OLD AGE QUOTES IV
quotations about old age
Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.
WASHINGTON IRVING
Bracebridge Hall
After a man passes sixty, his mischief is mainly in his head.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
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
Getting older was definitely preferable to an up close and personal meeting with the Grim Reaper.
JOANN ROSS
No Safe Place
Few know how to be old.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Oft am I by the Women told,
Poor Anacreon, thou grow'st old,
Look how thy hairs are falling all;
Poor Anacreon how they fall.
Whether I grow old or no,
By th' Effects I do not know.
This I know without being told,
'Tis time to Live, if I grow Old.
'Tis time short Pleasures now to take;
Of little Life the best to make,
And manage wisely the last Stake.
ANACREON
"Ode X", Odes
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
The world's oldest woman passed away at 116. They keep dying. I think that title may be cursed.
DAVID LETTERMAN
Late Show with David Letterman, December 18, 2012
I always liked people who are older. Of course, every year it gets harder to find them.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
The Paris Review, summer 1993
You know you're getting old when your back starts going out more than you do.
PHYLLIS DILLER
Housekeeping Hints
In youth all doors open outward; in old age all open inward.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
The old are apt to mistake age for experience, and to imagine they are privileged to give good advice, though they may have lived only to afford bad example.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
Until thirty we live through curiosity, after that out of sheer spite and bravado.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
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
Women are beautiful when they're young, and not after. Men can still preserve their sex appeal well into old age.... Some men can maintain, if they embrace it ... cragginess, weary masculinity. Women just get old and fat and wrinkly.
TRACY LETTS
August: Osage Country
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
As life runs on, the road grows strange
With faces new, and near the end
The milestones into headstones change,
'Neath every one a friend.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Sixty-eighth Birthday
I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time ... but it's not like that. It happens overnight.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Dance, Dance, Dance
There's a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it's really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect.
GLEN DUNCAN
The Last Werewolf
When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
interview, The Paris Review, summer 1997