There are lots of scary things about getting older, but one of the biggest, I guess, is death itself. Especially in midlife, when we suddenly wake up to the fact we may have fewer years left than we have already lived.
You've only got so long to live.
At the age of 60, you see how short the runway is in front of you and how long the runway is behind you, and that you don't have much time left.
Age doesn't bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys. It's the lack of years left that weighs far heavier on me than the age that I am.
What will you do with the time you have left?
As you get older, the questions come down to about two or three. How long? And what do I do with the time I've got left?
It wasn't really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left. Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty; and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed.
Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left?
While there's time left, I want to do different kinds of things.
I work more now perhaps because I know that there is so little time left.
I just have so few sunrises left, and I want to be happy.
Nobody knows how long they have left on Earth. There's no guarantees, and for me, when they tell you - not once, twice, three times - 'You've got a couple weeks to live,' or a couple months, you have to determine how you want to do that.
Age is a chronological number. That's all. There is plenty of time for my life afterwards. I'm still a young woman.
If every year is a marble, how many marbles do you have left? How many sunrises, how many opportunities to rise to the full stature of your being?
We usually say of ancient persons, that they have already one foot in the grave, and the rest of their life is nothing else but the bringing of these feet together.
People say that time slips through our fingers like sand. What they don't acknowledge is that some of the sand sticks to the skin. These are memories that will remain, memories of the time when there was still time left.
