Growing Older Quotes

Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

College kids seem to look younger with every passing year. It's one of the hazards of growing older. ~ J. A. Jance

I have absolutely no objection to growing older. I am a stroke survivor so I am extremely grateful to be ageing - I have nothing but gratitude for the passing years. I am ageing - lucky, lucky me! ~ Sharon Stone

My favorite movies growing up were things like 'The Wizard of Oz,' but as I got older, I really began to admire people like Steven Soderbergh. ~ Rainey Qualley

When I was growing up, I wanted to be my half-sister Lucy. She was 14 years older than me and was impossibly glamorous. I grew up in awe of her. ~ Emilia Fox

There are things I've given up on
Like recording funny answering machine messages.
It's part of growing older
And the human race as a group has matured along the same lines.
It seems our comedy dates the quickest.
If you laugh out loud at Shakespeare's jokes
I hope you won't be insulted
if I say you're trying too hard.
Even sketches from the original Saturday Night Live
seem slow-witted and obvious now. ~ David Berman

It does not take much to make us realize what fools we are, but the little it takes is long in coming. ~ Flannery O'Connor

The best thing about growing older is that it takes such a long time. ~ Bob Hope

It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Isabelle had always thought of her mind as a garden, a magical place to play as a child, when the grown-ups were having conversations and she was expected to listen politely-- and even, although she hated to admit this, later with Edward, her husband, when listening to the particularities of his carpet salesmanship wore her thin. Every year the garden grew larger, the paths longer and more complicated. Meadows of memories.

Of course, her mental garden hadn't always been well tended. There were the years when the children were young, fast-moving periods when life flew by without time for the roots of deep reflection, and yet she knew memories were created whether one pondered them or not. She had always considered that one of the luxuries of growing older would be the chance to wander through the garden that had grown while she wasn't looking. She would sit on a bench and let her mind take every path, tend every moment she hadn't paid attention to, appreciate the juxtaposition of the one memory against another. ~ Erica Bauermeister

Reclaiming ourselves usually means coming to recognize and accept that we have in us both sides of everything. We are capable of fear and courage, generosity and selfishness, vulnerability and strength. These things do not cancel each other out but offer us a full range of power and response to life. Life is as complex as we are. Sometimes our vulnerability is our strength, our fear develops our courage, and our woundedness is the road to our integrity. It is not an either/or world. It is a real world. In calling ourselves "heads" or "tails," we may never own and spend our human currency, the pure gold of which our coin is made.

But judgment may heal over time. One of the blessings of growing older is the discovery that many of the things I once believed to be my shortcomings have turned out in the long run to be my strengths, and other things of which I was unduly proud have revealed themselves in the end to be among my shortcomings. Things that I have hidden from others for years turn out to be the anchor and enrichment of my middle age. What a blessing it is to outlive your self-judgments and harvest your failures. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute. ~ Ambrose Bierce

One of the greatest glories of growing older is the willingness to ask why and, getting no good answer, deciding to follow my own inclinations and desires. Asking why is the way to wisdom. Why are we supposed to want possessions we don't need and work that seems beside the point and tight shoes and a fake tan? Why are we supposed to think new is better than old, youth and vigor better than long life and experience? Why are we supposed to turn our backs on those who have preceded us and to snipe at those who come after? When we were small children we asked 'Why?' constantly. Asking the question now is more a matter of testing the limits of what sometimes seems a narrow world. One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating conformity. ~ Anna Quindlen

I would love to write something that people would still read 50 or 100 years from now. That comes with growing older, I think. ~ Charles Kuralt

It is a sadness of growing older that some of us lose our ardent appreciation of what is new and different and difficult. ~ Elizabeth Aston

The bones of the oak tree that had stood by the spring branch during my youth were scattered about the ground, pieces of the skeleton of a majestic life that had passed while I was off growing up and old. ~ Dan Groat

In the first woman we love, we love everything. Growing older, we love the woman only. ~ Honore De Balzac

Growing older is not such a big deal for me, despite the fears that older actresses have in Hollywood. When I hit 40, for example, I didn't feel 40 - or whatever that is supposed to feel like. ~ Halle Berry

Growing older is mandatory, but growing up is optional. ~ Heather Brewer

As I got older, I got into all kinds of things in the streets - but for some reason, I never got caught up with the gangs growing up. Everybody dug me, man. I never had problems. ~ Bernie Mac

What I wonder is, maybe the world is growing older. Less all alive. Or is it only my growing older?" "Everybody always wonders that. I don't think, really, anyone could feel the world grow older. Its life is far too long for that." She took a black man of Alice's. "What maybe you learn as you grow older is that the world is old - very old. When you're young, the world seems young. That's all. ~ John Crowley

I like every part of growing older except what happens to your feet.
Written by Avis DeVoto to Julia Child in As Always, Julia ~ Joan Reardon

The phrase 'Boys will be boys,' reflects that a male child is expected to be unpredictable and occasionally troublesome. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

She was fast approaching thirty, and with that impending birthday the way she thought of her own life was beginning to change. When she was twenty, she thought of people in their thirties as, well, old: after all, they had lived as long as she had and half as long again, and so they must have been tired, with the beginnings of aches in their bones and the first intimations of their own mortality.

But the peculiar horror of growing older was not what she expected. In fact, she felt the same age as she had eight years ago, and twenty-eight years of life had managed to compress themselves into a life-span that once comfortably held twenty. It wasn't that she was getting older, but that the years were getting shorter, and were therefore more precious. You had to use them sparingly. ~ Dexter Palmer

When I was growing up, I always saw Karen Millen as a resource for women who were a bit older. ~ Sophie Turner

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) ~ Victoria Moran

As you age you learn even to be happy with what you have. That's one of the few good points of growing older ~ Haruki Murakami

I don't know of any American playwrights who earn the bulk of their living writing plays. Many of the older ones teach, while a growing number of younger ones write for series television. ~ Terry Teachout

How to Be a Poet"

(to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill - more of each
than you have - inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came. ~ Wendell Berry

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 I must say something on every subject and at every opportunity.

Release me from the idea that I must straighten out other peoples' affairs. With my immense treasure of experience and wisdom, it seems a pity not to let everybody partake of it. But thou knowest, Lord, that in the end I will need a few friends.

Keep me from the recital of endless details; give me wings to get to the point.

Grant me the patience to listen to the complaints of others; help me to endure them with charity. But seal my lips on my own aches and pains -- they increase with the increasing years and my inclination to recount them is also increasing.

I will not ask thee for improved memory, only for a little more humility and less self-assurance when my own memory doesn't agree with that of others. Teach me the glorious lesson that occasionally I may be wrong.

Keep me reasonably gentle. I do not have the ambition to become a saint -- it is so hard to live with some of them -- but a harsh old person is one of the devil's masterpieces.

Make me sympathetic without being sentimental, helpful but not bossy. Let me discover merits where I had not expected them, and talents in people whom I had not thought to possess any. And, Lo ~ Anonymous

For the mouths of her children quickly forgot the taste of her nipples, and years ago they had begun to look past her face into the nearest stretch of sky. ~ Toni Morrison

Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older. ~ John Dos Passos

Market research shows that older women like seeing older women in ads, and that younger women do, too - because they see them and are not frightened of growing older. ~ Isabella Rossellini

There are many images and realities of what women are, become, can be - strong, vulnerable, dogged, determined, frail, brave, courageous. The faces of women are at once gentle, reflective, firm; steeped with a sense of self, the lives of women growing older are lives of care, toil, splendour and glory ... the future is not to be feared. ~ Jocelynne Scutt

Know that you are the perfect age. Each year is special and precious, for you shall only live it once. Be comfortable with growing older. ~ Louise Hay

I could have dated younger men during the last five years, but lovely as some of them were, I didn't want to keep wincing inwardly whenever I referred to something that called attention to my age. Or not be able to share the difficulties of growing older, or have to keep explaining references. I'd like to be with someone kind who can hold a conversation and is in my age group. If that's too much to ask, I'll do without. ~ Viv Albertine

In growing older, we become our parents. ~ Julien Green

Those boys at the counter are too dreamy and young to do anything but drool as they watch Gillian. And, to her credit, Gillian is especially kind to them, even when Ephraim, the cook, suggests she kick them out. She understands that theirs might just be the last hearts she will break. When you're thirty-six and tired, when you've been living in places where the temperature rising to a hundred and ten and the air is so dry you have to use gallons of moisturizer, when you've been smacked around, late at night, by a man who loves bourbon, you start to realize that everything is limited, including your own appeal. You begin to look at young boys with tenderness, since they know so little and think they know so much. You watch teenage girls and feel shivers up and down your arms - those poor creatures don't know the first thing about time or agony or the price they're going to have to pay for just about anything. ~ Alice Hoffman

Old is old at any age. Old is when you quit asking questions about this, that, and everything. Old is when you forget how to love-or worse, don't care. Old is when you don't want to dance anymore. Old is when you don't want to learn anything new except how to be old. Old is when people tell you that you are old-and you believe them. ~ Carew Papritz

Growing older, I love only quietness: who need be concerned with the things of this world? Looking back, what better plan than this: returning to the grove. ~ Li Bai

Just because you're grown up and then some doesn't mean settling into the doldrums of predictability. Surprise people. Surprise yourself. (281) ~ Victoria Moran

One of the best parts of growing older? You can flirt all you like since you've become harmless. ~ Liz Smith

There's plenty of emphasis on success in our culture, but we have to help people focus on significance as well. ~ Morton Shaevitz

Age shame is also a problem primarily for women. As women approach and go through menopause, naturally gaining weight as fat-to-muscle ratios shift, they exhibit many of the same anxieties and symptoms that teenage girls do. The process of growing older makes women's 'flaws' more visible and acute, thus, aging, a natural process, becomes frightening, disorienting, and difficult for many women. ~ Soraya Chemaly

Growing older is not upsetting; being perceived as old is. ~ Kenny Rogers

Just 'cause there's snow on the roof doesn't mean there's not a fire inside. ~ Bonnie Hunt

I don't ever remember being afraid of "oldness".

There are things I miss about being younger - chiefly the ability to pull all-nighters and keep working and working well; and being smiled at by girls I didn't know who thought I was cute; and I wish I had the eyesight I had even five years ago… but that stuff feels pretty trivial.

I'm happier than I've been at any time in my life these days. I have a wonderful wife whom I adore, watched three amazing kids grow into two delightful adults and my favourite teenager, an astonishing number of grand life experiences, I've made art I'm proud of, I have real, true, glorious friends, and I've been able to do real good for things I care about, like freedom of speech, like libraries.

Sometimes I'll do something like An Evening With Neil and Amanda, or the 8 in 8 project, and completely surprise myself.

I miss friends who have died, but then, I'm glad that time gave them to me, to befriend, even for a while, and that I was alive to know them. I knew Douglas Adams, and I knew Roger Zelazny, and I knew John M Ford, and I knew Diana Wynne Jones… do you know how lucky that makes me?

Ah, I'm rabbiting on, and I sound a bit more Pollyannaish than I'm intending to sound: I know the downside of age and the downside of time, and I am sure that the view from age 51 is not the view from age 71.

I wish the time hadn't gone so fast, though. And sometimes I wish I'd enjoyed it more on t ~ Neil Gaiman

Want to forget that you're growing older? Walk across green grass with bare feet. ~ Toni Sorenson

Sometimes seeing the changes in one another had the opposite effect and actually comforted them. Seeing that they weren't alone in growing older, they stopped caring, or at least caring so much. But often this seemed to be accompanied by a kind of neutering, a gradual disappearance of anything remotely resembling sexuality, until finally the men in question were more like kindly old aunties than men who liked to fuck other men. ~ Michael Thomas Ford

It seems to me that sometimes the worst parents make the best grandparents. I'm not sure why. Maybe because there is enough of a generational separation that they don't see their grandchildren as an extension of themselves, so their relationship isn't tainted by any self-loathing. And of course, just growing older seems to soften and relax people. Since so many people these days don't seem to start their families until around age forty, I predict there will be less child beating, but more slipped disks from lifting babies out of cribs. Even the father of advanced age who's not inclined to spare the rod is likely to suffer more than his victim: The first punch he throws might well be the last straw for his rotator cuff, reducing his disciplinary options to mere verbal abuse and napping. I'm excited about the next generation! ~ Sarah Silverman

I think people understand things different when they get older. It's not a question of getting soft, or seeing things in the gray areas instead of black and white. I really believe I'm just understanding things different. Better. ~ Jeff Lindsay

When I was younger, I thought my task was to forge ahead and succeed as an individual. But growing older has helped me realize that our success lies in our relationships - with the family we are born into, the friends we make, the people we fall in love with, and the children we have. Sometimes we struggle, sometimes we adapt, and at other times we set a course for others to follow. We are all leaders and followers in our lives. We are constantly learning from and teaching one another. We learn, too, that the most important work is not done by those who seem the most important, but by those who care the most. ~ Caroline Kennedy

It's one of the best parts of growing up and growing older, I think, that feeling that you'll just get through one day, and then the next, that a week from Saturday will take care of itself. I couldn't do that when I was younger. I don't know how much of this knowledge grows out of being female and having lived through layers of serial, often contradictory, lives. ~ Anna Quindlen

For the rest of the night he sat by himself under the elm-tree. Until this moment it had never seemed to him that his magicianship set him apart from other men. But now he had glimpsed the wrong side of something. He had the eeriest feeling - as if the world were growing older around him, and the best part of existence - laughter, love and innocence - were slipping irrevocably into the past. ~ Susanna Clarke

I've always feared growing older because I thought I'd run out of interests, but what this project has taught me is that I've barely scratched the surface of what I could try next. ~ Jen Lancaster

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 older is a wonderful privilege. I want to learn to glorify God in every stage of my life. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

I've wondered since if you can ever truly read a face. It's too easy to see what you so desperately want to see, even if it isn't there. I knew that. ~ Debbie Howells

I've had a lot of 'aha' moments, but the big 'aha' about growing older is the mental freedom. ~ Isabella Rossellini

I realized about a month ago that there's a last time everyone skips across a street. And that most people I know have already skipped for the last time and don't know it.

From here on out it will always be walking or running, growing older and buying things at the store or seeing friends or going to work, but never again will life impel them to skip. When I thought of this, the tragedy of it overwhelmed me so that I skipped all the way home from my friend's house.

Skipping is a strange thing. Because it means something. Like trains make the sound of leaving. Skipping is the motion of being totally free, childlike, abandoned of self and to self.

But I learned something else about skipping. You can't fake it. Or make it happen. It must be something that happens to you. (pp. 152-153) ~ Heather Harpham Kopp

If you don't know how to grow old, don't start learning how to grow old. ~ Carew Papritz

Sometimes I have wrinkles, in the morning. It depends on what kind of night that I had. I accept myself and the way that I am growing older. I have eye bags and some people have proposed to me to take them out but I said no. ~ Antonio Banderas

Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive. ~ Colum McCann

Day by day we increase in age. Step by step we reduce the number of our steps. When you grow old, you shall see life differently and you shall get a better understanding of the journey of life: how you lived it and how you should have lived it! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

One pleasure attached to growing older is that many things seem to be growing younger; growing fresher and more lively than we once supposed them to be. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

Hey presto: time travel. You don't need a time machine, it turns out, you just need a friend to laugh like a teenager. Chronology shivers. ~ Michael Marshall Smith

Growing older, it appears, does not mean growing up. ~ Michael Marshall Smith

If you were a pretty boy pop singer, it would wreck you, growing older. ~ Bob Geldof

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. ~ Sebastian Horsley

Old age is like an opium dream. Nothing seems real except the unreal. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Just as a river flows to the sea, growing older and slowing down are just part of the natural scenery, and I've got to accept it. It might not be a very natural process and what I discover as a result might not be all that pleasant. But what choice do I have, anyway? In my own way, I've enjoyed my life so far, even if I can't say I've fully enjoyed it. ~ Haruki Murakami

For me, the moment the mic is on and it's rolling, it's impossible to vocally relax for some reason. But one day, I'm going to be able to sing the way I sang when I was a little kid, completely open and free. That's, I think, the one thing that's changed: Growing older, I'm not ashamed to hear my voice. ~ Cat Power

I even had this idea that the knife stopped working, that after a certain time it just stops working for you, when your number is up. I thought maybe it was me who had done it. That I killed him just by growing older, and being ready to replace him. ~ Kendare Blake

They stood in the courtyard of Swangard Palace, too cold to be comfortable despite the sun, and they looked fully on one another, knowing that they were friends, and would always be.

A lot of water under this bridge too, Mark thought, with something like awe. He was growing older. Old enough to feel the current of what had been flowing under him, leading to his future. Old enough to look back over his shoulder, and see his past behind him, and grieve for what was gone, and honour its memory.

He felt, suddenly, how much it would hurt him if Val died; felt an echo of that pain, knowing that the Valerian he had known, fluffy and peering and hapless and altogether wonderful: this Valerian was already dying. Not physically, of course, but the man he remembered from that first night in Swangard Palace would be gone the next time they met, though his ghost would linger on in Val forever, and in their memories.

Three cheers for ghosts, Mark thought. Three cheers for the dead.

Of course Val would be much the same: better, even. As full of wonder and delight, with big pockets full of puzzles and fascinating stories about the lives of ants and ingenious designs for windmills that would do your washing. And they would still be friends, excellent friends. It could even be better next time.

But it would never be the same. ~ Sean Stewart

To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life taught me. It is the most-requested column I've ever written. ~ Regina Brett

Youth is but the painted shell within which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the spirit of a man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some than in others. ~ Lew Wallace

In his eyes I forget time, burnt diaries, midnight, and ballads. I forget that I am growing older. One day I will be an old woman. ~ Abigail George

The sooner growing older is stripped of reflexive dread, the better equipped we are to benefit from the countless ways in which it can enrich us. ~ Ashton Applewhite

Lively once, expansive and affectionate, in growing older she had become (after the fashion of wine that, exposed to air, turns to vinegar) ill-tempered, grumbling, irritable. She ~ Gustave Flaubert

You can't possibly enjoy growing older unless you make peace with where you are right now. ~ J. Ellsworth Kalas

Instead, he sat in the parlor of his family's Fifth Avenue mansion, growing older by the minute just like everybody else. ~ Anna Godbersen

Fear of dying is human. Fear of aging is cultural. ~ Ashton Applewhite

It's no use growing older if you only learn new ways of misbehaving yourself. ~ Hector Hugh Munro

With age comes wisdom and with wisdom comes age. I guess I too am growing older. ~ Amanda L. Moritz

Writing music obviously comes from being inspired by things, and big changes in your life, and relationships and growing older and being more independent. ~ Tristan Prettyman

Growing old becomes clear to you at a certain point. I think it's after the age of 70 you realize - you begin to actually be convinced - you're growing older. ~ Leonard Cohen

Despite what anti-aging ads say, growing older can be better. I feel better in my skin, 100 percent. You have greater effects of gravity, but the better sense of yourself you have is something I wouldn't trade. Women who lie about their age - 'why?' ~ Demi Moore

The real evidence of growing older is that things level off in importance ... Days are no longer jagged peaks to climb; time is a meadow, and we move over it with level steps. ~ Gladys Taber

There is no barrier to Indiana Jones growing older. It's not an age-based character. We can't bang him up as much as we used to, maybe. But I guess I can pretend to have the capacity as well as I pretended before. ~ Harrison Ford

Growing older is an opportunity for you to increase your value and competence as the neural connections in your hippocampus and throughout your brain increase, weaving into your brain and body the wisdom of a life well lived, which allows you to stop living out of fear of disappointing others and being imperfect. Ageless living is courageous living. It means being undistracted by the petty dramas of life because you have enough experience to know what's not worth worrying about and what ought to be your priorities. ~ Christiane Northrup

I'm not a grownup, just a kid who has been around for a while. ~ Millie Florence

I don't know when Tiger Lily stopped growing older; I can't pinpoint that moment. But I do know I never saw her visibly age beyond the days when she was with Peter. I like to think her growing stopped the day they were on the plateau, watching the horses. ~ Jodi Lynn Anderson

O Day after day we can't help growing older.
Year after year spring can't help seeming younger.
Come let's enjoy our winecup today,
Nor pity the flowers fallen. ~ Wang Wei

I want to hold on tight to everything and everyone I cherished and, at the same time, saw in a way I never had before that living on this earth, growing older, and growing up in the true sense of the word is really about learning how to let go. ~ Katrina Kenison

I love the optimism on the shores of youth, where time hasn't yet eroded faith. ~ Amy Neftzger

Mrs. Weston's friends were all made happy by her safety; and if the satisfaction of her well-doing could be increased to Emma, it was by knowing her to be the mother of a little girl. She had been decided in wishing for a Miss Weston. She would not acknowledge that it was with any view of making a match for her, hereafter, with either of Isabella's sons; but she was convinced that a daughter would suit both father and mother best. It would be a great comfort to Mr. Weston, as he grew older - and even Mr. Weston might be growing older ten years hence - to have his fireside enlivened by the sports and the nonsense, the freaks and the fancies of a child never banished from home; and Mrs. Weston - no one could doubt that a daughter would be most to her; and it would be quite a pity that any one who so well knew how to teach, should not have their powers in exercise again. ~ Jane Austen

When I was growing up, I would go hang out with older guys at night in blues clubs. ~ Gary Clark, Jr.

Growing older is a precious commodity. Only a few can endure to achieve that distinguished distinction and quality. ~ Debasish Mridha

Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty. ~ Coco Chanel

You seem sad, Coriel."

I nodded. "The world makes me sad these days. Things I would not have noticed a year ago seem dreadful to me now. Is that a function of growing older? And will everything seem more dreadful every year, from now until I die? ~ Sharon Shinn

There were, of course, compensatory advantages to growing older. 'As I must leave off being young,' Jane admitted, 'I find many Douceurs … I am put on the Sofa near the Fire & can drink as much wine as I like. ~ Lucy Worsley