Do I enjoy getting older? No. I'm thrilled and delighted for those people who enjoy the experience. I just don't happen to be one of them.

-Cher originally  Cheryl Sarkisian La Pier
  In The Scotsman,11 May.

Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.

-Dylan, Bob pseudonym of  Robert Allen Zimmerman
  'My Back Pages'.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living.

-Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)
  Four Quartets,'East Coker', pt.5.

The tolling bell Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried Ground swell, a time Older than the time of chronometers.

-Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)
Four Quartets,'The Dry Salvages', pt.1.

As I get older I perceive Life has its tail in its mouth.

-Ferlinghetti, Lawrence
  'Poet as Fisherman'.

The older I get, the more of my mother I see in myself.

-Friday, Nancy
  My Mother, My Self, ch.1.

As we get older we do not get any younger. Seasons return, and today I am fifty-five, And this time last year I was fifty-four, And this time next year I shall be sixty-two.

-Reed, Henry
  'ChardWhitlow (Mr Eliot's Sunday Evening Postscript)', a parody ofT S Eliot's style.

Ich habe um meine Kindheit gebeten, und sie ist wiedergekommen, und ich fu«  hle, dass sie immer noch so schwer ist wie damals, und dass es nichts genu«  tzt hat,  a« lter zu werden. I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all. 687

-Rilke, Rainer Maria
  DieAufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (translated by Stephen Mitchell in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1989).

As I grow older and older, And totter towards the tomb, I find that I care less and less Who goes to bed with whom.

-Sayers, Dorothy L(eigh)
'That'sWhy I Never Read Modern Novels', collected in Janet Hitchman Such a Strange Lady (1975), ch.12.

Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer, This land stares at the sun in a huge silence Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear. Inarticulate, arctic, Not written on by history, emptyas paper, It leans away from the world with songs in its lakes Older than love, and lost in the miles. 722

-Scott, F(rancis) R(eginald)
  Of Canada.'Laurentian Shield'.

As I grow older, I constantly learn more.

-Solon
Quoted in Bergk (ed) Poetae Lyrici Graeci,'Solon', no.18.

It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge intime, toprotest againstchange, particularlychangefor the better.

-Steinbeck,John Ernest
  TravelsWith Charley In Search of America, pt.2.