Instead of hip hip hooray, how about hip hip replacement? Old age should be celebrated one wobbly step at a time until the top of the stairs topples down onto the topless crowd below.

Living this long's not as wonderful as people think. I mean, you get the same amount of youth as everyone else, but a great big extra helping of being very old and deaf and creaky.

Of course, you were crowned with laurel in the beginning, your gold hair was wreathed with laurel, but the gold is thinning and the laurel has withered. Face it – pitiful monster.

Getting older is a question of coming to terms with the fact that you’ll never know the secrets; and the resulting equilibrium is what gives the illusion of actually knowing them.

One of the many problems with aging is that you begin to think of yourself as a slob because your birthday suit can never be cleaned or pressed no matter how spotted or wrinkled it gets

Die Jahre, die man auf dem Buckel hatte, waren zu nichts mehr nutze: Man brauchte sie ungelebt, einen ganzen Vorrat davon. Denn je älter man wurde, desto mehr Dinge gingen zu Bruch.

A twenty-three-year-long study in Ohio determined that people who saw growing older as something positive lived a whopping seven and a half years longer than those who didn’t. (356)

Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.

He did not want to feel old. He did not want to feel the weight of his age hovering above him, mocking him out of the core of a man’s pride, waiting to descend upon his mind and body.

When I was young, I was 13 going on 31. Then when I was 30 going on 31, I was 30 going on 29. Now I’m in love and I’ve lost all sense of time—and all the rest of my sense.

You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just eighty.

Once when he was still young, I saw a bit of his scalp showing through his hair and I was afraid. But it was just a cowlick. Now sometimes it shows through for real, but I feel only tenderness.

How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

No one likes to talk about the positive parts of getting older and aging into orphanhood, how with your parents you often bury a lot of things you were never able to confront or fix or let go of.

I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense. (xxvi)