Growing old

Table of contents

1 Attributed 2 Feeling insecure 3 Looking back on Youth 4 Middle Age 5 Forgetting 6 But you're not growing old if ...

Attributed

• "Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what happened." -- Jennifer Yane
• To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living. -- Henri Frederic Amiel
• Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional. -- Chili Davis
• "The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age." -- Lucille Ball
• "One to-day is worth two to-morrows." -- Benjamin Franklin
• "To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something." -- Samuel Beckett
• "Thanks to modern medical advances such as antibiotics, nasal spray, and Diet Coke, it has become routine for people in the civilized world to pass the age of 40, sometimes more than once." -- Dave Barry, "Your Disintegrating Body," Dave Barry Turns 40, 1990
• "Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself." -- Tom Wilson

Feeling insecure

• "When I have a birthday I take the day off. But when my wife has a birthday, she takes a year or two off."
• "We know when we're getting old when the only thing we want for our birthday is not to be reminded of it."
• "It's so sad to grow old alone. My wife hasn't had a birthday in 4 years. She was born in the year of our Lord-only-knows."

Looking back on Youth

• "Youth is a disease from which we all recover." -- Dorothy Fulheim
• "Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children." -- George Bernard Shaw
• "Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life." -- Herbert Asquith

Middle Age

• "Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle." -- Bob Hope

Forgetting

• "First you forget names; then you forget faces; then you forget to zip up your fly; and then you forget to unzip your fly." -- Branch Rickey

But you're not growing old if ...

• "You're not 40, you're eighteen with 22 years experience." -- Anonymous
• "I still have a full deck; I just shuffle slower now." -- Anonymous
• "Because time itself is like a spiral, something special happens on your birthday each year: The same energy that God invested in you at birth is present once again." -- Menachem Mendel Schneerson
• "To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent that is to triumph over old age." -- Thomas B. Aldrich

See also aging