Quotation About Old Age
1. Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.
2. I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
3. I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.
4. In one thing you have not changed, dear friend,” said Aragorn: “you still speak in riddles.”
“What? In riddles?” said Gandalf. “No! For I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to; the long explanations needed by the young are wearying.
5. Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made. Our times are in his hand who saith, ‘A whole I planned, youth shows but half; Trust God: See all, nor be afraid!
6. Our lives can’t be measured by our final years, of this I am sure.
7. It`s not how old you are, it`s how you are old.
8. There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.
9. Learning is an ornament in prosperity, a refuge in adversity, and a provision in old age.
10. When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep
11. Sex at age 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.
12. The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.
13. People don’t love each other at our age, Marthe—they please each other, that’s all. Later on, when you’re old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That’s all it is.
14. The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.
15. I’m not senile,” I snapped. “If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.
16. That’s the trouble with you young people. You think because you ain’t been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forgot more than you ever know.
17. And then I laugh, because it’s so ridiculous and so gorgeous and it’s all I an do to not melt into a fit of giggles. So what if I’m ninety-three? So what if I’m ancient and cranky and my body’s a wreck? If they’re willing to accept me and my guilty conscience, why the hell shouldn’t I run away with the circus?
It’s like Charlie told the cop. For this old man, this IS home.
18. It’s [old age] not a surprise, we knew it was coming – make the most of it. So you may not be as fast on your feet, and the image in your mirror may be a little disappointing, but if you are still functioning and not in pain, gratitude should be the name of the game.
19. I’ll be happy if running and I can grow old together.
20. For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
21. The truth is I’m getting old, I said. We already are old, she said with a sigh. What happens is that you don’t feel it on the inside, but from the outside everybody can see it.
22. If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.
23. I don’t see why there should be a point where everyone decides you’re too old. I’m not too old, and until I decide I’m too old I’ll never be too fucking old.
24. When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary.
25. A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.
26. Cherish all your happy moments: they make a fine cushion for old age.
27. I dread no more the first white in my hair,
Or even age itself, the easy shoe,
The cane, the wrinkled hands, the special chair:
Time, doing this to me, may alter too
My anguish, into something I can bear
28. Hope is sweet.
Hope is illumining.
Hope is fulfilling.
Hope can be everlasting.
Therefore, do not give up hope,
Even in the sunset of your life.
29. Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age.
30. I just got a rather nasty shock. In looking for something or other I came across the fact that one of my cats is about to be nine years old, and that another of them will shortly thereafter be eight; I have been labouring under the delusion they were about five and six. And yesterday I happened to notice in the mirror that while I have long since grown used to my beard being very grey indeed, I was not prepared to discover that my eyebrows are becoming noticeably shaggy. I feel the tomb is just around the corner. And there are all these books I haven’t read yet, even if I am simultaneously reading at least twenty.
31. And this is the strangest of all paradoxes of the human adventure; we live inside all experience, but we are permitted to bear witness only to the outside. Such is the riddle of life and the story of the passing of our days.
32. If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: ‘Only if I did not know that I was doing so.’ To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean—even if it did build muscle—whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one’s learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same me but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period… the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities.
33. Seven Ages: first puking and mewling
Then very pissed-off with your schooling
Then fucks, and then fights
Next judging chaps’ rights
Then sitting in slippers: then drooling.
34. Everybody dies. There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God. (Although there’s no question a belief in God would come in handy. It would be great to think there’s a plan, and that everything happens for a reason. I don’t happen to believe that. And every time one of my friends says to me, “Everything happens for a reason,” I would like to smack her.)
35. If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.
36. He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life.
37. And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he’s gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.
38. When the last autumn of Dickens’s life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?
Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute?
39. I just wish moments weren’t so fleeting!’ Isaac called to the man on the roof, ‘They pass so quickly!’
‘Fleeting?!’ responded the tilling man, ‘Moments? They pass quickly?! . . . Why, once a man is finished growing, he still has twenty years of youth. After that, he has twenty years of middle age. Then, unless misfortune strikes, nature gives him twenty thoughtful years of old age. Why do you call that quickly?’ And with that, the tilling man wiped his sweaty brow and continued tilling; and the dejected Isaac continued wandering.
‘Stupid fool!’ Isaac muttered quietly to himself as soon as he was far enough away not to be heard.
40. Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray.
41. When we age we shed many skins: ego, arrognace, dominance, self-opionated, unreliable, pessimism, rudeness, selfish, uncaring … Wow, it’s good to be old!
42. Was it the forgetfulness of old age or personal incapacity that made the man able to say please but not thank you?
43. The good thing about being old is not being young.
44. Combine nursing homes with nursery schools. Bring very old and very young together: they interest one another.
45. The delights of reading impart the vivacity of youth even to old age.
46. We could endlessly reminisce, live in the past to an unhealthy degree, then politely kill each other some winter night before bedtime, stirring poison into our cups of whiskey-spiked chamomile tea, wearing party hats. Then, nervous about our double homicide, we could lie in bed together, holding hands again, frightened and waiting, still wondering, after all these years, if we even believed in our own souls.
47. In my old age, I was at last being permitted to make the discovery that lovemaking gets better and better with time, if it’s with someone you care for.
48. The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.
49. In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness, except that which associates itself especially with romantic love. Yet the cleanliness and dignity of Michel Angelo’s male figures are incontestable, and bear striking witness to that nobility of the sentiment in him, which we have already seen illustrated in his sonnets.
50. I wept for relationships not possible due to denial and dreams locked in the back of people’s minds, all of the bits of life that lay dormant until the babblings of televisions and nursing homes sweep them away. It makes me wonder how many of the dreams we had originally have already been forgotten.
51. You were young, I thought, not once but always before, always always, every day before the day just passed. You were young only minutes ago.
52. Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
53. Thou hast had thty day, old dame, but thy sun has long been set. Thou art now the very emblem of an old warhorse turned out on the barren heath; thou hast had thy paces in thy time, but now a broken amble is the best of them.
54. Here, on a human face, appeared all the ruin following upon hopeless labour. Laveuve’s unkempt beard straggled over his features, suggesting an old horse that is no longer cropped; his toothless jaws were quite askew, his eyes were vitreous, and his nose seemed to plunge into his mouth. But above all else one noticed his resemblance to some beast of burden, deformed by hard toil, lamed, worn to death, and now only good for the knackers.
55. Let us cherish and love old age; for it is full of pleasure if one knows how to use it. Fruits are most welcome when almost over; youth is most charming at its close; the last drink delights the toper, the glass which souses him and puts the finishing touch on his drunkenness. Each pleasure reserves to the end the greatest delights which it contains. Life is most delightful when it is on the downward slope, but has not yet reached the abrupt decline.
56. For myself, hand on heart, those things never bothered me. It is one of the graces of married life that for some magical reason we always look the same to each other. Even our friends never seem to grow old. What a boon that is, and never suspected by me when I was young. But I suppose, otherwise, what would we do? There has never been a person in an old people’s home that hasn’t looked around dubiously at the other inhabitants. They are the old ones, they are the club that no one wants to join. But we are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.
57. I respect traditional people – they have the eyes which see value in the tarnished. This is a gift in itself. Tradition requires a wealth of discipline in order to be adhered to, hence it is rarely found in youth.
58. For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis … [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother’s Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling “vaguely guilty.
59. Parker, I’m old,” She said matter-of-factly. “I get away with these things.” She continued to wave and smile wildly. “People treat me like an idiot so I’m allowed to act like one from time to time. It’s one of the perks.
60. His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough
