aging

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 in our mothers' arms, having lost all our learning and all sense of disappointment. If only we could die, she says, not knowing we'd ever grieved.

One of the things I dread about becoming an adult is that sooner or later you begin letting sentimentality get in the way of simple logic. False feelings are allowed to clog the works like raw honey poured into the tiny wheels of a fine timepiece.

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 vegetable juice and having ultrasound treatments, in search of her original face, the one she knows is under there somewhere; she comes back feeling toned up and virtuous, and hungry.

Maybe this is what growing old was like, she thought. Maybe the world gets smaller and smaller until there's nothing but the walls around you to show you where you end and the rest of the world begins.

The worst thing about getting older is you discover that most of the performers in the shows you used to watch are now younger than you. Suddenly, everything become less believable.

In biblical times, they used to stone a few thirteen-year-olds with some regularity, which helped keep the others quiet and at home. The mothers were usually in the first row of stone throwers, and had to be restrained.

...is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?

She re-marked her lips with her lipstick. I saw sprays of silver in her coarse hair. I saw inscriptions of her years around her mouth, a solid crease between her brows from a lifetime of cynicism. The posture of a woman who had stood in a casual spotlight in every room she'd ever been in, not for gloss or perfection, for self-possession. Everything she touched she added an apostrophe to.

How much longer would we go on being old young people? They wavedgoodbye to me. I was moved by Annette. She and I wereexactly the same age, and she'd become one of those slightlyfaded Danish beauties who used to attract me when I wastwenty. They were older than I was at that time, and I wasgrateful for their tender protection.

There's nothing quite like the sight of two dozen half-naked octogenarians. We enter the stage of life as dolls and exit as gargoyles.

In the seven years or so that had passed since I had last seen him, Sir Magnus Donners had grown not so much older in appearance, as less like a human being.

Folks double my age and older often run down a conversation tracking a vanishing world that will, with the passing of their memory, vanish entirely.

There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes...

There is a line in Verlaine I shall not recall again,There is a street close by forbidden to my feet,There's a mirror that's seen me for the very last time,There is a door that I have locked till the end of the world.Among the books in my library (I have them before me)There are some that I shall never open now.This summer I complete my fiftieth year;Death is gnawing at me ceaselessly.

I'm just at the age when time speeds up in an odd way. Do you know what I mean? The winters come closer together and you learn to accept that you're not special anymore.

The compensation of growing old...was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained - at last! - the power which adds the supreme flavor to existence, - the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

It is coincidence, I decide, and I am getting old and batty, thinking the universe revolves around me.

I remember a new heaviness in my body, but maybe that's the work of time and my looking back.