Aging Experience Quotes

Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.

Old age comes on suddenly, and not gradually as is thought.

As time goes by and you're getting older and stuff like that - getting older sucks. You know, I hear all this crap about, 'Oh, you can age with dignity.' Really?

The trouble is, old age is not interesting until one gets there. It's a foreign country with an unknown language to the young and even to the middle-aged.

Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.

Growing old becomes clear to you at a certain point. I think it's after the age of 70 you realize - you begin to actually be convinced - you're growing older.

Being old is such a treat!

In middle age, I practiced feeling old, but the real thing has been a rude surprise.

Age, like woman, requires fit surroundings.

There's nothing good about getting older-absolutely nothing-because the amount of wisdom and experience you gain is negligible compared to what you lose. You do gain a couple of things-you gain a little bittersweet and sour wisdom from your heartbreaks and failures and things-but what you lose is so catastrophic in every way.

I think that's what makes life interesting - the evolution of getting older, and it's kinda fascinating to me, the whole process.

That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importance, they remember only for example 'where they were' when such-and-such occurred. Et cetera et cetera. Objective events and data become naturally more and more subjectively colored.

Darling, when you're as old as I am, you cherish the very few musicals that have come your way that you know are great classics. You become their guardian.

Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?

The fact that doctors tend to treat people as individuals, guided by the need to ensure patient confidentiality, can reinforce this pattern of seeing the changes and challenges aging brings on through our heads and our bodies, rather than as a shared experience.

Philosophers, comedians, and tipsy birthday celebrants all have proposed theories about why time seems to move increasingly swiftly as we grow older. But the most disconcerting rationale is not a theory. It is the undeniable realization that every day we live constitutes a smaller percentage of the accrued experience with which we awaken each morning, and therefore seems proportionately a smidgen quicker and smaller than the day before.

We who are old know that age is more than a disability. It is an intense and varied experience, almost beyond our capacity at times, but something to be carried high.

Old age is a wonderful time of life. At least, that's what everyone tells you. But let me tell you: it is not true. What's true is that your hips, knees and ankles gradually give up on you - everything is quite dreadful, really. And it was a terrible thing to have told us because we believed it.

Ageism is interesting for me because I've been playing someone in my 40s since I was 20 or so, but I have experienced it. I've been lucky in that I haven't had to play the ingenue and feel that slip away.

I do think that people who are now in their sixties and their seventies are living a different kind of life than their grandparents led, even in these tough times. A lot of them are more active, a lot of them are still working, which was not the case when our grandparents were in their sixties.