aging

When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself.

Rich old people are more attractive than poor old people, so by all means, try to get rich before age sets in. Otherwise, you'll just be playing catch-up for the rest of your life and that will just wear you out, let me tell you.

Getting older comes with abilities. Being old comes with disabilities.

I think it's reasonable to suppose that one could oscillate between being biologically 20 and biologically 25 indefinitely.

It happens to everyone and it happens fast.

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 that aging seemed to bring, as though all the hormones were finally mixed up in a big coed pot because it just didn't matter anymore.

In the old pieces of furniture almost as in the old paintings, dwells the charm of the past, of the faded which becomes stronger in a man when he reaches an advanced age.

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 want to see more, do more. You can't wait until sixty-five.

Wart meets Merlin for the first time _ only for Merlin, who lives backwards, it's the last time. The old wizard weeps and the boy can't understand why. It's a powerful expression of the gulf between the ancient and the young.

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 doing the former. As with narrative in general, then, reading our lives is not merely a metaphor for how we make sense of our lives. It is how we make sense of our lives.

It must be murder to be an aging beauty, a former Tadzio, to see your future as an ignored spectator rushing up to meet you like the hard pavement. What a small sip of gall to be able to time with each passing year the ever-shorter interval in which someone's eyes focus upon you. And then shift away.

Once when he was still young, I saw a bit of his scalp showing through his hair and I was afraid. But it was just a cowlick. Now sometimes it shows through for real, but I feel only tenderness.

No one can turn back the clock. Lie about your age if you want, but we're all going in the same direction.

Many people define beauty as skin deep, but I__e found the beauty in physical and superficial changes that continue throughout the life of a woman.

I see an actress smoking a cigarette in an old Fred McMurray movie. She__ clever and beautiful and manipulative. I feel envy. I suddenly wish I smoked cigarettes and was as clever and beautiful and manipulative as she. I want to be that way at the restaurants I visit, as I__ walking to my car, with certain friends who might understand. The actress has played her part well; she__ made me want to emulate her base desires if only for a while. Does that make me impressionable, a fool, or someone who will recognize the deepest secrets of her heart?I fight hard to stay young__o keep the lines from further etching my face and hands and breasts, presumably to trick the world into believing I am young. I__ an actress playing a part. I__ afraid to tell the truth. I fear losing those younger or becoming those older. In the presence of youth, a sort of unseen age-osmosis occurs within me. The years drop away and I don__ want to leave. It__ utterly selfish but I don__ care. After all, I__ no older than they____e just been so longer. I was nineteen only yesterday and they don__ retire nineteen-year-old actresses.

Torka extended a conciliatory hand and laid it upon the old man__ shoulder. __mak, Manaravak, Dak, and Tankh and Chuk will walk at my side. We will miss your strength, courage, and wisdom, but a man in possession of these qualities is needed here_.They left Grek standing at the edge of camp with his spear in hand and his pack frame on his back. As Torka walked on without looking back he wondered if he had ever done anything in his life as difficult as that.__ou had no choice._ Umak came to walk beside him with Dak and Companion at his side. Manaravak and the two boys trotted on ahead.Torka eyed Dak and Umak without slowing his step. __o you two imagine that you will never be old?__ak replied with his usual curtness. __hen I am old, I will have sense enough to know when it is time to step aside and let younger men take my place on the hunt_."It would seem the best thing to do,_ Torka agreed. __ut will you know when you are old? Or will your years sneak up on you like hunters tracking caribou_ one after the other, each looking just the same until the stalking cloaks fall away and the spears of truth come out to wound you_ until one day you are a young man trapped and rattling around in an old man__ skin, still believing that your old bones can do all the things they once did in your youth and trying to prove it even if it kills you?

The older you get, the more questions you get asked, and the more weary you become of answering the questions and the more elusive the answers--any answer, every answer--seem. --Maureen O'Toople in the short story "Your Question for Author Here

At thirty either you are perfect or nothing.