The Gift of Years Quotes

“We don't change as we get older - we just get to be more of what we've always been.”
― Joan D. Chittister, The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully

“This compulsion to look back, to explain to myself, to others, why I did what I did—or, worse, to justify why I didn’t do something else—is one of the most direct roads to depression we have. Our thoughts, emotions, and attitudes, according to Dr. Andrew Weil in his book Healthy Aging, are “key determinants of how we age.” They can threaten the quality of time we bring to the present.”
― Joan D. Chittister, The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully

“Life is not about age, about the length of years we manage to eke out of it. It is about aging, about living into the values offered in every stage of life. As E. M. Forster wrote, “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
― Joan D. Chittister, The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully

“holiness is made of dailiness, of living life as it comes to me, not as I insist it be.”
― Joan D. Chittister, The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully

“We don't change as we get older - we just get to be ore of what we've always been.”
― Joan D. Chittister, The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully

“To simply withdraw from the arena of ideas, from public discourse on public issues, from the value formation of the young—to shrug our shoulders and say, “I don’t know” or, worse, “I don’t care about those things anymore”—is to abandon the young to the mercy of their own ideas without the benefit of experience to guide them.”
― Joan D. Chittister, The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully

“But one thing I do know: life and time are ghosted creatures for us all. They belong to us - and are not ours at the same time.”
― Joan D. Chittister, The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully

“Other people begin to look different to me, too. They are as transformed as I am. I no longer see them as roles. They are people now, individuals—not problems, not “connections,” not a measure of my own value. My value now rests entirely in me, in what kind of person I am with others.”
― Joan D. Chittister, The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully

“We don’t change as we get older—we just get to be more of what we’ve always been.”
― Joan D. Chittister, The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully

“Regret claims to be insight. But how can it be spiritual insight to deny the good of what has been for the sake of what was not? No, regret is not insight. It is, in fact, the sand trap of the soul. It fails to understand that there are many ways to fullness of life, all of them different, all of them unique.”
― Joan D. Chittister, The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully

“old ways of doing things. It is the ability to make ancient truth the living memory of today. Only the elderly have lived through both the good and the bad decisions of the past. It is they, then, who have the wisdom to alert us to alternatives, to evaluate present choices from the perspective of history. The role of”
― Joan D. Chittister, The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully

“The young hear memory in the voice of their elders and, delighted by these voices from the past or bored by them, too often miss the content behind the content. Memory is not about what went on in the past. It is about what is going on inside of us right this moment. It is never idle. It never lets us alone.”
― Joan D. Chittister, The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully

“Whatever happens to the body, what toll age takes on the physical, the spirit does not grow old. In our dreams, in the way we ourselves see ourselves, we are forever becoming. Our dreams are always the vision of a younger self, a self-contained, energetic, self-determining person with a will of steel. Our dreams reveal to us the basic truth of life: years are biological; the spirit is eternal. The number of our years do not define us. There is in the human being a life force that never dies. It is the life force that proves to us that age does not fossilize us. Down deep, where our souls live, we stay forever young. It is this surging, driving force that brings us to the bar of life every day of our lives, whatever our age, however much we have been through, prepared to live life to the hilt again.”
― Joan D. Chittister, The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully

“Life is meant to form us in independence, usher us into an adulthood that begins in apprenticeship and ends in mastery, and then, those tasks accomplished, to bring us to the acme of integrity, of wisdom, of eldership in the community of the world. It is a process of ripening as we go, getting stronger, getting more caring, becoming more procreative, sharing more wisdom as we grow—so that those who come after us can walk a clearer path.”
― Joan D. Chittister, The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully

“The service that the whole world needs from the elders is not the service of hours spent and time put in and documents finished and machines fixed. There are untold numbers of people who can do all of those things. No, the service of the elders is not a service of labor, it is a service of enlightenment, of wisdom, of discernment of spirits. Only the carriers of generations past can give us those things, because wisdom is what lasts after an experience ends.”
― Joan D. Chittister, The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully

“We need to think again about the beauties of age, its freedom and its splendor. It is the “fresh life within” that age reveals to us, if we only give it a chance.”
― Joan D. Chittister, The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully