IT HAS BEEN SAID...

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming... suddenly you find - at the age of 60, say - that a whole new life has opened before you... You can only perceive real beauty in a person as they get older... Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication, because youth is sweet and they are growing... Aging is not 'lost youth' but a new stage of opportunity and strength... There is no old age. There is, as there always was, just you... The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in 70 or 80 years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all... The surprising thing about young fools is how many survive to become old fools... I'm very pleased with each advancing year. It stems back to when I was forty. I was a bit upset about reaching that milestone, but an older friend consoled me. 'Don't complain about growing old - many, many people do not have that privilege... In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways. Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death... It is a sadness of growing older that we lose our ardent appreciation of what is new and different and difficult... Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I felt at twenty... I grow more intense as I age... The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes... I was always taught to respect my elders and I've now reached the age when I don't have anybody to respect... It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution. The reverse is true . As one grows older, one climbs with surprising strides... About the only thing that comes to us without effort is old age... Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough...