90/93-year-old Jacob wonders as he gazes at his aged reflection, 'When did I stop being me?

— Sara Gruen

A boy from Brooklyn used to cruise on summer nights. As soon as he’d hit sixty he’d hold his hand out the window, cupping it around the wind. He’d been assured this is exactly how a woman’s breast feels when you put your hand around it and apply a little pressure. Now he knew, and he loved it. Night after night, again and again, until the weather grew cold, and he had to roll the window up. For many years afterward he was perpetually attempting to soar. One winter’s night, holding his wife’s breasting his hand, he closed his eyes and wanted to weep. He loved her, but it was the wind he imagined now. As he grew older, he loved the word etcetera and refused to abbreviate it. He loved sweet white butter. He often pretended to be playing the organ. On one of his last mornings, he noticed the shape of his face molded in the pillow. He shook it out, but the next morning it reappeared.

— Mary Ruefle

Accepting one's age and mortality is a sign that you've now become an adult. Once you realize you no longer fit in the same jeans you did when you were 30, and the spicy foods you loved when you were younger now like to revisit you at 2 AM, you come to realize that with aging comes adjustment. And, aging isn't a bad thing - it sure beats the alternative!

— James Arlen Dennis

A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging. Wrong, I want to say. In fact, I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging. In fact, I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.

— Joan Didion

A face-lift is a woman’s attempt to lower the odds of the next person accurately guessing her age.

— Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are anymore. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal.

— Douglas Coupland

A few years turned into more years, and more years turned into all years. Years have a habit of behaving like that.

— Fredrik Backman

After 25 the only thing you’ll be precocious at is death.

— Patricia L. Steffy

After a certain point, all natural bodily changes are for the worst.

— Mokokoma Mokhonoana

After all these years, his best friend is malaria. Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old battles.

— Louis Bayard