OLD AGE QUOTES III
quotations about old age
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
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"
You read the past in some old faces.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The Virginians
After a man passes sixty, his mischief is mainly in his head.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town 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
I'm like a good cheese. I'm just getting mouldy enough to be interesting.
PAUL NEWMAN
The Guardian, April 10, 2005
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
Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Heartbreak House
As we grow older, we must discipline ourselves to continue expanding, broadening, learning, keeping out minds active and open.
CLINT EASTWOOD
attributed, Sad Sayings
In youth all doors open outward; in old age all open inward.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
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
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
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"
Age is never so old as youth would measure it.
JACK LONDON
"The Wit of Porportuk"
Until thirty we live through curiosity, after that out of sheer spite and bravado.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
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
Before forty we live forwards; after forty we live backwards.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish. Alas, the heart hardens as the blood ceases to run. The cold snow strikes down from the head, and checks the glow of feeling. Who wants to survive into old age after abdicating all his faculties one by one, and be sans teeth, sans eyes, sans memory, sans hope, sans sympathy?
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The Virginians
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
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, August 17, 1821