And I’m not going to get any thinner or any younger, my ass is going to hit the ground, if it hasn’t already–and I want to be with somebody who can still see me in here. I’m still in here. And I don’t want to be resented or despised for changing…I’d rather be alone.

As I get older, I just prefer to knit.

Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age.

As long as I am breathing, in my eyes, I am just beginning.

Aging is a mortal term that my immortal spirit doesn’t quite grasp.

LADY BRACKNELLThirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years. Lady Dumbleton is an instance in point. To my own knowledge she has been thirty-five ever since she arrived at the age of forty, which was...

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...

In terms of days and moments lived, you’ll never again be as young as you are right now, so spend this day, the youth of your future, in a way that deflects regret. Invest in yourself. Have some fun. Do something important. Love somebody extra. In one sense, you’re just a kid, but a kid...

Just because you’re grown up and then some doesn’t mean settling into the doldrums of predictability. Surprise people. Surprise yourself. (281)

The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill. Shake down all the grains of Time—the big grains of centuries, and the small grains of years, and the tiny grains of hours and minutes—and the clock pulverized them, slid Time silently out in all directions in a fine pollen, carried by cold winds to blanket the...

We’re all fools,” said Clemens, “all the time. It’s just we’re a different kind each day. We think, I’m not a fool today. I’ve learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we...

For most of her life she just expected things would work out, that people would be kind. Now she recognized her good fortune for what it was. She’d been lucky in so much, it had left her woefully unprepared for old age.

Something I really enjoy about older couples is that they really have given up on getting everything right. They don’t sweat the imperfections.

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...

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...

He doesn’t know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief.

I am persuaded that feminism is not at the root of political correctness. The actual source is much nastier and dares not speak its name, which is simply hatred for old people. The question of domination between men and women is relatively secondary—important but still secondary—compared to what I tried to capture in this novel,...

And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.

With age I have voluntarily chosen certain limitations. I don’t have the energy to start over again. To learn new skills or fight my own personality or figure out diesel engines.

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.

Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence.Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance.Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence.Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance.

Beauty is not who you are on the outside, it is the wisdom and time you gave away to save another struggling soul, like you.

Sometimes the monotony of bingo and sing alongs, ancient dusty people parked in the hallway in wheelchairs makes me long for death, particularly when — remember that I’m one of the ancient dusty people, filed away like some worthless chotski.

Sometimes when you get older—and I’m not talking about you, I’m talking generally, because everyone ages differently—things you think on and wish on start to seem real. And then you believe them, and before you know it they’re a part of your history, and if someone challenges you on them and says they’re not true—why,...

My son, you are just an infant now, but on that day when the world disrobes of its alluring cloak, it is then that I pray this letter is in your hands.Listen closely, my dear child, for I am more than that old man in the dusty portrait beside your bed. I was once a...

Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image....

I learned not to fear infinity,The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,The wheel turning away from itself,The sprawl of the wave,The on-coming water.

The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out altogether.

To flatter a young man, tell him that you thought that he was older than he is. To flatter an old woman, tell her that you thought that she was younger than she is.

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

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

Self-denial can lock women into a smug and critical condescension to other, less devout women.According to Appel, cult members develop…”an attitude of moral superiority, a contempt for secular laws, rigidity of thought, and the diminution of regard for the individual.” A premium is placed on conformity to the cult group; deviation is penalized. “Beauty” is...

The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold.Or, if your ad revenue or your seven-figure salary or your privileged sexual status depend on it, it is an operable condition.

Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient pool, into man-made women.

Sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism, since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for artificially buoying up this market is our heart’s desire. The beauty myth keeps a gap of fantasy between men and women. That gap is made...

Where woman do not fit the Iron Maiden [societal expectations/assumptions about women’s bodies], we are now being called monstrous, and the Iron Maiden is exactly that which no woman fits, or fits forever. A woman is being asked to feel like a monster now though she is whole and fully physically functional. The surgeons are...

Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty “fixes” that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under the beauty myth, and there is no great social or economic incentive for women to live a long time. A...

What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?

At least a third of a woman’s life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition–so that women will only feel healthy if we are two thirds of the women we could be. How can an “ideal” be about women if...

A consequence of female self-love is that the woman grows convinced of social worth. Her love for her body will be unqualified, which is the basis of female identification. If a woman loves her own body, she doesn’t grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness, she champions its rights. It’s true...

Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible.

When we’re young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren’t that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I’ve...

I had forgotten such innocence exists,/forgotten how it feels/ to live with neither calendars nor clocks

Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.

(You know you’ve reached middle-age if…) when you hear ‘Boys in the hood’ you think of the Ku Klux Klan.

My aunt must have been perfectly well aware that she would not see Swann again, that she would never leave her own house any more, but this ultimate seclusion seemed to be accepted by her with all the more readiness for the very reason which, to our minds, ought to have made it more unbearable;...

Visurile împlinite ne îmbătr nesc.

[The thief-taker] was conspicuous by his age, I should estimate he is in his middle fifties, and by a bearing, I am tempted to call it dignity, wanting in the others. He has a good head of hair, only a bit thin on top, blond going grey, and sea green eyes. He has an excellently...

I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car.I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.

A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.Wrong, I want to say.In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.