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...

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...