At twenty-four she imagined with dread that she was growing old.

Our first youth is of no value; for we are never conscious of it, until after it is gone. But sometimes–always, I suspect, unless one is exceedingly unfortunate–there comes a sense of second youth, gushing...

You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just...

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

The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today’s woman has become her “beauty.

Men are like wine-some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age.

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...

They say older folks need less sleep, so I must not be old yet.

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.

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...

I don’t mind pointing out some of the failings of old age, because we are all headed in that direction, unless of course we take our own lives before we become a burden. I’m not...

Do you suppose you will look the same when you are an old woman as you do now? Most folk have three faces—the face they get when they’re children, the face they own when they’re...

In good truth he had started in London with some vague idea that as his life in it would not be of long continuance, the pace at which he elected to travel would be of...

Dear 30 years old, why are you stalking me? Please leave me alone or I’ll be forced to alert the authorities.

There is something the child sees that he does not see; something the child hears that he does not hear; and this something is the most important thing of all. Because he does not understand...

The only consolation, even for someone like him who had been a good man in bed, was sexual peace: the slow, merciful extinction of his venereal appetite. At eighty-one years of age he had enough...

It’s this freedom that’s the key to becoming visible again. Not caring what others think is freeing. Expressing yourself any way you want is freeing. Having opinions, emotional wisdom, spiritual understanding…these things free you. And...

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...

The key to successful aging is to pay as little attention to it as possible.

Jules told them, “I used to be a camper here myself,” but she was confronted with a squeal of feedback, and even when she repeated her words, she saw that it didn’t matter to them...

Young women today feel vulnerable to judgment; if a harsh sentence is passed (or even suspected or projected), it is not her reputation that suffers so much as the stability of her moral universe. They...

Wisdom comes with winters

It was the ultimate cautionary tale, the moral being Don’t fall, as if they were made of glass. In a sense they were–their fragility was irrefutable, medically proven–and yet Emily detested the inevitable rundown of...

More and more, he heard his spine playing stick games through his skin, singing old dusty words, the words of all his years.

90/93-year-old Jacob wonders as he gazes at his aged reflection, ‘When did I stop being me?

I was young once and slender and pretty and I made the most of it. It’s somebody else’s turn now.

Courage has no age.

Janey accuses me of chasing jailbait. She bursts into angry tears, asking if it’s because she’s getting older. It’s true. She’s aging more noticeably every day—while I am standing still. I prefer the stillness here....

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

I don’t know what the old you was like, but the new you, the older you than the old you, is new and fresh.

His hair isn’t turning gray—it’s turning silver, and it’s going up in value. Aging is the best hedge against an inflationary fiat currency.

I am thinking about the way that life can be so slippery; the way that a twelve-year-old girl looking into the mirror to count freckles reaches out toward herself and that reflection has turned into...

I’m older now, which I can’t help, but I’m also fatter, thanks to all the extra helpings.

And since when had I become the guy that things happened to ten years ago?

…A mirror can trick you day by day into thinking you remain looking and existing in one way forever. But a photograph presents you with the truth: it freezes you eternally, existing as a reminder...

Embrace aging.

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...

The surgeons are playing on the myth’s double standard for the function of the body. A man’s thigh is for walking, but a woman’s is for walking and looking “beautiful.” If women can walk but...

It’s not cold in here, you’re just dying.

If we don’t accept any common beliefs, we can’t exist in spacetime. But when we don’t believe in age, at least we don’t have to die because our numbers change. […] When you don’t believe...

..Thirty’s the end of being young, forty is where you stop fooling yourself.

Maybe it’s true that life begins at fifty. But everything else starts to wear out, fall out, or spread out.

The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men’s characters and tempers; for he who is...

At thirty either you are perfect or nothing.

I was 16 when I entered the foster system, and know firsthand the statistics for ‘aging out.’

I just got a rather nasty shock. In looking for something or other I came across the fact that one of my cats is about to be nine years old, and that another of them...

Nothing comes back. The eye sees for a moment, the ear hears, but look, now it is gone.

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.

She went weak in the knees and could barely walk as she followed him, trembling with fear. Her hopes for a happy future with Jordan came crashing down. Whoever had told Jordan she was free...

I’m not opposed to aging – even though society is kinder on men than women when it comes to getting old. How can I look at aging as the enemy? It happens whether I like...