Growing Older Quotes

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”
― Albert Einstein

“A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.”
― Robert Frost

“An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets, the more interested he is in her.”
― Agatha Christie

“The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“I have left orders to be awakened at any time during national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting.”
― Ronald Reagan

“Some guy said to me: Don't you think you're too old to sing rock n' roll?

I said: You'd better check with Mick Jagger.”
― Cher

“Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.”
― Coco Chanel

“As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I think people understand things different when they get older. It’s not a question of getting soft, or seeing things in the gray areas instead of black and white. I really believe I’m just understanding things different. Better.”
― Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter

“Just 'cause there's snow on the roof doesn't mean there's not a fire inside.”
― Bonnie Hunt

“A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths?”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Youth is but the painted shell within which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the spirit of a man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some than in others.”
― Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

“It does not take much to make us realize what fools we are, but the little it takes is long in coming.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“It’s not loving a man that makes life harder for gay guys, it’s homophobia. It’s not the color of their skin that makes life harder for people of color; it’s racism. It’s not having vaginas that makes life harder for women, it’s sexism. And it’s ageism, far more than the passage of time, that makes growing older harder for all of us.”
― Ashton Applewhite, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism

“Hey presto: time travel. You don't need a time machine, it turns out, you just need a friend to laugh like a teenager. Chronology shivers.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, By Blood We Live

“What young people didn’t know, she thought, lying down beside this man, his hand on her shoulder, her arm; oh, what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn’t choose it. And if her platter had been full with the goodness of Henry and she had found it burdensome, had flicked it off crumbs at a time, it was because she had not known what one should know: that day after day was unconsciously squandered.
And so, if this man next to her now was not a man she would have chosen before this time, what did it matter: He most likely wouldn’t have chosen her either. But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union—what pieces life took out of you.
Her eyes were closed, and throughout her tired self swept waves of gratitude—and regret. She pictured the sunny room, the sun-washed wall, the bayberry outside. It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.”
― Elizabeth Strout

“Muoth was right. On growing old, one becomes more contented than in one's youth, which I will not therefore revile, for in all my dreams I hear my youth like a wonderful song which now sounds more harmonious than it did in reality, and even sweeter”
― Hermann Hesse, Gertrude

“Whenever my mum gets depressed about her age, she goes to Paris.”
― Jane Tara, The Happy Endings Book Club

“I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don’t think it is years themselves, or the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better taken care of and better-looking than ever. What it is, is what we know, now that in spite of ourselves we have stopped to think about it. It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless. It is not only that, by this time, a lot of acquaintances and friends have died and all the others are getting ready to sooner or later. It is more that the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down, after all—after all that schooling, all that care. Lord, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me. But when you are thirty-three, or thirty-five, the cup must come around, cannot pass from you, and it is the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from. Dana cried over Mrs. Hilton. My eyes filled during the nightly news. Obviously we were grieving for ourselves, but we were also thinking that if they were feeling what we were feeling, how could they stand it? We were grieving for them, too. I understand that later you come to an age of hope, or at least resignation. I suspect it takes a long time to get there.”
― Jane Smiley, The Age of Grief

“When you get to a certain age you find that other people’s opinions don’t really matter anymore, and you get kind of uncomfortable with your place in modern life.”
― Noel Gallagher

“Those boys at the counter are too dreamy and young to do anything but drool as they watch Gillian. And, to her credit, Gillian is especially kind to them, even when Ephraim, the cook, suggests she kick them out. She understands that theirs might just be the last hearts she will break. When you're thirty-six and tired, when you've been living in places where the temperature rising to a hundred and ten and the air is so dry you have to use gallons of moisturizer, when you've been smacked around, late at night, by a man who loves bourbon, you start to realize that everything is limited, including your own appeal. You begin to look at young boys with tenderness, since they know so little and think they know so much. You watch teenage girls and feel shivers up and down your arms - those poor creatures don't know the first thing about time or agony or the price they're going to have to pay for just about anything.”
― Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic

“Use all this life to make yourself a great writer, thoughtful and kind, slowly, surely over the years.”
― T.K. Naliaka

“Age has taught me that what other people think of me is none of my business.”
― Jane Tara, The Happy Endings Book Club

“...little girls are raised on fairy tales. No one ever tells you that sad things stay sad, some people die angry and unforgiven, and some things are lost and never found.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“She was not beautiful, but she had a pleasant face, the sort that would wear well through life, becoming more attractive as she grew older.”
― Donna Leon, Suffer the Little Children

“Becoming older doesn’t sadden me. The never ending length between a memory does.”
― Dominic Riccitello

“Getting older is realizing that who you love most will one day be gone.”
― McCaid Paul, Sweet Tea & Snap Peas

“It is easier to age, gracefully, in the company of love.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“When you're a baby you get Luvs, Pampers, and Huggies, but when you're an adult... it Depends. ”
― Deanna L. Lawlis