The closer I get, the faster I have to go. Otherwise, I might be late to the very place where I’m not even expected. Adding to my tardiness is the fact that I don’t even...

If I knew I was going to live so long, I’d have taken better care of myself.

She was a pretty girl, with a pointed face and blue-black hair. But she was an untidy, a dusty sort of girl, and you felt that in a few years something might go wrong; she...

It’s finished. Everything went past, without me.

It is lovely to meet an old person whose face is deeply lined, a face that has been deeply inhabited, to look in the eyes and find light there.

Why does the social order feel the need to defend itself by evading the fact of real women, our faces and voices and bodies, and reducing the meaning of women to these formulaic and endlessly...

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

Our society on a whole is trained to see young women. There are proportionally far more of them on magazine covers, on TV, and in films than int the actual population. As a result, we...

Reading lives is the primary activity. Reading literature, although we engage in it more intentionally and more mindfully, is the secondary one. We are able to do the latter only insofar as we are already...

Old is always fifteen years from now.

…I have decided that I shan’t sweat the small stuff. Sense and sensibility will, I assume, come in their own time. If indeed they ought to come. And in the meantime, I shall continue to...

Fighting makes us feel alive, until it kills us. If it doesn’t kill us, the pain of sitting alone with ourselves, quietly, under constant assault by our own thoughts and memories of war can easily...

A tree with red leaves is like an old man with gray hair. Likewise, my love for you was blue, but now it’s orange, and that’s a compliment.

She was an object lesson on the essential luck, whatever hardships may come their way, of those born able to make things.

Here is what happens in middle age: Some friends and acquaintances who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad.

And the view was suddenly clear to me. The world opened out to its grim beyonds and I realized that, at forty, one must learn the rigors of acceptance. Capitalize it: Acceptance. I needed to...

When I was suddenly thrust into what everyone calls menopause (Orchids) earlier than my body planned, I decided someone needed to take charge on so many levels. It was time to not only change the...

Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.

Time erodes us all.

What editors are obliged to appear to say that men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women.

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

Someday, I suppose I’ll give up, and sit in the rocking chair. But I’ll probably be rocking fast, because I don’t know what I’ll do without a job.

Wow. Look at the lines in your face, Missy. It’s like your bitterness just dug in and stayed.

now that one was mature then, said Peter, one could watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling, he said. No, that is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply,...

Living this long’s not as wonderful as people think. I mean, you get the same amount of youth as everyone else, but a great big extra helping of being very old and deaf and creaky.

If all women revealed their age, men would have nothing to hide from each other.

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child’s perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted...

I’m getting old, thought Eileen Calder. Old and worn out and cynical. And being cynical is a lot worse than being old or worn out.

The old me is younger than the me now. Ah, but that’s life, no?

I’m older today than yesterday, and therefore I must be more mature.

George Macdonald said, ‘If you knew what God knows about death you would clap your listless hands’, but instead I find old people in North America just buying this whole youth obsession. I think growing...

Sitting in the wicker rocking chair with her interrupted work in her lap, Amaranta watched Aureliano José, his chin covered with foam, stropping his razor to give himself his first shave. His blackheads bled and...

Heyday, now that is a funny word ain’t it? Part of a heyday is, you don’t never know you are having yourself one till later when it’s all over with, long gone.

I have a friend who likes to date younger women because their stories are shorter. Old men like us, our stories are longer.

It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more...

Time erodes people, and when you are old enough you weigh nothing. It’s comforting to know that I will never be as frail.

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...

Youth was the time for happiness, its only season; young people, leading a lazy, carefree life, partially occupied by scarcely absorbing studies, were able to devote themselves unlimitedly to the liberated exultation of their bodies....

I can’t see that Danish episode as an adventure, or a crisis survived, or a serious quest for anything definable. It was just another happening like today’s luncheon, something I got into and got out...

Of course, you were crowned with laurel in the beginning, your gold hair was wreathed with laurel, but the gold is thinning and the laurel has withered. Face it – pitiful monster.

I find no reason to think that aging is genetically determined. Genes do not provide information for the development of the individual beyond growth and the reproductive process in which the genes are transmitted to...

My friends scoffed at my anxiety and said dumb things like, ‘Fifty is the new forty!’ Which just made me realize that there are a whole lot of other people who suck at math as...

Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life – it has given me me . It has provided time and experience and failures and triumphs and time-tested friends who have helped...

One of the many problems with aging is that you begin to think of yourself as a slob because your birthday suit can never be cleaned or pressed no matter how spotted or wrinkled it...

We are on red alert when it comes to how we are perceiving ourselves as a species. There’s no desire to be an adult. Adulthood is not a goal. It’s not seen as a gift....

You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.

Old Age- You can tell when you’re getting old when you stop taking drugs for fun and start taking them to keep you alive.-character Jackson Rockenberger (Broken)

It happens to everyone and it happens fast.

That’s what happens when you’re thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.