S. Jay Olshansky Quotes

You never think about your own mortality. At least not until your back gives way when you're 40.

In the sixties, you're still thinking you could do something about this slow disintegration of the body.

No one can control the aging process or the trajectory of illness.

Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of fifty.

In your teens and twenties, death doesn't exist. In your thirties, you glance down the road occasionally. But then in your forties, it becomes a full-time job looking the other way.

Each day it's like: 'How many more days am I going to feel young and vibrant? I feel young and vibrant now, but I also feel the aches and pains a little bit.

I think I've become more aware of aging in the last couple of years because of friends dying of cancer or friends' parents dying and myself - I'm still healthy, but I'm aging, and that's something that I think about more, even though I shouldn't be too concerned.

There's not enough talked about in terms of growing older. You start to lose your body.

At 66, you're supposed to die or get hemorrhoids.

In your twenties, you think you are immortal. In your thirties, you hope you are immortal.

I'll be dead by the time I'm forty.

When you approach middle age, lots of stuff happens. Your body is aging, you're watching people around you get sick, you're watching people die, your mortality becomes very present at that point in your life.

Turning 50 gives me more yesterdays than tomorrows.

All diseases run into one, old age.

My brain is good, but my body is deteriorating. I probably have another two or three years. Or I can pass tomorrow, but it doesn't make a difference to me.

After 60, it's just patch, patch, patch.

I definitely don't feel like I'm 71. I feel like I did when I was - between 30 and 40. The body ages. The mind doesn't.

I don't feel old. I feel like a young man that has something wrong with him.

It doesn't seem like it's been 50 years. I don't even feel like I'm 50 years old yet, though I've had all these knee and back operations.

You get old, you slow down.

I warn you not to be ordinary, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old.

Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.

Things are old. Parts are old. I'm talking about 'us' parts. AARP-parts. Some of us were born with stronger parts than others.

The biggest myth about aging is that we can't do anything about it. That it's a road to being decrepit, frail, and sick.

After I was 70, I realized that, 'Okay, I would like to have another 50 years, and I probably could.' But part of me is saying, 'Maybe I'm not going to have that much time.'