Aging and its evidence remain life’s most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never...

We had a good marriage,” he said. “I just thought it would be so much longer.” Then he shrugged, and coughed away a sob, this thin man in his sixties with the soft androgynous face...

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

It was difficult to imagine that a full day hadn’t yet passed since we boarded the airliner in New York. I paused. Medieval man believed that one was placed beyond the touch of time, and...

When you are a young person, you are like a young creek, and you meet many rocks, many obstacles and difficulties on your way. You hurry to get past these obstacles and get to the...

The joy of reading with our children doesn’t stop as they, and we, get older; it simply changes.

It was painful to contemplate the distance between the future of accomplishment I’d imagined for myself twenty years earlier, and the reality…it was painful to understand that the cushion of exceptionality invoked by the drug...

Good thing I’m aging, otherwise I’d be dead.

The older you get, the closer your loves are to the surface. She was breathing rarefied air, the ether you come upon at high altitudes. I understood finally how long-held grievances and petty smallnesses might...

Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it...

When you’re young, you always feel that life hasn’t yet begun—that “life” is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays—whenever. But then suddenly you’re old and the scheduled life...

…wear a hat and some old lady shoes, and you can do whatever you want.

I’m about to cross a time zone, and I feel younger already. If I keep traveling west, maybe I can catch up to the love of my youth.

Prayer of an Anonymous Abbess:Lord, thou knowest better than myself that I am growing older and will soon be old. Keep me from becoming too talkative, and especially from the unfortunate habit of thinking that...

A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child....

I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)

Today I speak to my bones as I would speak to a dog. I want to go up the stairs, I tell them. Up, up, up, with one leg dragging. Is the ache deep in...

In a sexual double standard as to who receives consumer protection, it seems that if what you do is done to women in the name of beauty, you may do what you like. It is...

It’s strange how in childhood it feels like tomorrow won’t come until the end of forever, but in adulthood it feels like the end of forever could come tomorrow.

After 25 the only thing you’ll be precocious at is death.

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...

All are dead, and ourselves left alone amidst a new generation whom we know not, and who know us not.

As we age we begin to grasp at youthful bliss like a life raft in a sea of harsh reality.

The curse of mortality. You spend the first portion of your life learning, growing stronger, more capable. And then, through no fault of your own, your body begins to fail. You regress. Strong limbs become...

People don’t get gentler as they get older but rather, harder.

But I knew it was pure masturbation, because down in my gut I wanted nothing more than a clean bed and a bright room and something solid to call my own at least until I...

Frankie,” she said softly, “do you know what my idea of heaven is? A place where the windows are always clean, and the people I want can always come to dinner.

When you’re a young man like yourself, life is full of wonders. Everything new. Everything an adventure. But as the years roll on, things become ordinary. Colors lose their vibrance. Stars lose their glitter. You...

[Women’s magazines]ignore older women or pretend that they don’t exist; magazines try to avoid photographs of older women, and when they feature celebrities who are over sixty, ‘retouching artists’ conspire to ‘help’ beautiful women look...

I need to stop saying LMAO because that is precisely what’s happening; I wish I could rewind time by two decades, immortalize my derriere in wax, and then kiss it goodbye.

They say that your powers of memory are at their peak when you’re 26, and it’s all downhill after that.

Mother is fading for him, her face receding into shadows, her memory diminishing with each passing day, leaking like sand from a fist.

this one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood” “Normal Time” in New California Writing

The beauty myth sets it up this way: A high rating as an art object is the most valuable tribute a woman can exact from her lover. If he appreciates her face and body because...

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

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...