growing-older

Day by day we increase in age. Step by step we reduce the number of our steps. When you grow old, you shall see life differently and you shall get a better understanding of the journey of life: how you lived it and how you should have lived it!

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.

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__ 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__fter 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.

Marlena's body was found on November 19, and so I consider that the anniversary of her death, though she almost certainly died on the eighteenth. Because for me, that day, she was still fully, hugely, annoyingly alive--deliberately ignoring my phone calls, up to something she'd no doubt tell me all about soon.Twelve days after November 19, I turned sixteen. Every year, it happens the same way: Marlena dies, I get older.

The bones of the oak tree that had stood by the spring branch during my youth were scattered about the ground, pieces of the skeleton of a majestic life that had passed while I was off growing up and old.

As you grow older, start using your brains, energy, and the means available to you, however little they may seem, to go after what you need to get better, so that you can have what you want to live the the life you desire.

The phrase __oys will be boys,_ reflects that a male child is expected to be unpredictable and occasionally troublesome.

The adult were once young.The young have not yet attained adulthood.

If you don__ know how to grow old, don__ start learning how to grow old.

Old is old at any age. Old is when you quit asking questions about this, that, and everything. Old is when you forget how to love-or worse, don't care. Old is when you don't want to dance anymore. Old is when you don't want to learn anything new except how to be old. Old is when people tell you that you are old-and you believe them.

Growing older is a blurred birth certificate that only can take us to this world__ perplexed journey, but it cannot smear the letters of the epitaph

What young people didn__ 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__ 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__ 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__hat pieces life took out of you. Her eyes were closed, and throughout her tired self swept waves of gratitude__nd 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.

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

Anyone who is forgetting to love is growing older. Anyone who is learning to fly with the wings of love are growing younger.

It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.

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.

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

I don__ ever remember being afraid of __ldness_.There are things I miss about being younger - chiefly the ability to pull all-nighters and keep working and working well; and being smiled at by girls I didn__ know who thought I was cute; and I wish I had the eyesight I had even five years ago_ but that stuff feels pretty trivial. I__ happier than I__e been at any time in my life these days. I have a wonderful wife whom I adore, watched three amazing kids grow into two delightful adults and my favourite teenager, an astonishing number of grand life experiences, I__e made art I__ proud of, I have real, true, glorious friends, and I__e been able to do real good for things I care about, like freedom of speech, like libraries.Sometimes I__l do something like An Evening With Neil and Amanda, or the 8 in 8 project, and completely surprise myself.I miss friends who have died, but then, I__ glad that time gave them to me, to befriend, even for a while, and that I was alive to know them. I knew Douglas Adams, and I knew Roger Zelazny, and I knew John M Ford, and I knew Diana Wynne Jones_ do you know how lucky that makes me?Ah, I__ rabbiting on, and I sound a bit more Pollyannaish than I__ intending to sound: I know the downside of age and the downside of time, and I am sure that the view from age 51 is not the view from age 71.I wish the time hadn__ gone so fast, though. And sometimes I wish I__ enjoyed it more on the way, and worried about it less.