All Quotes By Tag: Aging

“You’ve climbed too many mountains and crossed too many rivers to stop and turn back now.”

“There are various theories about why the years seem to pass faster as you get older. The most popular is also the most obvious. As you get older, each year is a smaller percentage of your life. If you are ten years old, a year is ten percent. If you are fifty years old, a year is two percent. But she read a theory that spurned that explanation. The theory states that time passes faster when we are in a set routine, when we aren’t learning anything new, when we stay stuck in a life pattern. They key to making time slow down is to have new experiences. You may joke that the week you went on vacation flew by far too quickly, but if you stop and think about it, that week actually seemed to last much longer than one involving the drudgery of your day job. You are complaining about it going away so fast because you loved it, not because it felt as though time was passing faster. If you want to slow down time, this theory holds: If you want to make the days last, do something different. Travel to exotic locales. Take a class.”

“Time is unkind to all of us, but it is particularly sadistic to women. A man’s physical prowess may dwindle with time, but he has compensations: stature, wealth, eminence. Men grow distinguished while women simply grow old.”

“History was, is, a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards, but you don’t always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.”

“It was not Hansu that she missed, or even Isak. What she was seeing again in her dreams was her youth, her beginning, and her wishes–so this is how she became a woman.”

“There, I was hit again with a feeling I’d had rather frequently as of late. Deep in the night, or even in broad daylight, a sense of the transitory would abruptly arise, shocking me, slapping my clueless self with the truth of my own age and how much time had already passed, and so suddenly too, it seemed. It would hit hard. And it made me want to keep hold of everything and to toss it away. How could you even talk about that? What were the words for it? I just didn’t know where it all went and how it went that fast. What we lost over a lifetime seemed so great.”

“It was difficult to imagine that a full day hadn’t yet passed since we boarded the airliner in New York. I paused. Medieval man believed that one was placed beyond the touch of time, and therefore aging, while attending Mass. What, I wondered, would he have made of those hours we left up in the sky? I would not change my watch until I gave the matter more thought.”

“
I’d Better Not–
A man leaned over to a man in a pubAnd said in a voice‘I used to be thirty seven but now I’m fifty one’.And that’s how the years go.In handfuls.Like somebody is almost at the end of a bag of crispsAnd they tip the bag upAnd it’s as though they’re drinking crisps.That’s how the years go.”

“She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child’s perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here–the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.”

“One of the seats of emotion and memory in the brain is the amygdala, he explained. When something threatens your life, this area seems to kick into overdrive, recording every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. “This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older,” Eagleman said–why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.”

“a life can change in a tenth ofa second.or sometimes it can take70years.”

“The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill. Shake down all the grains of Time—the big grains of centuries, and the small grains of years, and the tiny grains of hours and minutes—and the clock pulverized them, slid Time silently out in all directions in a fine pollen, carried by cold winds to blanket the town like dust, everywhere. Spores from that clock lodged in your flesh to wrinkle it, to grow bones to monstrous size, to burst feet from shoes like turnips. Oh, how that great machine…dispensed Time in blowing weathers.”

“Everyday is one less day.”

“The youthful body untouched decays the fastest, for no living hands record its splendor; and here youth and time are wasted.”

“I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable–if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.”