OLD AGE QUOTES IV
quotations about old age
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
Age is never so old as youth would measure it.
JACK LONDON
"The Wit of Porportuk"
The great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
Until thirty we live through curiosity, after that out of sheer spite and bravado.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral 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
Old age is gentle as an autumn morn;
The harvest over, you will put the plough
Into another, stronger hand, and watch
The sowing you were wont to do.
CARMEN SYLVA
"A Friend"
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"
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
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
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
No man loves life like him that's growing old.
SOPHOCLES
fragment, Acrisius
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
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
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
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
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 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
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 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
When you're forty, half of you belongs to the past -- and when you're seventy, nearly all of you.
JEAN ANOUILH
Time Remembered