“The sudden surge of hormones at teenage age will continue to play an important part in the life of young people”
“Kolonia Santita ina sura 8 na kila sura ina faslu 3.”
“But old fools is the biggest fools there is.”
“What ages you faster, suffering or experience?”
“...real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here and sullen there, warm asymmetrical streaks on a rosewood cabinet from where a slant of sun had struck it while the other side was as dark as the day it was cut.”
“And our ages never bothered her from the very beginning. I was married, but that didn’t matter, either. She seemed to consider things like age and family and income to be of the same a priori order as shoe size and vocal pitch and the shape of one’s fingernails. The sort of thing that thinking about won’t change one bit. And that much said, well, she had a point.”
“But at what age are you forgiven your trespasses?”
“The older I get the more I realize how simple life is and how complicated we make it...”
“The day you lose your sense of wonder is the day you grow old.”
“When the years are dying in the arms of your life, the earth is in pain moving around the sun.”
“I don t ever want to get old. Spare me that. Have you the power? No, even you don t have the power, alas.”
“They also knew that there was a string of DNA at the end of each chromosome called a telomere, which shortened a tiny bit each time a cell divided, like time ticking off a clock. As normal cells go through life, their telomeres shorten with each division until they’re almost gone. Then they stop dividing and begin to die. This process correlates with the age of a person: the older we are, the shorter our telomeres, and the fewer times our cells have left to divide before they die. By the early nineties, a scientist at Yale had used HeLa to discover that human cancer cells contain an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds their telomeres. The presence of telomerase meant cells could keep regenerating their telomeres indefinitely. This explained the mechanics of HeLa’s immortality: telomerase constantly rewound the ticking clock at the end of Henrietta’s chromosomes so they never grew old and never died.”
“Oh yes , said the old woman, but I ve heard these so-called stoves are by no means all they are supposed to be. I never saw a stove in my day, and yet never ailed a thing, at least as long as I could really be called alive, except for nettle rash one night when I was in my fifteenth year.. It was caused by some fresh fish that the boys used to catch in the lakes thereabouts. The man did not answer for a while, but lay pondering the medical history of this incredible old creature who, without ever setting eyes on a stove, had suffered almost no ailments in the past sixty-five years.”
“Eustasia Johannsen was ready. Anyone could see that. Everything about her ancient self gave evidence to it: Her skin, wrinkled and transparent... But mainly, it was her eyes. They were drawn into her face as if her memories occupied more of her sight than what was actually in front of her.”
“As we grow older, our bodies get shorter and our anecdotes longer.”
“Our immediate interests are after all of but small moment. It is what we do for the future, what we add to the sum of man s knowledge, that counts most. As someone has said, The individual withers and the world is more and more. Man dies at 70, 80, or 90, or at some earlier age, but through his power of physical reproduction, and with the means that he has to transmit the results of effort to those who come after him, he may be said to be immortal.”
“How old are you? asks Plastic again. That doesn t matter, says StingRay. What matters is how much stuff I know. People who know a lot of stuff don t need birthdays.”