Love in the Time of Cholera Old Age Quotes

When he had just turned forty, he had gone to the doctor because of vague pains in various parts of his body.  After many tests, the doctor had said:  "It's age."  He had returned home without even wondering if any of that had anything to do with him.  (4.146)

He was shaken by a visceral shudder that left his mind blank, and he had to drop the garden tools and lean against the cemetery wall so that the first blow of old age would not knock him down. 
"Damn it," he said, appalled, "that all happened thirty years ago!"  (4.146)

But that was also the period when Tránsito Ariza manifested the first symptoms of her incurable disease.  Her regular clients were older, paler, and more faded each time they came to the notions shop, and she did not recognize them after dealing with them for half a lifetime, or she confused the affairs of one with those of another […] At first it seemed she was growing deaf, but it soon became evident that her memory was trickling away.  (4.26)

She clung to her husband.  And it was just at the time when he needed her most, because he suffered the disadvantage of being ten years ahead of her as he stumbled alone through the mists of old age, with the even greater disadvantage of being a man and weaker than she was.  (4.157)

At Dr. Juvenal Urbino's time of life, that night at the film, men blossomed in a kind of autumnal youth, they seemed more dignified with their first gray hairs, they became witty and seductive, above all in the eyes of young women, while their withered wives had to clutch at their arms so as not to trip over their own shadows.  A few years later, however, the husbands fell without warning down the precipice of a humiliating aging in body and soul, and then it was their wives who recovered and had to lead them by the arm as if they were blind men on charity […] (5.99)

The years of immobilized waiting, of hoping for good luck, were behind him, but on the horizon he could see nothing more than the unfathomable sea of imaginary illnesses, the drop-by-drop urinations of sleepless nights, the daily death at twilight.  He thought that all the moments in the day, which had once been his allies and sworn accomplices, were beginning to conspire against him.  (5.106)

The truth is that by the standards of his time, Florentino Ariza had crossed the line into old age.  He was fifty-six well-preserved years old, and he thought them well lived because they were years of love. (5.107)

It was a bad time for being young:  there was a style of dress for each age, but the style of old age began soon after adolescence, and lasted until the grave.  More than age, it was a matter of social dignity.  The young men dressed like their grandfathers, they made themselves more respectable with premature spectacles, and a walking stick was looked upon with favor after the age of thirty.  (5.107)

For women there were only two ages:  the age for marrying, which did not go past twenty-two, and the age for being eternal spinsters:  the ones left behind.  The others, the married women, the mothers, the widows, the grandmothers, were a race apart who tallied their age not in relation to the number of years they had lived but in relation to the time left to them before they died.  (5.107)

He thought that the world would make more rapid progress without the burden of old people […] He foresaw a more humanitarian and by the same token a more civilized future in which men and women would be isolated in marginal cities when they could no longer take care of themselves so that they might be spared the humiliation, suffering, and frightful loneliness of old age.  From the medical point of view, according to him, the proper age limit would be seventy.  (6.113)