Quotes about old age

“You two don’t know yet,” he said. “When you get old, you think more about the past than about what you did five minutes ago. Time changes.”

“Do you remember what you wished for?” asked Stan.

“Only the one of them. I must have been ten or eleven.”

“Did it come true?” asked Groot.

“Hell no, I wished I’d never get old,” said Venner.

Now I was stuck and could feel the tide of years suddenly beginning to rise around me.

The wind and sun, the salt water, the hard work aged a body rapidly, and when I would look at the old man who clammed, I was too young to sense the wisdom their years on the water had bestowed upon them and saw only what I did not want to become.

Being a good mother doesn't end with creating a home where just my children can flourish. A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn't end until she creates a home where all of life's beings can flourish.

I like the ecological idea of aging as progressive enrichment, rather than progressive loss.

Her eyes have been opened to the fact that after the burdens and toil of a young mother comes a new kind of fear and concern for the aging mother.

Kristin felt as if she were now an old woman. It seem to her that a woman was young as long as she had little children sleeping in her arms at night, playing around her during the day, and demanding her care at all times. When a mother’s children have grown away from her, then she becomes an old woman.

I am beginning to reach the age when I say hello to the old women I meet in my neighborhood, anticipating the moment in life when I shall be one of them. When I was twenty I didn't notice them; they would be dead before my face had wrinkles.

Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened. (p. 263)

Life’s like a fat orange, Frank thinks. When you’re young, you squeeze it hard and fast, trying to get all the juice in a hurry. When you’re older, you squeeze it slowly, savouring every drop. Because, one, you don’t know how many drops you have left, and, two, the last drops are the sweetest.

Our culture mostly celebrates early successes, the people who bloom fast. But those people often wither as quickly as they bloom. [...] I don't want to know how a thirty-year-old became rich and famous; I want to hear how an eighty-year-old spent her life in obscurity, kept making art, and lived a happy life.