Aging Quotes - Page 10

Hi lover," he says to me, completely forgetting what happened before.He knows who I am. He knows that I am the one person who he loves, has always loved. No disease, no person can take that away.(p.205)

When pain ends gain ends too.

I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense. (xxvi)

... we absolutely mustn't forget it. We mustn't forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don't want to think about (so it is to retirement homes that they entrust the care of accompanying their parents to the threshold, with no fuss or bother). And where's the joy in these final hours they ought to be making the most of? They're spent in boredom and bitterness, endlessly revisiting memories. We mustn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you're twenty and the next day you're eighty.

Perhaps this was part of growing older, to undergo hideous alterations in the deepest certainties, in love, in lovers, finally in one's self.

You believed you could transcend the body as you aged, she tells herself. You believed you could rise above it, to a serene, nonphysical realm. But it’s only through ecstasy you can do that, and ecstasy is achieved through the body itself. Without the bone and sinew of wings, no flight. Without that ecstasy you can only be dragged further down by the body, into its machinery. Its rusting, creaking, vengeful, brute machinery.

I want to be able to remember it all, not just the books but the newsrooms and the playgroups and the bad jokes and the holiday traditions. In my mind I can walk through the house where I grew up even though I have not been inside it for decades . . . I want to be able to walk through the house of my own life until my life is done. I want to hold on to who and what I have been even as both become somehow inevitably less.

An old person knows what it’s like to be young, but a young person doesn’t know what it’s like to be old. There’s no substitute for life experience.

We have a solemn pact.' Kaye nodded to Mother and looked over at Em talking to some neighbors. 'If one of us is unconscious in the hospital, the others will make sure it's pulled.''The plug?' Ruth asked.'The chin hair,' said Kaye, eyeing Ruth with some alarm. 'You're off the visitors list. Mother, make a note.

Middle age is youth without its levity And age without decay.

Old age robs you of every last illusion, even the belief in your own goodness.

The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.

I know what's wrong with me - I could never stand still for death! Which you've got to do by a certain age, or be ridiculous - you've got to stand there nobly and serene, and let death run his tape on your arms and around your belly and up your crotch until he's got you fitted for that black suit. And I can't, I won't!... So I'm left with wrestling with this anachronistic energy which God has charged me with and I will use it till the dirt is shoveled in my mouth! Life! Life! Fuck death and dying!

How naive and foolish the young are to imagine that they understand the loneliness of great age, the outliving of your contemporaries, anyone to whom your century of memory might make any sense.

Modern cosmetic surgeons have a direct financial interest in a social role for women that requires them to feel ugly. They do not simply advertise for a share of a market that already exists: Their advertisements create new markets. It is a boom industry because it is influentially placed to create its own demand through the pairing of text with ads in women's magazines. The industry takes out ads and gets coverage; women get cut open. They pay their money and they takes their chances. As surgeons grow richer, they are able to command larger and brighter ad spaces.

Twenty-three is old. It's almost 25, which is like almost mid-20s.

Aging masters emotions, but with experiences of aging

Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.

In a sexual double standard as to who receives consumer protection, it seems that if what you do is done to women in the name of beauty, you may do what you like. It is illegal to claim that something grows hair, or makes you taller, or restores virility, if it does not. It is difficult to imagine that the baldness remedy Minoxidil would be on the market if it had killed nine French and at least eleven American men. In contrast, the long-term effects of Retin-A are still unknown--Dr. Stuart Yusps of the National Cancer Institute refers to its prescription as "a human experiment"--and the Food and Drug Administration has not approved it yet dermatologists are prescribing it to women at a revenue of over $150 million a year.

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.

Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

In her 20′s, a woman’s breasts double her self-esteem. In her 40′s, they halve it.

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, ‘Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!’ This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.

A boy from Brooklyn used to cruise on summer nights.As soon as he’d hit sixty he’d hold his hand out the window,cupping it around the wind. He’d been assuredthis is exactly how a woman’s breast feels when you putyour hand around it and apply a little pressure. Now he knew,and he loved it. Night after night, again and again, untilthe weather grew cold and he had to roll the window up.For many years afterwards he was perpetually attemptingto soar. One winter’s night, holding his wife’s breastin his hand, he closed his eyes and wanted to weep.He loved her, but it was the wind he imagined now.As he grew older, he loved the word etcetera and refusedto abbreviate it. He loved sweet white butter. He oftenpretended to be playing the organ. On one of his last mornings,he noticed the shape of his face molded in the pillow.He shook it out, but the next morning it reappeared.

The older I get, the more I see there are these crevices in life where things fall in and you just can't reach them to pull them back out. So you can sit next to them and weep or you can get up and move forward. You have to stop worrying about who's not here and start worrying about who is.

In the grand scheme of life, nobody grows old keeping their soul unblemished.

Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.

You know what getting married is? It's agreeing to taking this person who right now is at the top of his form, full of hopes and ideas, feeling good, looking good, wildly interested in you because you're the same way, and sticking by him while he slowly disintegrates. And he does the same for you. You're his responsibility now and he's yours. If no one else will take care of him, you will. If everyone else rejects you, he won't. What do you think love is? Going to bed all the time?

It is lovely to meet an old person whose face is deeply lined, a face that has been deeply inhabited, to look in the eyes and find light there.

And since a more convincing argument could not be found—aside from a fatal accident or suicide—this way was chosen: a process of galloping senescence.

THE FOUR HEAVENLY FOUNTAINSLaugh, I tell youAnd you will turn backThe hands of time.Smile, I tell youAnd you will reflectThe face of the divine.Sing, I tell youAnd all the angels will sing with you!Cry, I tell youAnd the reflections found in your pool of tears -Will remind you of the lessons of today and yesterdayTo guide you through the fears of tomorrow.

Living this long's not as wonderful as people think. I mean, you get the same amount of youth as everyone else, but a great big extra helping of being very old and deaf and creaky.

You start out happy that you have no hips or boobs. All of a sudden you get them, and it feels sloppy. Then just when you start liking them, they start drooping.

The young have little use for the concept of rebirth, yet the older they get the more appealing the concept becomes.

The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible.

I want to grow old without facelifts... I want to have the courage to be loyal to the face I've made. Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you'd never complete your life, would you? You'd never wholly know you.

But space shrinks when you get old, and things lose their wonder, and the wisest thing to do then is to try your best to sleep.

He thinks of the rotten parachute they played with as kids in Arcadia: they hurtle through life aging unimaginably fast, but each grasps a silken edge of memory that billows between them and softens the long fall.

Though my hair has grown grey now, and my sight dim, and my heart cold with years, and ennui, and disappointment, and treachery of friends, and yet I have but to lean back in my arm-chair and think, and those sweet figures comes rising up before me out of the past, with their smiles, and their kindnesses, and their bright tender eyes!

All things left her, allBut one. Her highborn courtlinessAccompanied her to the end,Beyond the rapture and its eclipse,In a way like an angel's. Of ElviraThe first thing that I saw - such years ago -Was her smile and also it was the last.

I've never stopped wanting to cross the equator, or touch an

Age has a good mind and sorry shanks.

...is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?

To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

There is many a good tune played on an old fiddle.

Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete.

Wisdom is the reward for surviving our own stupidity.

Beauty" and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be "beautiful" to be sexual. That of course is not true at all. The definitions of both "beautiful" and "sexual" constantly change to serve the social order, and the connection between the two is a recent invention.

It's paradoxical that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn't appeal to anyone.

I reflected how easy it is for a man to reduce women of a certain age to imbecility. All he has to do is give an impersonation of desire, or better still, of secret knowledge, for a woman to feel herself a source of power.

Me, I've seen 45 years, and I've only figured out one thing. That's this: if a person would just make the effort, there's something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there's always something you can learn. I read somewhere that they said there's even different philosophies in razors. Fact is, if it weren't for that, nobody'd survive.

One grey hair appeared on my headI plucked it out with my hand.It answered me: "You have prevailed against me alone -What will you do when my army comes after me?

Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.

I don't see why there should be a point where everyone decides you're too old. I'm not too old, and until I decide I'm too old I'll never be too fucking old.

I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge.

As the world is wearie of me so am I of it.

[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.

Real vision dies only when life dies. Once we live, we hope, we yearn for and we aspire to have something!

For youth, sexual love is whim; for the aged, luxury.

The magnitude of any one day is compromised by its passing quickly into the next, a mere moment in time which soon fades into the collective memory of our past.