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Aging Quotes

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Aging Quotes

“In terms of life, the great lesson is letting go. Life is an exercise, ultimately, in letting go. You don’t notice that when you’re young but at some point things are slowly taken away from you. We’re not good at letting go. People want to look as if they’re 30 when they’re 70. Pop stars are still trying to churn out three-minute pop songs when they’re 78 years old. Writers churn out worse and worse books when most people don’t read them any more.”

LifeLetting GoReflectionSelf AwarenessAgingImpermanence
Author:Yann Martel
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“Youth was the time for happiness, its only season; young people, leading a lazy, carefree life, partially occupied by scarcely absorbing studies, were able to devote themselves unlimitedly to the liberated exultation of their bodies. They could play, dance, love, and multiply their pleasures. They could leave a party, in the early hours of the morning, in the company of sexual partners they had chosen, and contemplate the dreary line of employees going to work. They were the salt of the earth, and everything was given to them, everything was permitted for them, everything was possible. Later on, having started a family, having entered the adult world, they would be introduced to worry, work, responsibility, and the difficulties of existence; they would have to pay taxes, submit themselves to administrative formalities while ceaselessly bearing witness--powerless and shame-filled--to the irreversible degradation of their own bodies, which would be slow at first, then increasingly rapid; above all, they would have to look after children, mortal enemies, in their own homes, they would have to pamper them, feed them, worry about their illnesses, provide the means for their education and their pleasure, and unlike in the world of animals, this would last not just for a season, they would remain slaves of their offspring always, the time of joy was well and truly over for them, they would have to continue to suffer until the end, in pain and with increasing health problems, until they were no longer good for anything and were definitively thrown into the rubbish heap, cumbersome and useless. In return, their children would not be at all grateful, on the contrary their efforts, however strenuous, would never be considered enough, they would, until the bitter end, be considered guilty because of the simple fact of being parents. From this sad life, marked by shame, all joy would be pitilessly banished. When they wanted to draw near to young people's bodies, they would be chased away, rejected, ridiculed, insulted, and, more and more often nowadays, imprisoned. The physical bodies of young people, the only desirable possession the world has ever produced, were reserved for the exclusive use of the young, and the fate of the old was to work and to suffer. This was the true meaning of solidarity between generations; it was a pure and simple holocaust of each generation in favor of the one that replaced it, a cruel, prolonged holocaust that brought with it no consolation, no comfort, nor any material or emotional compensation.”

LifeChildrenResponsibilityGenerationsAgingParenthoodReproductionProcreation
Book:The Possibility of an Island
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“In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where note even the ashes of his glory would remain.”

ChildrenFuturePhotographyAging
Book:Love in the Time of Cholera
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“No one ever grows up. They may look grown-up, but it's a disguise. It's just the clay of time. Men and women are still children deep in their hearts. They still would like to jump and play, but that heavy clay won't let them. They'd like to shake off every chain the world's put on them, take off their watches and neckties and Sunday shoes and return naked to the swimming hole, if just for one day. They'd like to feel free, and know that there's a momma and daddy at home who'll take care of things and love them no matter what. Even behind the face of the meanest man in the world is a scared little boy trying to wedge himself into a corner where he can't be hurt.”

ChildrenTruthYouthAdultsAgingPhilosophy Of LifeAdulthoodGrowing OldPassing Of Time
Book:Boy's Life
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“I believe that it IS possible to live every day in the consciousness that is experienced as unconditional love.”

AgingSelf AcceptanceGrief Inspirational BereavementSelf Love EmpowermentUnconditional Love And WisdomLifetime LearnerSurvival Biographies
Book:The Lifetimes of a Journey: My Amazing Journey of Coming Alive and the Power of Unconditional Self-Love
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“We can treat each other with compassion, with unconditional love, and a knowing that such a world enables a completely different experience for each and all of us.”

AgingSelf AcceptanceGrief Inspirational BereavementSelf Love EmpowermentUnconditional Love And WisdomLifetime LearnerSurvival Biographies
Book:The Lifetimes of a Journey: My Amazing Journey of Coming Alive and the Power of Unconditional Self-Love
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“I believe that it is the relationship with self that sets the tone for every other relationship in our lives.”

AgingSelf AcceptanceGrief Inspirational BereavementSelf Love EmpowermentUnconditional Love And WisdomLifetime LearnerSurvival Biographies
Book:The Lifetimes of a Journey: My Amazing Journey of Coming Alive and the Power of Unconditional Self-Love
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“Both my experiences of being well-loved on the one hand and being loved conditionally on the other influenced the development (or lack) of my self-love.”

AgingSelf AcceptanceGrief Inspirational BereavementSelf Love EmpowermentUnconditional Love And WisdomLifetime LearnerSurvival Biographies
Book:The Lifetimes of a Journey: My Amazing Journey of Coming Alive and the Power of Unconditional Self-Love
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“I have moved through so many negative and positive feelings about myself. All of it has been conspiring to open my mind and my heart to who I am today.”

AgingSelf AcceptanceGrief Inspirational BereavementSelf Love EmpowermentUnconditional Love And WisdomLifetime LearnerSurvival Biographies
Book:The Lifetimes of a Journey: My Amazing Journey of Coming Alive and the Power of Unconditional Self-Love
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“I hope that in sharing my experience and this wisdom, others in their own grieving process may find some hope in moving through their own experiences of loss.”

AgingSelf AcceptanceGrief Inspirational BereavementSelf Love EmpowermentUnconditional Love And WisdomLifetime LearnerSurvival Biographies
Book:The Lifetimes of a Journey: My Amazing Journey of Coming Alive and the Power of Unconditional Self-Love
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“I had experienced unconditional love, I lost it, I started searching for it again . . . and then, I found it had been within me all along.”

AgingSelf AcceptanceGrief Inspirational BereavementSelf Love EmpowermentUnconditional Love And WisdomLifetime LearnerSurvival Biographies
Book:The Lifetimes of a Journey: My Amazing Journey of Coming Alive and the Power of Unconditional Self-Love
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“For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human. Nothing comparable has ever happened in the history of our species; it dislodges Freud. Today's children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from Playboy to music videos to the blank females torsos in women's magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
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“She may resent Playboy because she resents feeling ugly in sex--or, if "beautiful," her body defined and diminished by pornography. It inhibits in her something she needs to live, and gives her the ultimate anaphrodisiac: the self-critical sexual gaze. Alice Walker's essay "Coming Apart" investigates the damage done: Comparing herself to her lover's pornography, her heroine "foolishly" decides that she is not beautiful.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationSexual ViolenceImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
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“[Women's magazines]ignore older women or pretend that they don’t exist; magazines try to avoid photographs of older women, and when they feature celebrities who are over sixty, ‘retouching artists’ conspire to ‘help’ beautiful women look more beautiful, ie less than their age...By now readers have no idea what a real woman’s 60 year old face looks like in print because it’s made to look 45. Worse, 60 year old readers look in the mirror and think they are too old, because they’re comparing themselves to some retouched face smiling back at them from a magazine.”

BeautySocietySelf EsteemAgingMagazinesEditingBody Image
Author:Dalma Heyn
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“...A body pocked by landmines left by a lifetime of war? And yet I have survived. To be here. Right here. Right now. Have I made it to this point so that finally—for once—I can see myself clearly? The sunlight glimmers. This same light, this same mountain that watches over us in the near distance will still be here long after I am gone. Shouldn’t I view myself—shouldn’t we all view ourselves—as eternally majestic?”

Self EsteemAging
Book:That's What Friends Are For
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“I am constantly mystified by what John ends up remembering… I just don’t understand why he’s able to hang on to information like that, while so many other more important memories evaporate. Then again, I suppose so much of what stays with us is often insignificant. The memories we take to the ends of our lives have no real rhyme or reason, especially when you think of the endless things that you do over the course of a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime. All the cups of coffee, hand-washings, changes of clothes, lunches, goings to the bathroom, headaches, naps, walks to school, trips to the grocery store, conversations about the weather—all the things so unimportant they should be immediately forgotten. Yet they aren’t. I often think of the Chinese red bathrobe I had when I was twenty-seven years old; the sound of our first cat Charlie’s feet on the linoleum of our old house; the hot rarefied air around aluminum pot the moment before the kernels of popcorn burst open. I think of these things as often as I think about getting married or giving birth or the end of the Second World War. What is truly amazing is that before you know it, sixty years go by and you can remember maybe eight or nine important events, along with a thousand meaningless ones. How can that be? You want to think there’s a pattern to it all because it makes you feel better, gives you some sense of a reason why we’re here, but there really isn’t any. People look for God in these patterns, these reasons, but only because they don’t know where else to look. Things happen to us: some of it important, most of it not, and a little of it stays with us till the end. What stays after that? I’ll be damned if I know. (pp.174-175)”

ReasonMomentsTimeMemoriesAgingLifetimeMemoryPatternsAfter DeathMeaningful LifeTime PassingOrdinary LifeEnd Of LifeMemory LossEnd Of Life Musings
Book:The Leisure Seeker
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“The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.”

DeathFriendshipLossAging
Book:Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake
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“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.”

LifeDeathChangeAgingMaturing
Book:The Illustrated Man
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“Before me lies a mass of shapeless days, Unseparated atoms, and I must Sort them apart and live them. Sifted dust Covers the formless heap. Reprieves, delays, There are none, ever. As a monk who prays The sliding beads asunder, so I thrust Each tasteless particle aside, and just Begin again the task which never stays. And I have known a glory of great suns, When days flashed by, pulsing with joy and fire! Drunk bubbled wine in goblets of desire, And felt the whipped blood laughing as it runs! Spilt is that liquor, my too hasty hand Threw down the cup, and did not understand.”

LifePoetryTimeYouthPoemAgingDays
Author:Amy Lowell
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“At his age, it can be overwhelming and painful to harbor a thought accompanied by too much nostalgia. Not that he wanted to. Mabel, in her final years, had stopped listening to music. The songs of her teenage years brought her back to people and feelings of that time - people she could never see again and sensations that were no longer coming. It was too much for her. There are people who can manage such things. There are those of us who can no longer walk, but can close our eyes and remember a summer hike through a field, or the feeling of cool grass beneath our feet, and smile. Who still have the courage to embrace the past, and give it life and a voice in the present. But Mabel was not one of those people. Maybe she lacked that very form of courage. Or maybe her humanity was so complete, so expansive, that she would be crushed by her capacity to imagine the love that was gone.”

MemoriesAgingNostalgia
Book:Norwegian by Night
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“...alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life--it was not worth much--not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage,he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one--we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.”

FaithLonelinessRegretAgingSelfishness
Book:Light Years
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