866 quotes found
“The problem with aging is not that it's one damn thing after another—it's every damn thing, all at once, all the time.”
“Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all...”
“That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.”
“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 sinc...”
“It is coincidence, I decide, and I am getting old and batty, thinking the universe revolves around me.”
“It paid barely a living wage, but he stayed with it—gradually and in the end gratefully arriving at the point in life when you understand there are no great changes ahead.”
“I have to start loving what comes next and stop hating I won't be a part of it.”
“One of the many problems with aging is that you begin to think of yourself as a slob because your birthday suit can never be cleaned or pressed no matter how spotted or wrinkled it gets”
“For youth, sexual love is whim; for the aged, luxury.”
“Hi,’ Jake said. ‘I met you earlier today, but you were a lot younger then.’ ‘I was a lot younger ten minutes ago.”
“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...”
“To what nadir of paltriness , pettiness, and squalor a man can sink! How could he change so! But is this really true to life? ---It is, it's all true to life, for anything can happen to a man. Your...”
“Know this: even if you’re like us and still doddering around above ground, someone out there from your past is probably pretty sure that you’re dead by now. (p.125 )”
“They had waited for too long, and the result was this hiatus, and the reflection that time and patience may bring poor rewards, that time itself, if not confronted at the appropriate juncture, can ...”
“Aging is scary but fascinating, and great talent morphs in strange and often enlightening ways.”
“Why is it amazing that I don’t act my age? Why should I act my age? Or more to the point, how is someone my age supposed to act? Old age is part fact, part state of mind, part luck, and wholly some...”
“She resolved, at forty-some, that since she herself must die, she would do it as gracefully as possible, as free as possible from vomitings, moans, the ignominy of basins, bedsores, and enemas, not...”
“I reflected how easy it is for a man to reduce women of a certain age to imbecility. All he has to do is give an impersonation of desire, or better still, of secret knowledge, for a woman to feel h...”
“I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge.”
“To a man and woman, all of her elderly patients had been surprised to be old - which Avery privately regarded as a serious failure to pay attention.”
