OLD AGE QUOTES IV
quotations about old age
Old men, what are they? Fast fading the leaf,
Three-footed they walk, yet frail as a child,
As a dream set afloat in the daylight.
AESCHYLUS
Agamemnon
There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not anymore. Now I'm startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never at all the one that I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself, a sadly dishevelled figure in a Halloween mask made of sagging, pinkish- grey rubber that bears no more than a passing resemblance to the image of what I look like that I stubbornly retain in my head.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
When you're five, you know your age down to the month. Even in your twenties you know how hold you are. I'm twenty-three, you say, or maybe twenty-seven. But then in your thirties something strange starts to happen. It's a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I'm--you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you're not. You're thirty-five. And then you're bothered, because you wonder if this is the beginning of the end. It is, of course, but it's decades before you admit it.
SARA GRUEN
Water for Elephants
The great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
In youth all doors open outward; in old age all open inward.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
Man, like the fruit he eats, has his period of ripeness. Like that, too, if he continues longer hanging to the stem, it is but an useless and unsightly appendage.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Henry Dearborn, August 17, 1821
It would be a good appendix to the Art of Living and Dying, if any one would write the Art of Growing Old, and teach men to resign their pretensions to the pleasures and gallantries of youth, in proportion to the alteration they find in themselves by the approach of age and infirmities. The infirmities of this stage of life would be much fewer, if we did not affect those which attend the more vigorous and active part of our days; but, instead of studying to be wiser, or being contented with our present follies, the ambition of many of us is also to be the same sort of fools we formerly have been.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Tatler, December 21, 1710
When you're forty, half of you belongs to the past -- and when you're seventy, nearly all of you.
JEAN ANOUILH
Time Remembered
We can't bust heads like we used to. But we have our ways. One trick is to tell stories that don't go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for m'shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. "Gimme five bees for a quarter," you'd say. Now where were we... oh yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have any white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones ...
GRAMPA SIMPSON
"Last Exit to Springfield", The Simpsons
Society often sends the message that old age is just a waiting room for the end--either elderly people are weak, sick, and irrelevant or that old age is all about meaningless recreation.
ANDREA BRANDT
"4 Keys to Increase Your Happiness As You Get Older", Psychology Today, February 1, 2017
No man loves life like him that's growing old.
SOPHOCLES
fragment, Acrisius
Once a happy old man
One can never change the core of things, and light burns you the harder for it.
JOHN ASHBERY
"A Last World"
Getting older was definitely preferable to an up close and personal meeting with the Grim Reaper.
JOANN ROSS
No Safe Place
And now the end is near
And so I face the final curtain,
I'll state my case of which I'm certain.
I've lived a life that's full, I traveled each and ev'ry highway,
And more, much more than this. I did it my way.
FRANK SINATRA
My Way
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.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"Morituri Salutamus"
I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
T. S. ELIOT
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Old age ought to be, and essentially is a manifestation of what is hidden in the depths of man's nature. It might be, it should be, not an exhibition of crackling impotence and gloomy decay, but the very crown and ripening of life--the symbol of maturity, not of dissolution.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Until thirty we live through curiosity, after that out of sheer spite and bravado.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
I used to think I preferred getting old to the alternative, but now I'm not sure. Sometimes the monotony of bingo and sing-alongs and ancient dusty people parked in the hallway in wheelchairs makes me long for death. Particularly when I remember that I'm one of the ancient dusty people, filed away like some worthless tchotchke.
SARA GRUEN
Water for Elephants
Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish. Alas, the heart hardens as the blood ceases to run. The cold snow strikes down from the head, and checks the glow of feeling. Who wants to survive into old age after abdicating all his faculties one by one, and be sans teeth, sans eyes, sans memory, sans hope, sans sympathy?
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The Virginians