"Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains."
— Winston S. Churchill

"Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age."
— Gloria Steinem

"As you get older; you've probably noticed that you tend to forget things. You'll be talking with somebody at a party, and you'll know that you know this person, but no matter how hard you try, you can't remember his or her name. This can be very embarassing, especially if he or she turns out to be your spouse."
— Dave Barry

"Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. Most women know this feeling of being more and more invisible everyday."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit."
— Martin Amis (London Fields)

"Twenty-three is old. It's almost 25, which is like almost mid-20s."
— Jessica Simpson

"The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you'll grow out of it.
"
— Doris Day

"It's paradoxical that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn't appeal to anyone."
— Andy Rooney

"The memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime."
— Pink Floyd, "Free Four"

"A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal."
— Douglas Coupland (The Gum Thief: A Novel)

"I don't mind pointing out some of the failings of old age, because we are all headed in that direction, unless of course we take our own lives before we become a burden. I'm not advocating suicide, oh wait, I guess I am."
— Amy Sedaris (I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence)

""When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun -- that "life" is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays -- whenever. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, 'Well then, exactly what was it I was having -- that interlude -- the scrambly madness -- all that time I had before?' ""
— Douglas Coupland (Life After God)

"Embrace aging."
— Mitch Albom (Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson)

"I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."
— T.S. Eliot (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems)

"Me, I've seen 45 years, and I've only figures out one thing. That's this: if a person would just make the effort, there's something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there's always something you can learn. I read somewhere that they said there's even different philosophies in razors. Fact is, if it weren't for that, nobody'd survive."
— Haruki Murakami

"The older I get, the more I see there are these crevices in life where things fall in and you just can't reach them to pull them back out. So you can sit next to them and weep or you can get up and move forward. You have to stop worrying about who's not here and start worrying about who is.
"
— Alex Witchel (The Spare Wife: A novel)

"Birthdays could be such a bummer when you were older than the country you lived in."
— Lynsay Sands (A Quick Bite)

"Before I got married I had six theories about raising children; now, I have six children and no theories."
— John Wilmot

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins"
— T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land and Other Poems)

"Now is the time to become a myth."
— Diane Von Furstenberg

"It is lovely to meet an old person whose face is deeply lined, a face that has been deeply inhabited, to look in the eyes and find light there."
— John O'Donohue (Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom)

"…he dared to explore her withered neck w/his fingertips…her hips w/their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep."
— Virginia Woolf (The Waves)

"I shot through my twenties like a luminous thread through a dark needle, blazing toward my destination: Nowhere."
— Carrie Fisher (Postcards from the Edge)

"It took me half my life to begin to know myself and the second half of life to be true to what I know of myself - which is that I'm authentically screwy."
— Carmen Dell'Orifice

"The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill. Shake down all the grains of Time—the big grains of centuries, and the small grains of years, and the tiny grains of hours and minutes—and the clock pulverized them, slid Time silently out in all directions in a fine pollen, carried by cold winds to blanket the town like dust, everywhere. Spores from that clock lodged in your flesh to wrinkle it, to grow bones to monstrous size, to burst feet from shoes like turnips. Oh, how that great machine…dispensed Time in blowing weathers."
— Ray Bradbury (Farewell Summer: A Novel)

"The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults."
— Peter De Vries

"Are you all right, Sir?" asked Hezekiah.
"Just fighting over old battles in my mind," said John. "It's the problem with age. You have all these rusty arguments, and no quarrel to use them in. My brain is a museum, but alas, I'm the only visitor, and even I am not terribly interested in the displays."
Hezekiah laughed, but there was affection in it. "I would love nothing better than to visit there. But I'm afraid I'd be tempted to loot the place, and carry it all away with me."
— Orson Scott Card (Heartfire)

"There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight."
— Ezra Pound

"The distance to the corner shops of childhood becomes unfathomable, immeasurable; the candy bars have changed. And change has changed."
— Ilse Aichinger

"Sometimes I want to clean up my desk and go out and say, “Respect me; I’m a respectable grown-up!" and other times I just want to jump into a paper bag and shake and bake myself to death."
— Wendy Wasserstein

"Prayer of an Anonymous Abbess:

Lord, thou knowest better than myself that I am growing older and will soon be old. Keep me from becoming too talkative, and especially from the unfortunate habit of thinking that I must say something on every subject and at every opportunity.

Release me from the idea that I must straighten out other peoples' affairs. With my immense treasure of experience and wisdom, it seems a pity not to let everybody partake of it. But thou knowest, Lord, that in the end I will need a few friends.

Keep me from the recital of endless details; give me wings to get to the point.

Grant me the patience to listen to the complaints of others; help me to endure them with charity. But seal my lips on my own aches and pains -- they increase with the increasing years and my inclination to recount them is also increasing.

I will not ask thee for improved memory, only for a little more humility and less self-assurance when my own memory doesn't agree with that of others. Teach me the glorious lesson that occasionally I may be wrong.

Keep me reasonably gentle. I do not have the ambition to become a saint -- it is so hard to live with some of them -- but a harsh old person is one of the devil's masterpieces.

Make me sympathetic without being sentimental, helpful but not bossy. Let me discover merits where I had not expected them, and talents in people whom I had not thought to possess any. And, Lord, give me the grace to tell them so.

Amen"
— Margot Benary-Isbert

"When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvements … while remaining heedless of the world’s barbarism. I don’t say things have got worse; I merely say the young wouldn’t notice if they had. The old times were good because then we were young, and ignorant of how ignorant the young can be."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"Some women I talk to are so frightened of growing old. I sense their desperation. They say things like I m not going to live to be old I m not going to live to be dependent. The message young women get from youth culture is that it s wonderful to be young and terrible to grow old. If you think about it it s an impossible dilemma how can you make a good start in life if you are being told at the same time how terrible the finish is Because of ageism many women don t fully commit themselves to living life until they can no longer pass as young. They live their lives with one foot in life and one foot outside it. With age you resolve that. I know the value of each day and I m living with both feet in life. I m living much more fully... The power of the old woman is that because she s outside the system she can attack. And I am determined to attack it. One of the ways in which I am particularly conscious of this stance is when I go down the street. People expect me to move over which means to step on the grass or off the curb. I just woke up one day to the fact that I was moving over. I have no idea how many years I ve been doing that. Now I never move over. I simply keep walking. And we hit full force because the other person is so sure that I am going to move over that he isn t even paying any attention and we simply ram each other. If it s a man with a woman he shows embarrassment because he s just knocked down a five foot seventy year old woman and so he quickly apologises. But he s startled he doesn t understand why I didn t move over he doesn t even know how I got there where I came from. I am invisible to him despite the fact that I am on my own side of the street simply refusing to give him that space he assumes is his"
— Barbara MacDonald

"He walked into the bathroom, wincing at himself in the mirror, that always more tired older brother."
— J.G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition)

"But if we are truly happy inside, then age brings with it a maturity, a depth, and a power that only magnifies our radiance."
— David Deida

"They say that your powers of memory are at their peak when you're 26, and it's all downhill after that."
— Lisa Jewell (One-Hit Wonder)

"I'd Better Not--

A man leaned over to a man in a pub
And said in a voice
‘I used to be thirty seven but now I’m fifty one’.
And that’s how the years go.
In handfuls.
Like somebody is almost at the end of a bag of crisps
And they tip the bag up
And it’s as though they’re drinking crisps.
That’s how the years go."
— Ian McMillan (I Found This Shirt: Poems and Prose from the Centre)

"In youth the days are short and the years are long. In old age the years are short and day's long."
— Nikita Ivanovich Panin

"Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up."
— Tom Stoppard

"When you stop moving, it's all over."
— Don Wildman

"The distance to the corner shops of childhood becomes unfathomable, immeasurable; the candy bars have changed. And change has changed."
— Ilse Aichinger