Up: [[Aging]] Related: [[Death]] Created: 2022-06-04 Updated: 2025-12-15 > [!orbit] Alix Kates Shulman in *Drinking the Rain* > For here I am when the tide goes out — speeder slowing down, fighter finding harmony, activist turned contemplative, analyzer seeking synthesis, communal become solitaire, rationalist grown spiritual, teacher turned student, desirer dissolving in [[Contentment]]. I wonder if these uncoverings are the blessings -- often seen as the curses — of age? Changes grounded in experience? Whatever they are, here, where time is still, I welcome them. Amor fati: love what is. Including my expanding self. (p. 65) > [!Orbit] Stephen Jenkinson in *Come of Age* > Eighty cents of every health care dollar in North America is spent in the last six months or so of a person’s life. The focus is on disease management, not health management. (p. 193) > [!Orbit] George Sand > The old woman I shall become will be quite different from the woman I am now. Another I is beginning. > [!Orbit] [[C. G. Jung]] in *Collected Works 7* > The afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning; only its meaning and purpose are different. (114) > [!Orbit] [[Robertson Davies]] in *Fifth Business* > I am deep in the old man’s puzzle, trying to link the wisdom of the body with the wisdom of the spirit until the two are one. At my age you cannot divide spirit from body without anguish and destruction, from which you will speak nothing but crazy lies! (p. 171-172) > [!orbit] [[Anne Truitt]] in *Turn* > My intention is to be a vigorous old woman. So I must learn how to take the different kind of care needed by the worn envelope in which I now live, and must summon up the motivation to do so. > [!orbit] Hermann Hesse > I have no right to call myself one who knows. > I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books. > I’m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. > My story isn’t pleasant, it’s not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories. > It tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves. > [!Orbit] Tennessee Williams > Life is a fairly well-written play except for the third act. It’s a badly written third act. > [!Orbit] An unknown geriatrician > If you've seen one 80-year-old, you've seen one 80-year-old. > [!orbit] [[Anne Truitt]] in *Turn* > Our lives move along, bearing our past into our future. > [!Orbit] [[Anne Truitt]] in *Turn* > Unable or unwilling to make psychic changes that take death into account, a person instead makes abrupt changes in circumstances and often loses the good of the knowledge accumulated in the steady effort of a lifetime. Thus diminished, a life can trail away in small busyness. Amusements become the equivalents of Lear’s knights: memories, hobbies, anecdotes of erstwhile cronies and skirmishes, creeping self-indulgences. This turn of events can make a person foolish, in need of a Fool to mirror lost self-respect. > [!Orbit] Helen Conway in a Substack post. Not sure if the quote is original to her. > Retired is the act of leaving obligation to follow desire. > [!Orbit] Mario de Andrade, Brazilian poet and novelist > We have two lives, and the second one starts when you realize that you only have one… > [!Orbit] Rachel Naomi Remen > A human life has seasons much as the earth has seasons, each time with its own particular beauty and power. And gift. By focusing on springtime and summer, we have turned the natural process of life into a process of loss rather than a process of celebration and appreciation. Life is neither linear nor stagnant. It is movement from mystery to mystery. Just as a year includes autumn and winter, life includes [[death]], not as an opposite but as an integral part of the way life is made. > [!Orbit] Woody Allen > I recently turned sixty. Practically a third of my life is over. > [!Orbit] Ronald Blythe > With full-span lives having become the norm, people may need to learn how to be aged as they once had to learn how to be adult. > [!Orbit] Bernard Baruch > To me old age is always fifteen years older than I am. > [!Orbit] [[C. G. Jung]] > For a young person, it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the ageing person, it is a duty and a necessity to devote serious attention to himself. > [!Orbit] [[Mary Oliver]] in *Our World* > How often now I just sit, with my > elbows on the desk and my hands > holding my face bold and upright, > and stare into the past. > [!Orbit] Miranda France in *The Writing School* > The past may be a foreign country, but at least it's one we've all been to and from which we may conserve some treasured mementoes -- the psychic equivalents of ...a fridge magnet, a snow dome. Old age is a blank page. It's hard to think yourself into that state, even as we all move steadily towards it. (p. 92) > [!Orbit] Marilyn Kay Hagar in *Finding the Wild Inside* > Watching an aged loved one deteriorate ever so gradually but inexorably — there in body but less and less capably, there mentally but less and less sharply — is a certain kind of torture. It is different than witnessing [[death]] from an accident or an illness. In those instances, it is possible to imagine that if we are really careful, those things won’t happen to us; thus, we maintain our distance from the inevitable. But watching a loved one fade away gradually brings life’s waning phase into the foreground of our awareness. (p. 244) > [!Orbit] Amadou Hampâté Bâ, an African quote > When an old person dies, it is a library that burns down. > [!Orbit] Jane R. Prétat in *Coming to Age: The croning years and late-life transformation* > It is not easy to accept and experience our aging bodies and psyches without getting caught in a complex that encourages us to adopt an heroic stance. Again we seek to turn life around, to redeem all of our failures before we get too old. > We must sacrifice even that desire. When we can willingly sacrifice our old ego goals in all their lightness and darkness of being, then there is a chance for a fuller, more open dialogue between ego and Self (p.98) > [!Orbit] Ken Wilber in Connie Zwieg’s book *The Inner Work of Age* > Growing old is an opportunity to reset our priorities, a continuing chance to drop things that aren’t important. If we continue to do that, we will have left the world more whole than we found it. If every human could make that statement truthfully, then the planet would see a slow and consistent increase in those values. > [!Orbit] [[John O’Donohue]] in *Anam Cara: A book of Celtic wisdom* > Many people miss out on themselves as they journey through life. They know others, they know places, they know skills, they know their work, but tragically they do not know themselves at all. Aging can be time of ripening when you actually meet yourself, indeed maybe for the first time… a time for visiting the temple of your memory and integrating your life… a vital part of coming home to yourself. > [!Orbit] Phillip Lopate in *Portrait of My Body* > Old age is a great leveller: the frailer elderly all come to resemble turtles trapped in curved shells — shrinking, wrinkled, and immobile — so that in a roomful, a terrarium, of the old, it is hard to disentangle one solitary individual’s karma from the mass fate of aging. (p. 168) > [!Orbit] Virginia Woolf in *Mrs. Dalloway* > The compensation of growing old [is] that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained — at last! — the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence, — the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it around, slowly, in the light.