Quotes about old-age

Honoré de Balzac - Cousin Bette

Parent may hinder their children's marriage but children cannot interfere with the insane acts of their parents in their second childhood.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana -

As a subconscious attempt to add meaning or purpose to their life: The unemployed pray for a job the retired pray for grandchildren.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana -

To come across as younger than they are: Women buy creams that promise to slow aging men buy fast cars.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana -

Time is a double-edged sword: while it might heal all wounds it also kills all the healed.

Hafsa Shah -

Too young to care Too old to change.

Abby Slovin - Letters In Cardboard Boxes

Parker, I'm old," She said matter-of-factly. "I get away with these things." She continued to wave and smile wildly. "People treat me like an idiot so I'm allowed to act like one from time to time. It's one of the perks.

T.S. Eliot - East Coker

Do not let me hearOf the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.

James Hauenstein -

People think I am younger then I really am,because I act so immature.

William Trevor - The Story of Lucy Gault

All this occupied his thoughts when he revisited the places of his war. Tramping over soil fed by the blood of men he had led and whose faces now stirred in his memory, it was his wife's response that came - as if in compensation for too little said before - when he wondered why his wandering had led him back to these old battlefields: in his sixty-ninth year he was establishing his survivor's status.

Gabriel García Márquez - The General in His Labyrinth

Iturbide exclaimed: "Don't frighten me, General!""Don't be frightened," said the General in a calm voice. "Go to Mexico, even if they kill you or even if you die. And go now while you're still young, because one day it will be too late, and then you won't feel at home here or there. You'll feel like a stranger everywhere, and that's worse than being dead." He looked him straight in the eye, placed his open hand on his own chest, and concluded:"Just look at me.

Lorena McCourtney - Invisible

I wrapped my hands around the familiar cup and tried to draw strength from it. It was from Thea's old Moss Rose set, remnant of careful scrimping and saving in her first year of marriage. Yet the mellow old cup now brought me no comfort, only a feeling of helplessness, of time slipping away. Sunday-best dishes gone to everyday and now to mismatched pieces. Like Thea and me

Roman Payne - Hope and Despair

I just wish moments weren’t so fleeting!' Isaac called to the man on the roof, 'They pass so quickly!' 'Fleeting?!' responded the tilling man, 'Moments? They pass quickly?! . . . Why, once a man is finished growing, he still has twenty years of youth. After that, he has twenty years of middle age. Then, unless misfortune strikes, nature gives him twenty thoughtful years of old age. Why do you call that quickly?' And with that, the tilling man wiped his sweaty brow and continued tilling; and the

Uma Shanker -

Life teaches us two important things - we are careless when we are young and by the time we get old, it is too late to be careful!!

Wendell Berry - Hannah Coulter

Those thoughts come to me in the night, those thought and thoughts of becoming sick or helpless, of the nursing home, of lingering death. I gnaw again the old bones of the fear of what is to come, and grieve with a sisterly grief over Grandmam and Mrs. Feltner and the other old women who have gone before. Finally, as a gift, as a mercy, I remember to pray, 'Thy will be done,' and then again I am free and can go to sleep.

Margot Benary-Isbert -

Prayer of an Anonymous Abbess:Lord, thou knowest better than myself that I am growing older and will soon be old. Keep me from becoming too talkative, and especially from the unfortunate habit of thinking that I must say something on every subject and at every opportunity.Release me from the idea that I must straighten out other peoples' affairs. With my immense treasure of experience and wisdom, it seems a pity not to let everybody partake of it. But thou knowest, Lord, that in the end I will n

Nobuyuki Fukumoto - Saikyō Densetsu Kurosawa 9

In times like these I always cheered myself up with a certain story. I forgot just when I first heard it, or who I heard it from... but, back when I was young it would cheer me up when I was feeling depressed. Basically, you think of life in terms of a single 24 hour day. So if you take the average human lifespan, to be around 72 years, then dividing that by 24... that comes to 3 years per hour. Meaning, that if you were 18 it'd only be 6 AM! 6 in the morning is nothing! Schools aren't even open

Michael Bassey Johnson -

Persistent smile brings out hollow dimples, and persistent frowns brings out hollow wrinkles.

Gabriel Bá -

I can't really tell how old I am, only that I'm too young to wonder if I asked the right questions in the past, and too old to wish the future will bring me all the answers.

Groucho Marx -

Getting older is no problem. You just have to live long enough.

Adalbert Stifter - Indian Summer

Great beauty and youth capture our attention, excite a deep pleasure; however, why shouldn't our souls gaze at a countenance over which the years have passed? Isn't there a story there, one unknown, full of pain or beauty, which pours its reflection into the features, a story we can read with some compassion or at least get a slight hint of its meaning? The young point toward the future; the old tell of a past.

Gabriel García Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude

...her own experience was beginning to tell her that an alert old age can be more keen than the cards.

Lailah Gifty Akita - Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

Once we were young, now we are adult.

Lailah Gifty Akita - Think Great: Be Great!

Take care of the elderly people.

Lailah Gifty Akita -

The glory of the elderly is long life with grey hair.

Isaac D'Israeli -

The delights of reading impart the vivacity of youth even to old age.

Dan Groat - An Enigmatic Escape: A Trilogy

One of the worst things I’ve learned about getting older is that there seems to be more change that you don’t like than there was when you were younger and you can’t do nothin’ about it.

Margaret Atwood - Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

According to Tobias, women hang around longer because they’re less capable of indignation and better at being humiliated, for what is old age but one long string of indignities? What person of integrity would put up with it?

John Steinbeck - The Wayward Bus

He hated old women. They frightened him. There was a smell about them that gave him the willies. They were fierce and they had no price. They never gave a damn about making a scene. They got what they wanted. Louie's grandmother had been a tyrant. She had got whatever she wanted by being fierce.

George MacDonald -

How old are you?""Ten," answered Tangle."You don't look like it," said the lady."How old are you, please?" returned Tangle."Thousands of years old," answered the lady."You don't look like it," said Tangle."Don't I? I think I do. Don't you see how beautiful I am!

Michelle Franklin -

The old who refuse to die merely on principle live on forever, to hate life and complain of all the things they could have been spared had they the good sense to die young.

Benny Bellamacina - Philosophical Uplifting Quotes and Poems

Even when you don't see old age coming, you can wave it goodbye

George Burns -

Sex at age 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.

Craig Stone - How to Hide from Humans

Parents raise children then grow old, and their children forget the things their old parents did for them, because their brains don’t remember before they grew selfish.There are buildings all over the world full of old people sitting around looking out of windows, full of hate for their selfish sons and daughters.And meanwhile, the selfish sons and daughters look out of their windows at their children playing and think how wonderful their unbreakable bond of love is between them and their childr

Mokokoma Mokhonoana -

Grandchildren are their grandparents' toys.

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah -

We can never skip growing old. As we grow older, we understand old things and things of old times better!

Miroslav Penkov - East of the West: A Country in Stories

At seventy-one you can't expect to hear a story, any story, and take it as it is. At my age a story stirs up a vortex that sucks into its eye more stories, and spits out still more. I must remember what I must.

Erik Pevernagie -

When illness and old age are no longer indulgent and strength is irrevocably seeping away, brightness fades insidiously away from the light of the day and time only betrays reckless evanescence. (“Into a new life”)

Lailah Gifty Akita -

We are never old with the strength of the spirit, although the body may fail.

W.B. Yeats - The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

The Coming of Wisdom with TimeThough leaves are many, the root is one,Through all the lying days of my youthI swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;Now I may wither into the truth.

Criss Jami - Killosophy

I have a thing for things that last.

Faraaz Kazi - More Than Just Friends

They say marry the person with whom you are the closest to, the guy with whom you can share your 3 am thoughts with, sitting on a rooftop and discussing random things like why cavemen were hirsute or why the earth isn’t a square. The genie who knows what you want before you open your mouth. The angel who reads your mind before you can articulate your thoughts. The friend you can laugh and cry with. The brother whose arms are safer than any amount of security and protection the outside world can

Michel de Montaigne - The Complete Essays

The natural heat, say the good-fellows,first seats itself in the feet: that concerns infancy; thence it mounts into the middleregion, where it makes a long abode and produces, in my opinion, the sole true pleasures of human life; all other pleasures in comparison sleep; towards the end, like a vapor that still mounts upward, it arrives at the throat, where it makes its final residence, and concludes the progress.

Patricia Nell Warren - The Front Runner

In my old age, I was at last being permitted to make the discovery that lovemaking gets better and better with time, if it's with someone you care for.

Dean Koontz - Deeply Odd

If an eighty-six-year-old woman has been clear-seeing from a young age, she will have gone through a lot of life developing a keen eye for snares and pitfalls, an ear for deceit, and a good nose for knavery. And by such an age, a smart woman with no illusions is one to whom courage comes far more readily than it does to those young people who don't yet know the world for what it is.

Muse - Enigmatic Evolution

Honor LostAmbulant sunshine piercedthe soot covered glass ~the feeble man wandered byin this ritual morning pass ...

Lailah Gifty Akita - Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

It is gracious to have old people full of vitality and endowed with wisdom in our society.

Michael LaRocca - The Last Titan

At my age, every day that I overcome simple inertia is a victory.

Muse - Enigmatic Evolution

PartingOne is strong, a child now grownThe other weak, a parent aged-The strong once feebleThe weak once mighty-Time, the infinityhas marked them...

Lailah Gifty Akita - Think Great: Be Great!

Appeal with respect to elderly people as you would to the members of your own family.

Carew Papritz - his Final Gift

Old is old at any age. Old is when you quit asking questions about this, that, and everything. Old is when you forget how to love-or worse, don't care. Old is when you don't want to dance anymore. Old is when you don't want to learn anything new except how to be old. Old is when people tell you that you are old-and you believe them.

P.G. Wodehouse -

There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.

Margaret Atwood - The Blind Assassin

I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.

Christopher Hitchens - Hitch-22: A Memoir

Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray.

Patrick White - Three Uneasy Pieces

I would like to believe in the myth that we grow wiser with age. In a sense my disbelief is wisdom. Those of a middle generation, if charitable or sentimental, subscribe to the wisdom myth, while the callous see us as dispensable objects, like broken furniture or dead flowers. For the young we scarcely exist unless we are unavoidable members of the same family, farting, slobbering, perpetually mislaying teeth and bifocals.

Nanette L. Avery -

When we are young we squander time as though it were unlimited; When we grow older, then like beggars we wish for crumbs of remembrance...

Edward Carpenter - The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women

In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness, except that which ass

Simone de Beauvoir - La Vieillesse

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.

Shel Silverstein -

The Little Boy and the Old ManSaid the little boy, "Sometimes I drop my spoon."Said the old man, "I do that too."The little boy whispered, "I wet my pants."I do that too," laughed the little old man.Said the little boy, "I often cry."The old man nodded, "So do I."But worst of all," said the boy, "it seemsGrown-ups don't pay attention to me."And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand.I know what you mean," said the little old man.

Nicholas Sparks - The Notebook

Our lives can't be measured by our final years, of this I am sure.

Jules Renard -

It`s not how old you are, it`s how you are old.

Herbert Hoover -

Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.

Sri Chinmoy - My Life's Soul-Journey: Daily Meditations for Ever-Increasing Spiritual Fulfillment

Hope is sweet.Hope is illumining.Hope is fulfilling.Hope can be everlasting.Therefore, do not give up hope,Even in the sunset of your life.

Aristotle -

Learning is an ornament in prosperity, a refuge in adversity, and a provision in old age.

W.B. Yeats - The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep

Pierre-Jean de Béranger -

Old age doth in sharp pains abound;We are belabored by the gout,Our blindness is a dark profound,Our deafness each one laughs about.Then reason's light with falling rayDoth but a trembling flicker cast.Honor to age, ye children pay!Alas! my fifty years are past!

Walter M. Miller Jr. - A Canticle for Leibowitz

When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary.

Dan Simmons - Drood

When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would

Edward Gorey - Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer

I just got a rather nasty shock. In looking for something or other I came across the fact that one of my cats is about to be nine years old, and that another of them will shortly thereafter be eight; I have been labouring under the delusion they were about five and six. And yesterday I happened to notice in the mirror that while I have long since grown used to my beard being very grey indeed, I was not prepared to discover that my eyebrows are becoming noticeably shaggy. I feel the tomb is just

Meryl Gordon -

DisciplineI am old and I have hadmore than my share of good and bad.I've had love and sorrow, seen sudden deathand been left alone and of love bereft.I thought I would never love againand I thought my life was grief and pain.The edge between life and death was thin, but then I discovered discipline.I learned to smile when I felt sad, I learned to take the good and the bad, I learned to care a great deal morefor the world about me than before.I began to forget the "Me" and "I"and joined in life a

Mark Doty -

And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.

Elizabeth Strout - Anything Is Possible

Angelina said, "Mom. I don't want you to die. That's the whole thing. You took from me the ability to care for you in your old age, and I wanted to be with you when you died, when you die. Mom. I wanted that.

Christopher Hawke - Unnatural Truth

I wept for relationships not possible due to denial and dreams locked in the back of people’s minds, all of the bits of life that lay dormant until the babblings of televisions and nursing homes sweep them away. It makes me wonder how many of the dreams we had originally have already been forgotten.

Lance Olsen - Theories of Forgetting

I'll live to be one year younger, because I can't stand the idea of a world without you in it, and die buried beneath an avalanche of my own books.

Lailah Gifty Akita -

Gray hair is the glory of a long life.

Nicanor Parra - Antipoems: How to Look Better and Feel Great

WHAT DOES AN OLD MAN GAIN BY EXERCISINGwhat will he gain by talking on the phonewhat will he gain by going after fame, tell mewhat does he gain by looking in the mirrorNothingeach time he just sinks deeper in the mudIt’s already three or four in the morningwhy doesn’t he try to go to sleepbut no--he won’t stop doing exercisewon’t stop with his famous long-distance callswon’t stop with Bach with Beethoven with Tchaikovskywon’t stop with the long looks in the mirrorwon’t stop with the ridicu

Stephen Richards -

The good thing about being old is not being young.

Brennan Manning - and Burnt Out

A man doesn't grow old because he has lived a certain number of years. A man grows old when he deserts his ideal. The years may wrinkle his skin, but deserting his ideal wrinkles his soul.

Geoff Ryman - Paradise Tales: and Other Stories

This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can’t get fresh fruit in the shops.

John Jeremiah Sullivan - Pulphead

When Lytle was born, the Wright Brothers had not yet achieved a working design. When he died, Voyager 2 was exiting the solar system. What does one do with the coexistence of those details in a lifetime’s view? It weighed on him.

Benny Bellamacina - Philosophical Uplifting Quotes and Poems

Old age is not just for grown up's

Laurie Lee - Cider With Rosie

Granny Trill and Granny Wallon were traditional ancients of a kind we won’t see today, the last of that dignity of grandmothers to whom age was its own embellishment. The grandmothers of those days dressed for the part in that curious but endearing uniform which is now known to us only through music-hall. And our two old neighbours, when setting forth on errands, always prepared themselves scrupulously so. They wore high laced boots and long muslin dresses, beaded chokers and candlewick shawls,

Stephen Richards -

When we age we shed many skins: ego, arrognace, dominance, self-opionated, unreliable, pessimism, rudeness, selfish, uncaring ... Wow, it's good to be old!

R.J. Lawrence - The Xactilias Project

She looked at his face. So old and wrinkled. So beautiful and just right.

Lailah Gifty Akita -

Embrace the glory of age.

Dan Groat - Monarchs and Mendicants

A person gets built and stands for a few years and then nature’s demolition team comes in.

Glen Cook - The Black Company

One endured with humble dignity the consequences of youthful folly.

Glen Cook -

An old, tired man. That is what I am. What became of the old fire, drive, ambition? There were dreams once upon a time, dreams now all but forgotten. On sad days I dust them off and fondle them nostalgically, with a patronising wonder at the naivete of the youth who dreamed them.

William S. Burroughs - The Cat Inside

For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother's Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling "vaguely guilty.

Nora Ephron - I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections

Everybody dies. There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God. (Although there’s no question a belief in God would come in handy. It would be great to think there’s a plan, and that everything happens for a reason. I don’t happen to believe that. And every time one of my friends says to me, “Everything happens for a reason,” I would like to smack her.)

Timothy Schaffert - The Coffins of Little Hope

We could endlessly reminisce, live in the past to an unhealthy degree, then politely kill each other some winter night before bedtime, stirring poison into our cups of whiskey-spiked chamomile tea, wearing party hats. Then, nervous about our double homicide, we could lie in bed together, holding hands again, frightened and waiting, still wondering, after all these years, if we even believed in our own souls.

John Betjeman - Collected Poems

Late-Flowering LustMy head is bald, my breath is bad,Unshaven is my chin,I have not now the joys I hadWhen I was young in sin.I run my fingers down your dressWith brandy-certain aimAnd you respond to my caressAnd maybe feel the same.But I've a picture of my ownOn this reunion night,Wherein two skeletons are shewnTo hold each other tight;Dark sockets look on emptinessWhich once was loving-eyed,The mouth that opens for a kissHas got no tongue inside.I cling to you inflamed with fearAs now you clin

Margaret Atwood - The Blind Assassin

After having imposed itself on us like the egomaniac it is, clamouring about its own needs, foisting upon us its own sordid and perilous desires, the body's final trick is simply to absent itself. Just when you need it, just when you could use an arm or a leg, suddenly the body has other things to do. It falters, it buckles under you; it melts away as if made of snow, leaving nothing much. Two lumps of coal, an old hat, a grin made of pebbles. The bones dry sticks, easily broken.

J.S. Davey -

The greatest trick you can teach an old dog is how to learn new tricks.

Will Advise - Nothing is here...

If I were offering hip replacement services I'd use Jarod Kintz as my spokesman. No one can possibly be better than him, to replace the missing spoke in your wheels.

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah -

Real vision dies only when life dies. Once we live, we hope, we yearn for and we aspire to have something!

Karl Ove Knausgård - Min kamp 1

Old age. All the facial detail is visible; all the traces life has left there are to be seen. The face is furrowed, wrinkled, sagging, ravaged by time. But the eyes are bright and, if not young, then somehow transcend the time that otherwise marks the face. It is as though someone else is looking at us, from somewhere inside the face, where everything is different. One can hardly be closer to another human soul.

Louise Erdrich -

Then his head tipped down on his chest and he fell into the instant sleep of the ancient and the very young.

Fidelis O. Mkparu -

I am a fading phantasmagoria. Time has left me in partial glory.

Ben Mitchell -

Now that I’ve reached the ripe old age of retirement, I feel it my duty to teach you everything I’ve learnt about love, so listen closely. Love is like… That’s as far as I’ve gotten I’m afraid.

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