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Old age is when the liver spots show through your gloves.
PHYLLIS DILLER, attributed, Funny Ladies: The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women
You can't be as old as I am without waking up with a surprised look on your face every morning: "Holy Christ, whaddya know — I'm still around!"
PAUL NEWMAN, The Independent, Jun. 17, 2006
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, Jan. 11, 1825
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
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
Pain for the old was no longer a surprise.
CORMAC MCCARTHY, All the Pretty Horses
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, Feb. 5, 1815
In youth all doors open outward; in old age all open inward.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, Table-Talk
The greatest tragedy of old age is the tendency for the old to feel unneeded, unwanted, and of no use to anyone; the secret of happiness in the declining years is to remain interested in life, as active as possible, useful to others, busy, and forward looking.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT, Book of Common Sense Etiquette
You know you're getting old when your back starts going out more than you do.
PHYLLIS DILLER, Housekeeping Hints
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, Aug. 17, 1821
- Time has laid his hand
- Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it,
- But as a harper lays his open palm
- Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, The Golden Legend
Most fatal diseases had their own specific odor, but ... none was as specific as old age.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, Love in the Time of Cholera
Maybe age is kinder to us than we think. With my bad eyes, I can't see how bad I look, and with my rotten memory, I have a good excuse for getting out of a lot of stuff.
ERMA BOMBECK, Family: The Ties that Bind ... And Gag!
Living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES, Middlesex
You know you're old if they have discontinued your blood type.
PHYLLIS DILLER, attributed, Women Know Everything!: 3,241 Quips, Quotes & Brilliant Remarks
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
One day you wake up and you're old as s**t.
CHUCK BARRIS, Esquire, Jan. 2003
I recently turned fifty, which is young for a tree, mid-life for an elephant, and ancient for a quarter-miler, whose son now says, "Dad I just can't run the quarter with you anymore unless I bring something to read."
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
I'm like a good cheese. I'm just getting mouldy enough to be interesting.
PAUL NEWMAN, The Guardian, Apr. 10, 2005
The real affliction of old age is remorse.
CESARE PAVESE, The Moon and the Bonfire
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