#ageing

What I took to be the norm -- taut, smooth, supple -- was the transient special case of youth. To me, the old were a separate species, like sparrows or foxes. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#age

Do not wait not for old age to wake you up to the true value of each moment. ↗

— Martin Suarez

#awake #enlightenment #life-lessons #old-age #value-of-life

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest [hu]man has learned anything of absolute value by living. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#ageing #learning #youth #age

Once you start recognizing your own obsessions, you know you’re getting old. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#obsession #age

Anyway, those things would not have lasted long. The experience of the years shows it to me. But Destiny arrived in some haste and stopped them. The beautiful life was brief. But how potent were the perfumes, On how splendid a bed we lay, To what sensual delight we gave our bodies. An echo of the days of pleasure, An echo of the days drew near me, A little of the fire of the youth of both of us, Again I took in my hands a letter, And I read and reread till the light was gone. And melancholy, I came out on the balcony Came out to change my thoughts at least by looking at A little of the city that I loved, A little movement on the street and in the shops. Translated by Rae Dalven ↗

— C.P. Cavafy

#losing-dreams #melancholia #nostalgia #age

The day wore on, and all these bright colours subsided, and assumed a quieter tint, like young hopes softened down by time, or youthful features by degrees resolving into the calm and serenity of age. But they were scarcely less beautiful in their slow decline, than they had been in their prime; for nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy, that we can scarcely mark their progress. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#change #age

I think people would live a bit longer if they didn't know how old they were. Age puts restrictions on things. ↗

— Karl Pilkington

#ageing #death #discrimination #humour #life

It wasn't getting easier because it isn't supposed to get easier. Midlife was a bitch, and my educated guess was that the climb only got steeper from here. Carl Jung put it perfectly: "Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life," he wrote. "Worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will by evening have become a lie." ... I was writing a new program for the afternoon of life. The scales tipped away from suffering and toward openheartedness and love. [p. 182] ↗

— Dani Shapiro

#age

... forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#ageing #life #age

Ik ben niet bevreesd, noch voor de ouderdom noch voor de dood, maar berusting is me schrikbeeld. Nooit zou ik aan de oevers waar braafheid en gezapigheid wonen, willen aanleggen. Ik ben nu vijfentachtig, ik schrijf nog steeds en ik zou nog tot liefhebben in staat zijn. ↗

— Claire Goll

#ageing #claire-goll #love #old #passion