OLD AGE QUOTES VIII
quotations about old age
When life's summer grows to winter
And its roses fade and fall;
When in vain we try to hinder
Death's commissioned right to all;
When on white lips there's a last kiss
And we see her face no more,
Then it is to know what love is,
Waiting on a foreign shore.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"'Tis Then We Know"
Science as culture misdirects the way in which old age is understood. Rather than valuing life in all its diversity, including its final phase, it leads to misguided devotion of resources to solving the problem of death. The focus on biological failure sets up a cultural construction of old age which leads to the low esteem in which it is currently held.
JOHN A. VINCENT
"Marketing Immortality", JSTOR Daily, February 2, 2017
It is because the old have forgotten life that they preach wisdom.
PHILIP MOELLER
Helena's Husband
To grow old means to be rid of anxieties about the past.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Sailing to Byzantium"
What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all;
Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold.
ROBERT BROWNING
"The Flight of the Duchess"
The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
My first advice (on how not to grow old) would be to choose you ancestors carefully. Although both my parents died young, I have done well in this respect as regards my other ancestors. My maternal grandfather, it is true, was cut off in the flower of his youth, at the age of sixty-seven, but my other three grandparents all lived to be over eighty. Of remoter ancestors I can only discover one who did not live to a great age, and he died of a disease which is now rare, namely, having his head cut off.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Portraits from Memory and Other Essays
When people got old, why did they always develop a passion for scrabbling in the earth? Were they trying to get used to it?
SERGEI LUKYANENKO
Twilight Watch
I have so many liver spots, I ought to come with a side of onions.
PHYLLIS DILLER
"Phyllis Diller's Best One-Liners", CBS News, August 21, 2012
We serve the devil in our youth, God in our old age--thinking if we journey towards hell while our limbs are sound, we can turn when they fail us, and get to heaven on crutches.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
The older you get the more you live in the past.
WALTER MOSLEY
The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey
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
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
Old age is a consistently satisfying bookend to a shapely arc of a life.
CERIDWEN DOVEY
"What Old Age Is Really Like", The New Yorker, October 1, 2015
The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
DORIS LESSING
The Sunday Times, May 10, 1992
When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.
ALEXANDER POPE
"Thoughts on Various Subjects"
Pain for the old was no longer a surprise.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
All the Pretty Horses
Ah, I often think it's wi' th' old folks as it is wi' the babies; they're satisfied wi' looking, no matter what they're looking at. It's God A'mighty's way o' quietening 'em, I reckon, afore they go to sleep.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
People are often advised to "prepare" for old age. But if this merely applies to setting aside money, choosing the place for retirement and laying on hobbies, we shall not be much the better for it when the day comes. It is far better not to think about it too much, but to live a fairly committed, fairly justified life so that one may go on in the same path even when all illusions have vanished and one's zeal for life has died away.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Coming of Age