Aging & Wisdom Quote by Robert Quillen

Aging, Quillen suggests, is a trade: you lose literal height and gain narrative length. The joke lands because it yokes two kinds of “getting shorter” and “getting longer” that usually live in separate compartments - the body’s slow shrinkage (spines compress, posture softens, gravity wins) and the mind’s expanding urge to frame experience as story. It’s an observation with newsroom timing: a quick pivot, a clean punchline, and a sting of recognition.

As a journalist writing in an America increasingly obsessed with progress, speed, and the new, Quillen gives elders a sly form of resistance. If the culture demotes you physically and socially, you can still take up space conversationally. Long anecdotes aren’t just rambling; they’re a bid for relevance, a way to reassert continuity in a world that treats people as replaceable. The “longer” story also hints at a changed economy of attention: older people often have fewer stages on which to perform competence, so the past becomes their most reliable credential.

The line carries a mild self-mockery that keeps it from sounding sentimental. Quillen isn’t praising wisdom in the abstract; he’s admitting a familiar human tack: when the body starts renegotiating its limits, we compensate by enlarging the self through memory, detail, and the pleasure of being listened to. The subtext is affectionate but unsparing: time reduces us, and we answer by talking our way back into significance.