MIDDLE-AGE

'One of the disconcerting aspects of middle age was the realization that most of the crises which happened to other people also ultimately happened to you.'

Margaret Laurence, The Diviners, p.44.

AGE-BASED WORRY

'Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters?
Old person worry: What if everything I do does?'
Jenny Offill, Weather, p.21

OLD AGE

'Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.'

Philip Roth, Everyman, p.156. 

THE GRIEF OF OLD AGE

'...an old person's sorrow, which so often lies in seeing the failure of those whom we love, rather than in our own personal grief.' 

Martin Boyd, The Cardboard Crown, p.196. 

AMBITION

'"...he'll do like the rest of us. He'll do what he wants to, till the time comes for him to wonder whether it was worth doing...'"

Howard Spring, Fame is the Spur, p.469. 

THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN THE YOUNG & OLD

'Sometimes very young children can look at the old, and a look passes between them, conspiratorial, sly and knowing. It's because neither are humans to the middling ones, those in their prime, as they say, like beef.' 

Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel, p.4.

YOUTH

'Yes, of course we were pretentious - what else is youth for?'
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending, p.10. 

TIME

'Here's how time works. When you're young, your mind is running really fast, like a camera over-cranked to produce a slow-motion film, so the days and weeks and summers seem incredibly long. When you grow old, the mind slows down, doesn't clock so much sensory stimuli, so the days and years flash by. The same of things happens in a day. Morning time seems longer because your mind is whirring. Evening times goes by faster, because you've slowed down - unless you're being stimulated by lively company at dinner.'

Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, p.259.

THE REVELATIONS OF OLD AGE

'If you want to know what a person is like "deep down," observe them in their still-functioning old age, where they finally express everything they have held back for so long, often in terms of bitterness and resentment. Or sometimes it may be even the display of generosity and joy. One of the truths emphasized by the "ages of life" tradition is that each stage is related to another. How we have navigated and been formed by one stage orders the next. And, conversely, our older selves will shape our younger brethren as well as illumine our own pasts. In a sense, then, old age - senectus - is the time when we are shown for we are, in terms of our responsible selves, as we prepare to stand before God. The old teach the young; but they teach the young only in a way that exposes their own form. The old are thereby judged.'

Ephraim Radner, A Time to Keep, p.150. 

AGE & IDENTITY

'The body may decline, may seem a dismal reflection of what went before, but the mind has a healthy continuity, and some kind of inbuilt fidelity to itself, a coherence over time. We learn, and experience; attitudes and opinions may change, but most people, it seems to me, retain an essential persona, a cast of mind, a trademark footprint. It is not so much that we simply get more like ourselves, as has been said, but that the self in question may expand, mutate, over time, but retains always that signature identity.' 

Penelope Lively, Ammonites and Leaping Fish, p.42. 

LEARNING TO LET GO

'Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You've got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it. It's like boats. You keep your motor on so you can steer with the current. And when you hear the sound of the waterfall coming nearer and nearer, tidy up the boat, put on your best tie and hat, and smoke a cigar right up till the moment you go over. That's a triumph. Don't argue with the cataract.'

Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer, p.113.

TIME

'"No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you're nine, you think you've always been nine years old and always will be. When you're thirty, it seems you've always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.'"

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, p.98.

PRAYER

'A friend recently described an incident with her father who suffered from progressively severe dementia, and who had almost completely lost the power to communicate. A televised act of worship was being shown and on impluse my friend said to her father, "Do you still pray, Dad?"

To her surprise he responded with a distinct "Yes".

"What do you say to God when you pray?"

"I say...(long pause)...Hello..."

No more was forthcoming, but no more needed to be said.' 

John Wyatt, Matters of Life & Death: Human dilemmas in the light of the Christian faith, p.237. 

OLD AGE

'...most people never think to blame themselves until they're old and have time for thousands of second thoughts.' 

Tim Gautreaux, The Missing, p.336. 

BEAUTY

'Some of the most beautiful people I have ever seen are elderly people whose souls shine so brightly that their bodies are hardly visible...' 

Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, p.233. 

THE PASSAGE OF TIME

‘…a boy’s mind is different from an old man’s by precisely a lifetime.’
Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels, p.71. 

GROWING UP

'Finally I thought of one true thing, which is that sometimes I act just as juvenile as I ever did, but as I get older, I do it for shorter periods of time. I find my way back to the path sooner...' 

Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually), p.251. 

AGE

'The key to age is patience; and the key to patience is unfortunately age, which cannot be hurried, which takes time...'

William Maxwell, 'What Every Boy Should Know' in Over by The River and Other Stories, p.90. 

AGE

'Age and experience have not made me a Nestor qualified to tell others about how to live their lives. I feel more like more like Theodore Dreiser, who confessed that he would depart from life more bewildered than he had arrived in it. Instead of being embittered, or stoical, or calm, or resigned, or any of the standard things that a long life might have made me, I confess that I am often simply lost, as much in need of comfort, understanding, forgiveness, uncritical love - the things you used to give me - as I ever was at five, or ten.'  

Wallace Stenger, 'Letter, Much Too Late' in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West, p.22.

OLD AGE

'Getting old is like standing in a long, slow line. You wake up out of the shuffle and torpor only at those moments when the line moves you one step closer to the window.'

Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird, p.171.