My aunt must have been perfectly well aware that she would not see Swann again, that she would never leave her own house any more, but this ultimate seclusion seemed to be accepted by her...

We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn’t even know it.

Whatever is deeply, essentially female–the life in a woman’s expression, the feel of her flesh, the shape of her breasts, the transformations after childbirth of her skin–is being reclassified as ugly, and ugliness as disease....

Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her “Health”: if public discourse were really concerned with women’s health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.

I envy you, your youth. Every woman is still a dream, a thing that can’t exist. Even when you touch her, a creature too beautiful to be real or to cause real pain. It’s different...

A twenty-three-year-long study in Ohio determined that people who saw growing older as something positive lived a whopping seven and a half years longer than those who didn’t. (356)

I once laughed at the vanity of women of thirty or forty who whitened their ruddy old skin with lead, but now I know such salves are not disguises for old crones who wish to...

Hester, meanwhile, says we should live all of life back to front. We should be born old and age younger. Our baptism should be a ritual of our funeral. We should die as infants, content...

My wisdom is as spurned as chaos. What is my nothingness, compared to the amazement that awaits you?

So where does that leave me? I like hosting the show. I feel so . . .” She searched for the word. “So whole when I’m there.” Once started, the thoughts spilled. “I didn’t plan...

And the beauty of a woman, with passing years only grows!

Lines don’t make beautiful women less beautiful

My 30th birthday will be arriving in a few months. It’s not arriving unexpectedly, I just wish it would have given me more of an advance notice, say another 30 years.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

No one likes to talk about the positive parts of getting older and aging into orphanhood, how with your parents you often bury a lot of things you were never able to confront or fix...

You remember having friends who used to lampoon the world so effortlessly, crouching at the verge of every joke and waiting to pounce on it, and you remember how they changed as they grew older...

I am a lonely man,” he said again that evening. “And is it not possible that you are also a lonely person? But I am an older man, and I can live with my loneliness,...

Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.

Today I am 65 years old. I still look good. I appreciate and enjoy my age. A lot of people resist transition and therefore never allow themselves to enjoy who they are. Embrace the change,...

A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men’s appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes–all of which we do. The fact...

The machine itself receives some of the same feelings. With over 27,000 on it it’s getting to be something of a high-miler, and old-timer, although there are plenty of older ones running. But over the...

Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made...

Never give up hope. If you do, you’ll be dead already.–Dementia Patient, Rose from The Inspired Caregiver

Sometimes the monotony of bingo and sing alongs, ancient dusty people parked in the hallway in wheelchairs makes me long for death, particularly when — remember that I’m one of the ancient dusty people, filed...

Napping is divine, but I no longer have all the time in the world.

For youth, sexual love is whim; for the aged, luxury.

Some women I talk to are so frightened of growing old. I sense their desperation. They say things like I m not going to live to be old I m not going to live to...

Past age fifty-five, I experienced the advancement of exquisite fabric choices, paint distinctions that were celestial in scope, yet so many other man-made objects, such as people, became drab, redundant and boring.

You may be temporarily young, but you’ll forever be childish.” Then I put gum in her hair.

The last 33 years of my life have been a blur, like a hummingbird’s beating wings. Time flies, but not backwards, like a hummingbird can.

John had written that normal fantasy (“normal” in the T.S. Kuhn sense) was written for the moderately educated class suffering from ennui. It was for folks stuck doing dull, repetitive work, growing old while not...

…as he was combing his hair in front of the mirror…only then did he understand that a man knows when he is growing older because he begins to look like his father.

I don’t see why there should be a point where everyone decides you’re too old. I’m not too old, and until I decide I’m too old I’ll never be too fucking old.

[The thief-taker] was conspicuous by his age, I should estimate he is in his middle fifties, and by a bearing, I am tempted to call it dignity, wanting in the others. He has a good...

You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven’t found meaning . Because if you’ve found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward. You...

Her face is silting up, like a pond; layers are accumulating. Every once in a while, when she can afford the time, she spends a few days at a spa north of the city, drinking...

Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never...

The problem with aging was not that death was near, for death was always near. The problem with aging was that a woman began to carry too many memories within her.

One of the many troubles of growing older is that it gets progressively harder to find a famous historical figure who hadn’t yet amounted to anything by the time he was your age.

I grow old … I grow old …I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

It is only the rooms of the present I wish to inhabit.

Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all...

At eighty things do not occur; they recur.

There should be an age limit for patients, he thinks as he takes off his shoes. You just have to say to them, “You lived long enough. From now on, think of what’s left as...

As we get older, it matters less where you are and more who you’re with.

A tip for increased sales or in situations of life or death: Try to always refer to the lady as Miss. or Ms. Using the term: Ma’am could piss her off.

[O]ver the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a...

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...