Janine di Giovanni Quotes

This body is breaking down, but I am not.

In the sixties, you're still thinking you could do something about this slow disintegration of the body.

There's no such thing as ageing gracefully. I don't meet people who want to get Alzheimer's disease, or who want to get cancer or arthritis or any of the other things that afflict the elderly. Ageing is bad for you, and we better just actually accept that.

There's always a race against time. I don't think for one moment that life gets better. How can it? One's body starts to fall apart.

In specific circumstances the period of aging decline can set in earlier in a particular organ than in the organism as a whole which, in a certain general or theoretical sense, is left a cripple or invalid.

The reason we have cancer and heart disease is the same reason you can't get rid of the wear and tear on your tires on your car: as soon as you use them, you are wearing them away. You can't make eternal tires, and it's the same with the human body.

Death By A Thousand Cuts

I just turned 27 years old, and there are mornings where my knees and ankles really hurt. I hurt all over. I would hate to be me when I'm 35 years old. I'll be a basket case, but I will have a lot of memories.

Wherever it lies, under earth or over earth, the body will always rot.

With decrepitude, longevity has overshot the mark.

We must all either wear out or rust out, every one of us. My choice is to wear out.

Well, we're all dying in increments. I don't mind people knowing what I look like, but I don't want them thinking I'm dying.

Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay.

Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.

Except for an occasional heart attack I feel as young as I ever did.

I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.

it ultimately doesn't matter which disease gnaws away at the body - it looks the same. The flesh surrenders, grows exhausted, and the eyes ask why.

No man should live longer than his teeth.

My indigestion issues got gigantic and constant. And then I started thinking, I'm getting skinny. I dropped about 20 pounds in the blink of an eye. And then when you see it in the mirror, when all of a sudden, you pull your eyes down and the bottom of your eyes go yellow and jaundice sets in - then you know something's wrong.

Death needs time for what it kills to grow in.

I remain unconvinced that anything other than rapid decomposition is the fate of my body and mind after death.

I love my mother, not as a prisoner of atherosclerosis, but as a person; and I must love her enough to accept her as she is, now, for as long as this dwindling may take.

God is favorable to those whom he makes to die by degrees; 'tis the only benefit of old age. The last death will be so much the less painful: it will kill but a quarter of a man or but half a one at most.

I don't feel old, except in the morning once in a while, when I can't turn over properly and say, "What's that? When did that happen?" Our brain doesn't accept that. We're geared to last.

It's too bad that our bodies wear out while our interests are just as strong as ever.