OLD AGE QUOTES III

quotations about old age

Old Age quote

So precious life is! Even to the old, the hours are as a miser's coins!

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

"Broken Music"

Tags: Thomas Bailey Aldrich


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

Tags: Anacreon


You read the past in some old faces.

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

The Virginians

Tags: William Makepeace Thackeray


Old age is particularly difficult to assume because we have always regarded it as something alien, a foreign species.

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

The Coming of Age

Tags: Simone de Beauvoir


Age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimates youth.

J. K. ROWLING

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Tags: J. K. Rowling


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

Tags: Tracy Letts


Sixty feels exactly like 50, with aching feet and more forgetfulness.... But your inside person doesn't age. Your inside person is soul, is heart, in the eternal now, the ageless, the old, the young, all the ages you've ever been.

ANNE LAMOTT

Salon, November 3, 2014

Tags: Anne Lamott


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

Tags: John Banville


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

Tags: Sara Gruen


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

Tags: T. S. Eliot


Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

"Notebook K", Aphorisms

Tags: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg


The finest virtues can become deformed with age. The precise mind becomes finicky; the thrifty man, miserly; the cautious man, timorous; the man of imagination, fanciful. Even perseverance ends up in a sort of stupidity. Just as, on the other hand, being too willing to understand too many opinions, too diverse ways of seeing, constancy is lost and the mind goes astray in a restless fickleness.

ANDRE GIDE

Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality

Tags: Andre Gide


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

Tags: Glen Duncan


Few know how to be old.

FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

Tags: Francois de La Rochefoucauld


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

Tags: Frank Sinatra


Age is information failure. The body loses fluency.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

The Stone Gods

Tags: Jeanette Winterson


The art of growing old is the art of being regarded by the oncoming generations as a support and not as a stumbling-block.

ANDRÉ MAUROIS

An Art of Living

Tags: André Maurois


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

Tags: E. H. Chapin


After a man passes sixty, his mischief is mainly in his head.

EDGAR WATSON HOWE

Country Town Sayings

Tags: Edgar Watson Howe


Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

HERMAN MELVILLE

Moby Dick

Tags: Herman Melville