, their suppression.”

“Botox" In a friendly exchange with a shopper in a grocery story line, she joyfully declared: “Today is my 50th birthday!” I said, “It looks like the hands of Time have touched your face gently. Happy birthday!” “The hands of Time weren’t gentle on me, my dear. What you see are the wonders of botox,” she said. “They say it freezes face features and expressions. Is that true?” I inquired half-jokingly. “At this stage of my life, it makes no difference. I no longer need any expressions. There is nothing worth smiling for or frowning upon. I spent decades expressing in every physical and verbal way possible, all in vain,” she said. Her words were followed by a hopeless giggle that reminded me of the philosopher who wrote that as we advance in age, our fears are replaced with giggles. She then continued, “There is a time when you discover that all verbal and physical expressions are futile. In everyone’s life, there’s one defining event that freezes everything in their lives. Anything that happens after that event is no more than desperate and hopeless attempts to pretend that we are okay.” Before I managed to find the appropriate words, the cashier called on her. The timing was ideal as words froze on my tongue just like the botox freezes features and expression in a world in which words and expressions are of no use anymore. [Original text published in Arabic on October 14, 2024 at ahewar.org]”