Old Age Quotes

“Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“And this is the strangest of all paradoxes of the human adventure; we live inside all experience, but we are permitted to bear witness only to the outside. Such is the riddle of life and the story of the passing of our days.”
― Howard Thurman

“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 around the corner. And there are all these books I haven't read yet, even if I am simultaneously reading at least twenty...”
― Edward Gorey, Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer

“If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean—even if it did build muscle—whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one's learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same me but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period… the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“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.)”
― Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections

“If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.”
― John Irving, Last Night in Twisted River

“Discipline

I am old and I have had
more than my share of good and bad.

I've had love and sorrow, seen sudden death
and been left alone and of love bereft.

I thought I would never love again
and 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 more
for the world about me than before.

I began to forget the "Me" and "I"
and joined in life as it rolled by:
this may not mean sheer ecstasy
but is better by far than "I" and "Me.”
― Meryl Gordon

“He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“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 we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?

Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute?”
― Dan Simmons, Drood

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

“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.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“I'm growing fonder of my staff;
I'm growing dimmer in my eyes;
I'm growing fainter in my laugh;
I'm growing deeper in my sighs;
I'm growing careless of my dress;
I'm growing frugal of my gold;
I'm growing wise; I'm growing--yes,--
I'm growing old.”
― John Godfrey Saxe

“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 dejected Isaac continued wandering.
'Stupid fool!' Isaac muttered quietly to himself as soon as he was far enough away not to be heard.”
― Roman Payne, Hope and Despair

“Was it the forgetfulness of old age or personal incapacity that made the man able to say please but not thank you?”
― Yann Martel, Beatrice and Virgil

“Combine nursing homes with nursery schools. Bring very old and very young together: they interest one another.”
― John Cage, M: Writings '67–'72

“The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.”
― Núria Añó

“Then I remember that God is really, really old. So maybe God has God arthritis. And maybe that's why the world sucks. Maybe God's hands and fingers don't work as well as they used to.”
― Sherman Alexie, Flight

“The good thing about being old is not being young.”
― Stephen Richards

“The delights of reading impart the vivacity of youth even to old age.”
― Isaac D'Israeli

“Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.”
― Eugene Paul Wigner

“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.”
― Christopher Hawke, Unnatural Truth

“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 associates itself especially with romantic love. Yet the cleanliness and dignity of Michel Angelo's male figures are incontestable, and bear striking witness to that nobility of the sentiment in him, which we have already seen illustrated in his sonnets.”
― Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study Of Some Transitional Types Of Men And Women

“You were young, I thought, not once but always before, always always, every day before the day just passed. You were young only minutes ago.”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Coffins of Little Hope

“Let us cherish and love old age; for it is full of pleasure if one knows how to use it. Fruits are most welcome when almost over; youth is most charming at its close; the last drink delights the toper, the glass which souses him and puts the finishing touch on his drunkenness. Each pleasure reserves to the end the greatest delights which it contains. Life is most delightful when it is on the downward slope, but has not yet reached the abrupt decline.”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“Thou hast had thty day, old dame, but thy sun has long been set. Thou art now the very emblem of an old warhorse turned out on the barren heath; thou hast had thy paces in thy time, but now a broken amble is the best of them.”
― Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

“You need to have really wasted your life to envy the young for being young.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Here, on a human face, appeared all the ruin following upon hopeless labour. Laveuve's unkempt beard straggled over his features, suggesting an old horse that is no longer cropped; his toothless jaws were quite askew, his eyes were vitreous, and his nose seemed to plunge into his mouth. But above all else one noticed his resemblance to some beast of burden, deformed by hard toil, lamed, worn to death, and now only good for the knackers.”
― Émile Zola, Paris

“The Coming of Wisdom with Time

Though leaves are many, the root is one,
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.”
― W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“Godfrey's wife Charmian sat with her eyes closed, attempting to put her thoughts into alphabetical order which Godfrey had told her was better than no order at all, since she now had grasp of neither logic nor chronology.”
― Muriel Spark, Memento Mori

“It would of course be a shame to get too old. There’s no virtue in living too long. Living shouldn’t become a habit.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure