OLD AGE QUOTES III
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
I'm like a good cheese. I'm just getting mouldy enough to be interesting.
PAUL NEWMAN
The Guardian, April 10, 2005
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
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
I've finally reached the age where my Wild Oats have turned into All-Bran!
TOM WILSON
Ziggy, November 19, 1999
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"
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
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
In old age our bodies are worn-out instruments, on which the soul tries in vain to play the melodies of youth. But because the instrument has lost its strings, or is out of tune, it does not follow that the musician has lost his skill.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
After a man passes sixty, his mischief is mainly in his head.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
You read the past in some old faces.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The Virginians
It seems only the old are able to sit next to one another and not say anything and still feel content. The young, brash and impatient, must always break the silence. It is a waste, for silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox.
NICHOLAS SPARKS
The Notebook
As we grow older, we must discipline ourselves to continue expanding, broadening, learning, keeping out minds active and open.
CLINT EASTWOOD
attributed, Sad Sayings
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
How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand, there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep ... that have taken hold.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Return of the King
This week, a 95-year-old woman married a 98-year-old man to become the world's oldest newlyweds. They're registered at Bed, Sponge Bath and Beyond.
JIMMY FALLON
Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, March 2, 2012
It cuts one sadly to see the grief of old people; they've no way o' working it off; and the new spring brings no new shoots out on the withered tree.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
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 is particularly difficult to assume because we have always regarded it as something alien, a foreign species.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Coming of Age