I just got a rather nasty shock. In looking for something or other I came across the fact that one of my cats is about to be nine years old, and that another of them will shortly thereafter be eight; I have been laboring under the delusion they were about five and six. And yesterday I happened to notice in the mirror that while I have long since grown used to my beard being very gray indeed, I was not prepared to discover that my eyebrows are becoming noticeably shaggy. I feel the tomb is just around the corner. And there are all these books I haven't read yet, even if I am simultaneously reading at least twenty...

— Edward Gorey

I know I do everything. I've been doing everything for an awfully long time, and I've seen and lived as hard as I could, and it's been unbelievable, I tell you, unbelievable. But now I have the feeling everything is gliding away from me, and I don't remember, and I don't care, and yet now is right when I need it.

— Tove Jansson

I'm forty-two," he said. "That's eighty-four in musician years.

— Monica Wood

In any case the friendships of later life, in contrast with those negotiated before thirty, are apt to be burdened with reservations, constraints, inhibitions.

— Anthony Powell

In my school, he thought, they learn bitterness and frustration and how to grow old.

— Graham Greene

...inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.

— Terry Pratchett

In the old pieces of furniture almost as in the old paintings, dwells the charm of the past, of the faded which becomes stronger in a man when he reaches an advanced age.

— Adalbert Stifter

In the seven years or so that had passed since I had last seen him, Sir Magnus Dinners had grown not so much older in appearance, as less like a human being.

— Anthony Powell

I spit into the face of Time That has transfigured me.

— W.B. Yeats

It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity... How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced – and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation.

— Carol Shields