OLD AGE QUOTES IV
quotations about old age
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 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
Old age is perplexing to imagine in part because the definition of it is notoriously unstable. As people age, they tend to move the goalposts that mark out major life stages.
CERIDWEN DOVEY
"What Old Age Is Really Like", The New Yorker, October 1, 2015
What Youth deemed crystal,
Age finds out was dew.
ROBERT BROWNING
"Jochanan Hakkadosh"
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
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"
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
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
Discern of the coming on of years, and think not to do the same things still; for age will not be defied.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Regiment Of Health", The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral
Old men's prayers for death are lying prayers, in which they abuse old age and long extent of life. But when death draws near, not one is willing to die, and age no longer is a burden to them.
EURIPIDES
Alcestis
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
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
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
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
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
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.
T. S. ELIOT
Time Magazine, October 23, 1950
No man loves life like him that's growing old.
SOPHOCLES
fragment, Acrisius
Old age makes you a stranger in your own country.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
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"
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