aging

Nobody likes the "A" word, but everyone ages. You can have an aging in place master suite that looks like a resort hotel, rather than a rehab hospital room.

Here we are, alone again. It's all so slow, so heavy, so sad. . . I'll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They've talked. They haven't said much. They've gone away. They've grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world.

To continue what one had been doing -- which was Dante's idea of hell -- is, I came to see, and the vision frightened me, easy in one's sixties.

Charlotte views her younger selves with a certain detachment. They are herself, but other incarnations, innocents going about half-forgotten business.

I am afraid that as people grow old there is a tendency for them to believe that what the past *ought* to have been it was.

I am tarred and feathered with Time.

There are only four kinds of people in the world.Those who have been caregivers.Those who are currently caregivers.Those who will be caregivers, and those who will need a caregiver.

.. at a certain age we learned to see right through it, and that age is now.

The woman who undergoes this operation can sense the morphogenetic field at work in her face. She can feel the lines of force as they guide the embryonic cells into the patterns they must form. Why should a woman let her life be determined by tired collagens or by a shortage of zinc which weakens her electromagnetic field, the matrix of life? The goal of life is living. Life is a field of opportunity, guiding the individual forward along paths created by the meshed forces or objective possibilities as they interweave with a person's own potentialities. And this philosophy of life is now bodied forth in the faces of beautiful women. ("Motherhood

As she drove the familiar route to the school, she considered her magnificent new age. Forty. She could still feel "forty" the way it felt when she was fifteen. Such a colorless age. Marooned in the middle of your life. Nothing would matter all that much when you were forty. You wouldn't have real feelings when you were forty, because you'd be safely cushioned by your frumpy forty

Nursing homes and rest homes are all the rage round here. Most of us will be in them before very long. Do you fancy that? Are you looking forward to it? No, neither am I. But I'm doing something about that. Just whisky and cigarettes, so far, mostly.

They had painted a lady leaning her arms on the sill of the window. This lady was waiting for a husband. Her flesh was slack and she was some forty-five years old. Perhaps she had been waiting since she was fifteen. A rose and mauve lady that had not yet gathered her flesh and her beauty into dark clothes, and still waited, like a rose stripped of its petals, with her faded colors and her artificial smile, bitter as a grimace.

I tan the easy way. I just wait for my liver spots to connect.

Those whose lives have been an exercise in the pitting of their wits, or the selling of their talents, time and strength, to those who pay the piper, can even in their old age, even with their wits partially gone, automatically practise defences, and appeal for aid. But not so those who have never asked, who have never bargained.

There isn't a thing I can't do now that I didn't do when I was twenty-one...which gives you an idea of how pathetic I was when I was twenty-one. (That's a lie, but I might as well tell you something right here at the beginning of the book. Anytime I can get a laugh I'm not going to let the truth interfere with it.)

As you ripen, you__l notice that time is the weirdest thing in the world, that these surprises are relentless, and that getting older is not a stroll but an ambush.

And since a more convincing argument could not be found__side from a fatal accident or suicide__his way was chosen: a process of galloping senescence.

Old age. I don't know when it really starts, and I'm not interested in finding out. Julia pretty much ignored the whole thing, and that may be the only real lesson there is for the end of our days. Just pretend like it isn't happening, until you have no choice but to accept reality. If you're lucky, like Julia, you'll die peacefully in your sleep after having enjoyed a dinner of onion soup.