“Your old lovers get to be your really old lovers, and you can’t remember who broke up with who, or who got mad at who—just that the two of you remember things that no one else in the world does.”

Gloria Steinem

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“I’ve endured a few knocks but missed worse. I know how lucky I am, and secretly tap wood, greet the day, and grab a sneaky pleasure from my survival at long odds. The pains and insults are bearable. My conversation may be full of holes and pauses, but I’ve learned to dispatch a private Apache scout ahead into the next sentence, the one coming up, to see if there are any vacant names or verbs in the landscape up there. If he sends back a warning, I’ll pause meaningfully, duh, until something else comes to mind.”

Roger Angell

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“I am as alive to the world as I have ever been—alive to everything I see and hear and feel. I revel in the spring sunshine, and the cream and purple hellebore in the garden; I listen to a radio discussion about the ethics of selective abortion, and chip in at points; the sound of a beloved voice on the phone brings a surge of pleasure. I think there is a sea-change, in old age—a metamorphosis of the sensibilities. With those old consuming vigours now muted, something else comes into its own—an almost luxurious appreciation of the world that you are still in. Spring was never so vibrant; autumn never so richly gold. People are of abiding interest—observed in the street, overheard on a bus. The small pleasures have bloomed into points of relish in the day—food, opening the newspaper (new minted, just for me), a shower, the comfort of bed. It is almost like some kind of end-game salute to the intensity of childhood experience, when the world was new. It is an old accustomed world now, but invested with fresh significance; I’ve seen all this before, done all this, but am somehow able to find new and sharpened pleasure.”

Penelope Lively

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“If I didn’t think it would work, I would be the first to say, ‘Forget it.’ But we’re fighting people’s misconceptions about what rock & roll is supposed to be. You’re supposed to do it when you’re twenty, twenty-five—as if you’re a tennis player and you have three hip surgeries and you’re done. We play rock & roll because it’s what turned us on. Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf—the idea of retiring was ludicrous to them. You keep going—and why not?”

Keith Richards

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“At nearly 80, with a scattering of medical and surgical problems, none disabling, I feel glad to be alive—‘I’m glad I’m not dead!’ sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect. (This is in contrast to a story I heard from a friend who, walking with Samuel Beckett in Paris on a perfect spring morning, said to him, ‘Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?’ to which Beckett answered, ‘I wouldn’t go as far as that.’)”

Oliver Sacks

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“Here is my theory: I am all the ages I’ve ever been. You realize this at some point about your child—even when your kid is sixteen, you can see all the ages in him, the baby wrapped up like a burrito, the one-year-old about to walk, the four-year-old napping, the ten-year-old on a trampoline.”

Anne Lamott

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“My father used to say, of car after car, this is my last LaSalle, or Cadillac, or whatever, but it never was, at least not for longer than he expected. I feel quite sure this is my last book. Unless I am hit on the head with a falling rock and vast reservoirs of hitherto unperceived material are revealed to me. As it stands I feel pretty much that I have left no stone unturned.”

William Maxwell

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“Gently, Years, Gently!”

Ralph Hodgson

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“I am in love with the world. And I look right now, as we speak together, out my window in my studio and I see my trees and my beautiful, beautiful maples that are hundreds of years old, they’re beautiful. And you see I can see how beautiful they are. I can take time to see how beautiful they are. It is a blessing to get old. It is a blessing to find the time to do the things, to read the books, to listen to the music.”

Maurice Sendak

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“When we are green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever.”

Tobias Wolff

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“I turned five 50 years ago.”

Lynda Barry

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“You know, it’s funny. By the time we develop real taste in food, and begin to learn how to prepare it, digestive disorders set in and weight piles up. When I think what I could have done in my youth, when I ate like a horse with no bad results at all, with the knowledge I’m getting now, I could cry.”

Avis DeVoto

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“I used to have much confidence in my ability to ward off death. But death is as strong as ever, and I am a much weaker resister.”

Saul Bellow

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“Then there is the stamp of old age on the face, head, hands and ankles. These blue-cheese ankles—what a punishment for narcissists!”

Saul Bellow

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“I am like you in my boyish rejection of elderliness. Antiquity—why not come right out with it? You pack a snowball on a winter day and imagine taking a belly flop on your sled as we all used to do back in the beautiful Twenties—I was ten years old in 1925. All that remains is the freshness of the impulse.”

Saul Bellow

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