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...

One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living… and with each one, he thinks...

•Judge less–or at least later.•Give new ideas and images a chance.•Understand that everyone has his own truth or her own.•Remember: you are not married to any belief, opinion, or ideology.•Expect to discover something delicious every...

Age and illness made one a dualist

Getting older is a question of coming to terms with the fact that you’ll never know the secrets; and the resulting equilibrium is what gives the illusion of actually knowing them.

I don’t know who to write to anymore… They’ve changed their souls, that’s a way to be disloyal, to forget, to keep talking about something else.

The older you get, the faster time passes in your mind, so use your time according to what is most important.

Are you thankful for not being young?”Yes, sir. If I was young, it would all have to be gone through again, and the end would be a weary way off, don’t you see?…

I love opera. Si. But I am old. No passion in my life, you know? I work, I walk slowly now through my years…but opera! I see, I hear that passion, Eva. Is like the...

Instead of hip hip hooray, how about hip hip replacement? Old age should be celebrated one wobbly step at a time until the top of the stairs topples down onto the topless crowd below.

It is my opinion that enjoying yourself in the present and loosening your definition of time slows the aging process.

Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.

Marriage is like a series of opposing reflections, inverse images getting ever smaller like nesting dolls, each one of your trying to squeeze yourself smaller to fit inside the hopes of the other, until one...

You want to know why God gave us people to love? Because that’s the only way we can understand how he feels about us. Desperate and jealous.

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...

In her daydreams, they aged miraculously, she still trim with a blond ponytail, standing next to her strong, tall husband with his thick, curly dark hair and straight white teeth. Money was never an issue.

I’m not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naive and romantic and idealistic –...

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.

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

It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.

There are only four kinds of people in the world.Those who have been caregivers.Those who are currently caregivers.Those who will be caregivers, and those who will need a caregiver.

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,...

I’m falling into disrepair

We’re always trotting out some story of a ninety-seven-year-old who runs marathons, as if such cases were not miracles of biological luck but reasonable expectations for all. Then, when our bodies fail to live up...

I Didn’t Ask to Be a Senior Citizen (I Was Drafted)

Age doesn’t arrive slowly, it comes in a rush. One day nothing has changed, a week later, everything has. A week may be too long a time, it can happen overnight. You are the same...

Being a child is like nothing. It’s only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

Pre-forty, you can wash your face with Tide and use Vaseline for moisturizer, toss on a little mascara and lip gloss, and you’re a friggin’ cover girl. Those of us on the slippery slope that...

he dared to explore her withered neck w/his fingertips…her hips w/their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins.

When you get older, you think of sadness in a different way. You don’t judge it so harshly.

It is coincidence, I decide, and I am getting old and batty, thinking the universe revolves around me.

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

Before I got married I had six theories about raising children; now, I have six children and no theories.

For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children...

I think she is going to find you too old… Yes that was it, the moment she said it I knew it was true, and the revelation caused me no surprise, it was like the...

Ruth tells me at least once a day that old people, or people getting old, tend to disengage, back away, turn inward, listen only to themselves, and get self-righteous and censorious. And they mustn’t. (I...

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

He did not want to feel old. He did not want to feel the weight of his age hovering above him, mocking him out of the core of a man’s pride, waiting to descend upon...

An old man with overalls walked by; I don’t think old people should wear overalls; it makes them look like shrivelly toddlers.

Though Charles II both craved and enjoyed female companionship till the end of his life, there is no question that by the cold, rainy autumn of 1682 his physical appetites had diminshed considerably. The Duchess...

Where are the eyes of my childhood, those fearful eyes she had thirty years ago, the eyes that made me?

The wisest are the most annoyed at the loss of time.

You’re already older than the last time I saw you, and I just saw you right before I blinked.

I want my last 50 years on this earth to be amazing. Of course, I still want to have 150 years before those last 50 years begin.

The distance to the corner shops of childhood becomes unfathomable, immeasurable; the candy bars have changed. And change has changed.

For me- and for everybody else, probably- this is my first experience growing old, and the emotions I’m having, too, are all first-time feelings. If it were something I’d experienced before, then I’d be able...

Life is brief, young maiden, fall in love; before the crimson bloom fades from your lips, before the tides of passion cool within your hips, for those of you who know no tomorrow. (Gondola no...

Honor LostAmbulant sunshine piercedthe soot covered glass ~the feeble man wandered byin this ritual morning pass …

Then Treece realized a remarkable thing. He understood in a flash that everyone in the world was the same age -no one younger or older than anyone else. He could not understand it, but he...

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...