OLD AGE QUOTES V
quotations about old age
Nothing is more incumbent on the old, than to know when they should get out of the way, and relinquish to younger successors the honors they can no longer earn, and the duties they can no longer perform.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to John Vaughan, February 5, 1815
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
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
Until thirty we live through curiosity, after that out of sheer spite and bravado.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
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
No man loves life like him that's growing old.
SOPHOCLES
fragment, Acrisius
Getting older was definitely preferable to an up close and personal meeting with the Grim Reaper.
JOANN ROSS
No Safe Place
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
I always liked people who are older. Of course, every year it gets harder to find them.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
The Paris Review, summer 1993
When you're forty, half of you belongs to the past -- and when you're seventy, nearly all of you.
JEAN ANOUILH
Time Remembered
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
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
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
Age is never so old as youth would measure it.
JACK LONDON
"The Wit of Porportuk"
To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent -- that is to triumph over old age.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
Ponkapog Papers
Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.
DORIS LESSING
interview, The Progressive, June 1999
You know you're getting old when your back starts going out more than you do.
PHYLLIS DILLER
Housekeeping Hints
Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside -- from others. We do not accept it willingly.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Coming of Age
The solitude in which we are left by the death of our friends is one of the great evils of protracted life. When I look back to the days of my youth, it is like looking over a field of battle. All, all dead! and ourselves left alone midst a new generation whom we know not, and who know not us.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Francis Adrian Van Der Kemp, January 11, 1825
Old age is fertile terrain for unsettling dreams. To dream of dying is one of the more disconcerting experiences, for you can't be sure that you haven't really died until you have pinched yourself a number of times after waking up: you might just have been experiencing the afterlife.
ALEXANDER CHANCELLOR
"My night with Brigitte Bardot", Spectator, January 18, 2017