What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t.
After a certain age, all affairs are serious. Like heart attacks.
I’m perfectly all right. Yet there’s something ominous about turning sixty-five. Suddenly old age is not a phenomenon which will occur; it has occurred.
When you reach thirty, you realize its not the end of the world.
They nodded when the baker began to speak of loneliness, and of the sense of doubt and limitation that had come to him in the middle years.
When Youth lapses into error, it dares not look into the mirror of its conscience, whereas Ripe Old Age has already seen itself reflected there: therein lies the difference between these two ages of man.
When you get old, you can’t talk to people because they snap at you. That’s why you become deaf, so you won’t be able to hear people talking to you that way. That’s why old people die, eventually. People talk to them that way.
After a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
I thought when I was this age, I’d have nothing but time. But I find you’re running around like a blue-arsed fly.
I say – what I mean. I am an old woman. I do not have the time any longer to say things I do not mean.
She thought about how time had a way of swinging the balance of power on its axis, and how old age had a way of sometimes looking through a dressing-table mirror like the hand of a corpse poking through eroded earth.
Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.