On facing aging:

... the battle to remain an unassailable man had by then been lost by him, time having transformed his own body into a storehouse for man-made contraptions designed to send off collapse. Diffusing thoughts of his own demise had never required more diligence and cunning.

On random fears of dying that come to us:

Why must he mistrust his life just when he was more its master, and he'd been in years? Why should he imagine himself on the edge of extinction when calm, straightforward thinking, told him there was so much more solid life to come? Yet it happened every night during their seaside walk beneath the stars. He was not flamboyant or deformed or extreme in anyway, so why then, at his age, should he be haunted by thoughts of dying?

On the absence of faith:

No hocus-pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. If he could be said to have located a philosophical leash for himself, that was it -- he'd come upon it early and intuitive way, and however elemental, that was the whole of it.

On the degenerative aspects of the aging body:

Yet what he'd learned was nothing when measured against the inevitable onslaught that is the end of life. Had he been aware of the mortal suffering of every man and woman he happened to know during all his years of professional life, of each one's painful story of regret and loss and stoicism, of fear and panic and isolation and dread, had he learned of every last thing they had parted with that had once been vitally theirs and of how, systematically, they were being destroyed. He would have had to say on the phone through the day and into the night, making another hundred calls at least. Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.