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.

Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am...

Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table–it is running among...

It was dawning on the wizards that they were outside the University, at night and without permission, for the first time in decades. A certain suppressed excitement crackled from man to man. Any watch trained...

This is the true wine of astonishment: “We are not over when we think we are.

haves” being the ones she’s got and maybe not getting anymore.

Never had anyone said, “Listen. Life is short. Pretend your body is still in its twenties. Jump for the brass ring. Swing for those bleachers. Dive into the deep end of the pool. Act like...

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,...

I tried being 29, and it worked for about a year, but finally I just had to get rid of it.

REFUSALWhen you refuseto tell your weightand age,people knowyou’re fat and old.

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...

I have to start loving what comes next and stop hating I won’t be a part of it.

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.

The most important thing I can tell you about aging is this: If you really feel that you want to have an off-the-shoulder blouse and some big beads and thong sandals and a dirndl skirt...

When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way...

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...

it had been a winter of deadening seriousness, when all the illusions and bright dreams of my early twenties had withered and died. I did not yet have the interior resources to dream new dreams;...

In recent years a smaller share of young adults has been employed than at any time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking such trends in 1948. So it’s not surprising that this generation...

I don’t ask for your pity, but just for your understanding – not even that – no. Just for some recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.

Wart meets Merlin for the first time – only for Merlin, who lives backwards, it’s the last time. The old wizard weeps and the boy can’t understand why. It’s a powerful expression of the gulf...

Never has nostalgia held stronger sway; never has the belief in the redemptive possibilities of the future seemed so laughable.

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

I do not dye my hair blackso as to be young again and sin againbut because people dye their clothes black in mourning,so I have dyed my hair black, mourning for my old age.- Rudagi

The easiest way to get old is to be technologically behind…

Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.

Most people live life backwards. They party and kill time in their youth, when they’re strong and have the energy to accomplish great things. And then they’re older, they try to get things done, but...

It is warm, I am alive, I am calm and sad, I hardly know why. In this existence so even, so tranquil, and so gentle as I have here, I am in an element that...

Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the...

It has been my face. It’s got older still, or course, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It’s scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn’t collapsed,...

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

I’ve reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.

One of the odd things about middle age…was the strange decisions a man discovers he’s made by not really making them.

The surgeons’ market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women’s faces or bodies that social change won’t cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.

Depression is a red herring,” said Nariman. “I think a lot about the past, it’s true. But at my age, the past is more present than the here and now. and there is not much...

Let me tell you something, honey. When your boobs fall south and that pretty skin of yours looks like you’ve been tanning in a nuclear war zone, you’ll see what I mean about independence. When...

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.

Die Jahre, die man auf dem Buckel hatte, waren zu nichts mehr nutze: Man brauchte sie ungelebt, einen ganzen Vorrat davon. Denn je älter man wurde, desto mehr Dinge gingen zu Bruch.

Age had drained the color from her eyes the way darkness drains the color from everything

Og engang skal hver eneste mann på jord erkjenne, at det var i ungdommen han kunne gjort alt, men ikke gjorde det. Engang skal han erkjenne den bitreste av alle sannheter: at livet ikke kan...

In my youth I loved climbing and scrambling up rocks and mountains: now I seldom intrude on the dweller of a second story, and my greatest enemy or friend may avoid me altogether on the...

I’m willing to die for the woman I love. I just want to take 75 years to do it.

Everyone in the world ages at exactly the same rate and time. We’re all getting older in unison.

The old man had been tanned by the light of too many beer signs, and it just goes to show that you can’t live on three packs of Chesterfields and a fifth of bourbon a...

Youth. I don’t seek it through another because I have it within; it’s a state of mind, a spirit that is free, and a mind that is playful. The shell of my being is altered...

You can do this (this thing, where your body will cease to produce hormones and your skin, hair, muscles and bones… basically every part of you will notice, go into withdrawals, and stage a coup)....

At 11, I could say ‘I am sodium’ (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.

Suddenly it seemed to me that I looked back from a great distance on that smile and saw it all again – the smile and the day, the whole sunny, sad, funny, wonderful day and...

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

A face-lift is a woman’s attempt to lower the odds of the next person accurately guessing her age.

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...