#ageing

I find the whole disdain for ageing crazy. ↗

— Laura Linney

#crazy #disdain #find #i #whole

I looked at the group of human remains that languished in the corner and smiled at them. It occurred to me that their very presence was testimony to the moral emptiness of the universe and the mechanical brutality with which it destroys the parts it no longer needs. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#death #nature #age

I just got a rather nasty shock. In looking for something or other I came across the fact that one of my cats is about to be nine years old, and that another of them will shortly thereafter be eight; I have been labouring under the delusion they were about five and six. And yesterday I happened to notice in the mirror that while I have long since grown used to my beard being very grey indeed, I was not prepared to discover that my eyebrows are becoming noticeably shaggy. I feel the tomb is just around the corner. And there are all these books I haven't read yet, even if I am simultaneously reading at least twenty... ↗

— Edward Gorey

#aging #death #old-age #reading #age

Seven Ages: first puking and mewling Then very pissed-off with your schooling Then fucks, and then fights Next judging chaps' rights Then sitting in slippers: then drooling. ↗

— Robert Conquest

#limerick #middle-age #old-age #seven-ages-of-man #william-shakespeare

When we age we shed many skins: ego, arrognace, dominance, self-opionated, unreliable, pessimism, rudeness, selfish, uncaring ... Wow, it's good to be old! ↗

— Stephen Richards

#aged #ageing #ageism #old-age #old-men

I bargained with Life for a penny, And Life would pay no more, However I begged at evening When I counted my scanty store; For Life is just an employer, He gives you what you ask, But once you have set the wages, Why, you must bear the task. I worked for a menial's hire, Only to learn, dismayed, That any wage I had asked of Life, Life would have paid. ↗

— Jessie B. Rittenhouse

#hire #learning #life #philosophy #poem

This is in the natural order of things--the time of life we've now entered. The afternoon, as Jung called it. Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life. Are we unprepared simply because preparation is not possible? ... We learn--if we are lucky we learn--as we go. ... we are in the center of the stream. Much has already happened, and has formed the shape of our lives as surely as water shapes rock. Much lies ahead of us. We can't see what's coming. We can't know it. All we have is our hope that all will be well, and our knowledge that it won't always be so. We live in the space between this hope and this knowledge. ... Life keeps coming at us. Fleeing it is pointless, as is fighting. What I have begun to learn is that there is value in simply standing there--this too--whether the sun is shining, or the wind whipping all around. [pp.239-240] ↗

— Dani Shapiro

#age

Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming. ↗

— Richard Russo

#age