Life is a do-it-yourself project.

They were people whose lives were slow, who did not see themselves growing old, or falling sick, or dying, but who disappeared little by little in their own time, turning into memories, mists from other days, until they were absorbed into oblivion.

I used to be a poet.My words were traded in marketplaces like pieces of gold.Merchants bought my verses for as much as they paid for saffron and Indian jade.Now I am old…drunk on wine and candle fumes.Alone in this barren room, I speak my psalms to the night air so as to entertain moths before...

I know I do everything. I’ve been doing everything for an awfully long time, and I’ve seen and lived as hard as I could, and it’s been unbelievable, I tell you, unbelievable. But now I have the feeling everything is gliding away from me, and I don’t remember, and I don’t care, and yet now...

Even when you don’t see old age coming, you can wave it goodbye

Do you remember those days? Back porch, sunshine, mason jars” – she paused at remembered sweetness – “we were so foolish then…thinking there was a big ol’ world out there to conquer.

Men’s lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end...

Almost any age is better than twenty-two.

I bargained with Life for a penny,And Life would pay no more, However I begged at eveningWhen I counted my scanty store;For Life is just an employer,He gives you what you ask,But once you have set the wages,Why, you must bear the task.I worked for a menial’s hire,Only to learn, dismayed,That any wage I had...

WisdomWhen I have ceased to break my wings Against the faultiness of things, And learned that compromises wait Behind each hardly opened gate, When I can look Life in the eyes, Grown calm and very coldly wise, Life will have given me the Truth, And taken in exchange — my youth.

True Relations never break and relation which breaks were never true

To all, I would say how mistaken they are when they think that they stop falling in love when they grow old, without knowing that they grow old when they stop falling in love.

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 day wore on, and all these bright colours subsided, and assumed a quieter tint, like young hopes softened down by time, or youthful features by degrees resolving into the calm and serenity of age. But they were scarcely less beautiful in their slow decline, than they had been in their prime; for nature gives...

I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book.

I used to look at Jinks and marvel at her smooth complexion, but over the years I have come to realise that she has been spared wrinkles by virtue of never having succumbed to heavy thought.

it is all clearer now than it was then. Rhea would say it is the vivid fabrications of an ageing mind. More likely, though, it is the clarity that comes from ageing – from the natural process of releasing the mind from imagined futures, and allow the present and paste to take their rightful place...

When it’s all said and done remember, “You are only as old as you look.

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.

The OakLive thy Life, Young and old,Like yon oak,Bright in spring, Living gold;Summer-rich Then; and thenAutumn-changedSoberer-hued Gold again.All his leaves Fall’n at length,Look, he stands,Trunk and bough Naked strength.

Miu let age naturally rise to the surface, accepted it for what it was, and made her peace with it.

Everything was brighter and more colorful in those years, as if my youth was ending in an explosion of unreal passion. Memories like these make my life sacred and holy.

Anyway, those things would not have lasted long.The experience of the years shows it to me.But Destiny arrived in some haste and stopped them.The beautiful life was brief.But how potent were the perfumes,On how splendid a bed we lay,To what sensual delight we gave our bodies.An echo of the days of pleasure,An echo of the...

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

Unattached and aimless, these old men are always infatuated with little certainties and regularities such as those that ordered the life of Mr. Krupper as seen from outside. Habit is living. Anything unexpected reminds them of death.(“Hard Candy”)

Doesn’t seem quite real. It’s not meaningful. I can’t quite imagine myself being 73. That’s the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It’s weird.

I was thinking not very long ago about the difference between the people we “grew up” with vs. the people we’re “growing old” with – not always being one and the same – and how time (and the memories we forge together) really does strengthen pretty much all of our relationships/friendships (whether they had started...

You’re never too old to be young.

God is like a mirror, consistent, stable, unchanging; reflecting His image of us, that is always changing.

With her slim, tight figure, a little makeup and she’d easily pass for late twenties. But she didn’t make the effort. Miu let age naturally rise to the surface, accepted it for what it was, and made her peace with it.

Without knowing why or how, I found myself in love with this strange Wanderess. Maybe I was just in love with the dream she was selling me: a life of destiny and fate; as my own life up until we met had been so void of enchantment. Those things: mystery, fate, enchantment… they are things...

Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray.

One Life With Many Names, Childhood, Boyhood, Manhood And Old, Then? Then! All Unknown, Uncertain Destination….

Seven Ages: first puking and mewlingThen very pissed-off with your schoolingThen fucks, and then fightsNext judging chaps’ rightsThen sitting in slippers: then drooling.

Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved – to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty would be used like that…

Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?

I can’t get my knickers in a twist about my age and ageing in an industry that caters to the ids of 14-year-olds.

It’s not that I’m particularly worried about growing old. Nor am I all that bothered about wrinkles, grey hair and all that. BUT. Major but. I don’t like the idea of dying – not when i have so much left to do! That, people, is the rather unwelcome realisation that strikes me now and then,...

When did my youth slip away from me? I suddenly thought. It was over, wasn’t it? Seemed just like yesterday I was still only half grown up. Huey Lewis and the News had a couple of hit songs then. Not so many years ago. And now here I was, inside a closed circuit, spinning my...

The youthful body untouched decays the fastest, for no living hands record its splendor; and here youth and time are wasted.

A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can’t make old friends.

When the years are dying in the arms of your life,the earth is in pain moving around the sun.

Time is a function of memory; what does not pass through a smile flies away through dark. Celebrating passing time applies to the successful ones. Cheer on your birthday, you’re among the lucky ones.

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.

… forty’s nothing, at fifty you’re in your prime, sixty’s the new forty, and so on.

…inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.

In the old pieces of furniture almost as in the old paintings, dwells the charm of the past, of the faded which becomes stronger in a man when he reaches an advanced age.

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate: I think they have no portion in us after We pass the gate. They are not long, the days of wine and roses: Out of a misty dream Our path emerges for a while, then closes Within a dream.

How old would you be if you didn;t know how old you are?

I looked at the group of human remains that languished in the corner and smiled at them. It occurred to me that their very presence was testimony to the moral emptiness of the universe and the mechanical brutality with which it destroys the parts it no longer needs.