Old Age Quotes

“Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you're aboard there's nothing you can do.”
― Golda Meir, As good as Golda;: The warmth and wisdom of Israel's Prime Minister

“I have a thing for things that last.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“...one of the roles of man is to shut his eyes and keep them shut to see if he can continue into the night of his old age the dream curtailed in the night of his youth.”
― Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro

“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.”
― Abby Slovin, Letters In Cardboard Boxes

“Elizabeth's doze had deepened into real sleep. Once she might have been young and beautiful. Once she might have been some young man's dream baby. Now she was snoring with her mostly toothless mouth pointed at the ceiling. If there's a God, I think He needs to try a little harder.”
― Stephen King, Duma Key

“[O]ver the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying--in the supermarket, these old ladies won't get out of my way--but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.”
― Donald Hall

“There was already something dead about him. He didn’t rear back in his knees any longer. He squatted over his ankles when he walked. That stillness at the back of his neck. His prosperous-looking belly…sagged like a load suspended from his loins.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“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”
― Lorena McCourtney, Invisible

“Una vida larga es como una enorme caverna: en ella todo hace eco.”
― Gabriel Payares

“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 ray
Doth but a trembling flicker cast.
Honor to age, ye children pay!
Alas! my fifty years are past!”
― Pierre Jean de Béranger

“Los viejos tienen la muerte, y los jóvenes el amor, y la muerte viene una sola vez y el amor muchas.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories

“In later life most good things happen very slowly; only bad things tend to happen fast.”
― Mark Edmundson

“I was quite a looker in my time," she said. Was she reading his mind, or only being smart, to know she must be hideous?

"Oh, had they invented time as long ago as that?”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“What if experience is disappointment, and a human’s old age has no sense, and all what we acquire in our lifetime is a habit for disappointment?”
― Lara Biuts, The Sunless Parlour

“I sometimes think the worst thing a young person can feel is when you can find no answer to the question of what you are supposed to do with this life you’ve been given (…). I can now say that another version of that happens in old age, when it occurs to you that since you’ve lived this long you must have learned something, do you open your eyes before dawnn and think: What is it that I’ve learned, what is it I want to say?”
― Niall Williams, This Is Happiness

“The lecture halls of the world are filled with senior citizens who seek greater knowledge and wisdom. The explanatory drive that was there when they were babies is still there now.

Wisdom at this phase of life is the ability to see the connections between things. It’s the ability to hold opposite truths—contradictions and paradoxes—in the mind at the same time, without wrestling to impose some linear order. It’s the ability to see things from multiple perspectives.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“After a life of loving the old, by natural law I turned old myself. Decades followed each other--thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life, sixty began to extend the bliss of fifty--and then came my cancers, Jane’s death, and over the years I traveled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying—in the supermarket, these old ladies won’t get out of my way—but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“I survive into my eighties, writing, and oddly cheerful, although disabled and largely alone. There is only one road.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“An op-ed in the Boston Globe, remarking on near-corpses who keep on doing what they've always done, compared me to Mick Jagger. Never before had I been so honored. The columnist mentioned others: Keith Richards, Alice Munro, and William Trevor, who was born the year I was. At seventy, Jagger is a juvenile among us eighty-five-year-olds—but his face as he jumps and gyrates resembles something retrieved from a bog.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“My problem isn’t death but old age. I fret about my lack of balance, my buckling knee, my difficulty standing up and sitting down. Yesterday I fell asleep in an armchair. I never fall asleep in a chair. Indolence overcomes me every day. I sit daydreaming about what I might do next: putting on a sweater or eating a piece of pie or calling my daughter. Sometimes I break through my daydream to stand up. At Christmas or birthday, I no longer want objects, even books. I want things I can eat, cheddar or Stilton, my daughter’s chili, and replacements for worn-out khakis, T-shirts, socks, and underwear.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“When I was thirty, I lived in the future because the present was intolerable. When I was fifty and sixty, the day of love and work repeated itself year after year. Old age sits in a chair, writing a little and diminishing.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“Love will fly by you in a flash of light”
― Yuri Gilibloie

“Det er for tidlig å pakke
men jeg kan planlegge
hva jeg skal ha i min rullator

Ekstra genser sokker hostepastiller
sukkertøy til å lokke fremmede barn
fløyte lommelykt Swiss Army Knife

Nye nødvendigheter kan bykse frem
I går trengte jeg elektrisk tannbørste
i morgen kan jeg få verre behov
Og mitt bibliotek?
Mine amuletter?”
― Annabelle Despard, Vannet bestemmer

“But the thing is, he has lived so many years that the varieties of human weakness have lost their power to shock him.”
― Emma Donoghue, Haven

“I think it's ageist," Emily said. "Is Joe Biden too old to be president?"

"That would be a valid question if he'd run against anyone but Trump," Kitzi said, cutting the deck for her.

"Amen," Susie said.”
― Stewart O'Nan, Evensong

“No one spoke, each of them reflecting on their dead and the intractability of the past. That was the problem with getting old, Emily thought. After a point you outlived everyone who truly knew you. There was no one left to remember her aunt June. Soon there would be no one who knew Henry.”
― Stewart O'Nan, Evensong

“It was stifling inside and the ward smelled of scrambled eggs and urine. She didn't like to think the facility was a pit, as Emily put it, but each time she walked the gauntlet of the main hall, it was littered with trash and the call lights were blinking madly above the patients' doors, their wails beseeching the staff for help. Here, among the senile and dying, she felt obscenely young and healthy, near superhuman. Why was she repulsed? This was what awaited all of them, the body and mind's inevitable breakdown, just another stage of life, yet, undeniably, she was, and this failure--her cowardice in the face of others' suffering--angered her.”
― Stewart O'Nan, Evensong

“Domine ad adjuvandum me festina, they sang.

O Lord, make haste to save me.

It was true, they felt that urgency now, the need to finally make things right, or as right as they could be. They had only so much time.”
― Stewart O'Nan, Evensong

“You need to respect your elders."

"I will, when I meet elders I can respect.”
― Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf

“You sound like those men with white hair and shriveled skin, who think they talking wise when they just talking old.”
― Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf