aging

The young have little use for the concept of rebirth, yet the older they get the more appealing the concept becomes.

Youth is an unrecoverable asset. Unless you are a hydra, lucky you.

Trust me, somewhere over the rainbow, happily ever after, etcetera, etcetera - looks far less likely in your mid-thirties.

It was dawning on the wizards that they were outside the University, at night and without permission, for the first time in decades. A certain suppressed excitement crackled from man to man. Any watch trained in reading body language would have been prepared to bet that, after the click, someone was going to suggest that they might as well go somewhere and have a few drinks, and then someone else would fancy a meal, and then there was always room for a few more drinks, and then it would be 5 a.m. and the city guards would be respectfully knocking on the University gates and asking if the Archchancellor would care to step down to the cells to identify some alleged wizards who were singing an obscene song in six-part harmony, and perhaps he would also care to bring some money to pay for all the damage. Because inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.

Of course, you were crowned with laurel in the beginning, your gold hair was wreathed with laurel, but the gold is thinning and the laurel has withered. Face it _ pitiful monster.

It's strange how in childhood it feels like tomorrow won't come until the end of forever, but in adulthood it feels like the end of forever could come tomorrow.

To have the experience I did as a child, I would have to be a physically different being, one with whom I share nearly nothing. On a cellular level, aside from the neurons of my cerebral cortex and a few other stranglers in my heart and eyes, I am not him.

How naive and foolish the young are to imagine that they understand the loneliness of great age, the outliving of your contemporaries, anyone to whom your century of memory might make any sense.

There was nothing about youth that was fair: the young hadn't done anything to deserve it, and the old hadn't done anything to drive it away.

You are young," said my father. "You won't get any younger even if you clean your teeth twice a day.""You'll get older," said my mother, "that's what happens.""Then what happens?""You won't be able to find the treasure.""Will I be too old to look for it?""No, but you'll be looking in the wrong place.

He doesn't know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief.

With age, gone are the forevers of youth. Gone is the willingness to procrastinate, delay, to play the waiting game. Now each day is a treasure beyond compare . . . because there are so few such diadems left.

At twenty-four she imagined with dread that she was growing old.

Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

Youth is as easily wasted as a fine wine consumed by a drunken man. There is no poetry in aging, and Javert lived out the process in its most hideous iteration.

Life goes on and on after one's luck has run out. Youthfulness persists, alas, long after one has ceased to be young.

Just then, a little hopped-up Japanese car zips up next to us. It__ bright yellow with loud, high-pitched exhaust pipes and a big air spoiler on the back. I look over at the driver to see who__ making all the racket. I__ surprised to see a teenage girl there. After a moment, she gooses it and whinnies on past. On her back window, there__ a sticker: NO FEAR. I think, good girl.

I shot through my twenties like a luminous thread through a dark needle, blazing toward my destination: Nowhere.