Elderly Quotes

“All over the world, there are people dying for just one person to listen to their stories. Loneliness kills.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two. When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It's better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers. It is a pleasure to write about what I do.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“His beautiful silver hair had turned snow white over the course of just a few days following Chubb's death, and in a way this made him seem younger: made him seem to fit the white caliche landscape even better, and blend in.

His skin was turning whiter, too, even after he had been out in the sun,

It was beautiful, watching him get old-ancient-now that I had realized he too was going to die. This time I could understand it. It was like watching some graceful diver plunge in slow motion-the slowest-from the top of an improbably high cliff, down to the cool river below.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West

“At old age, one realizes that life is truly a dream.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Oneironaut’s Diary

“I never eat breakfast, but that doesn't mean I don't sell it at my Duck Farm Cafe. Children over the age of 65 dine FREE!”
― Jarod Kintz, Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.

“I tell ya, the live ones put more death in the place than the dying. In the time I was there. I watched my grandma try to tell the same story three times to two nurses and one doctor and she was told to stop talking each time. She'd barely get two sentences out before they'd shush her. She's dying. Silence won't save her, let her talk.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“What do you mean by "Back in my day?" Today is your day. So is tomorrow.”
― Nate Hamon

“Every day, I live with guilt about my mother’s death in a hospice as do thousands of other Australians and people from around the world. Yet society wants to sanitise euthanasia, sending us down a slippery slope of grey and murky murderous acts.”
― Vanessa de Largie

“COVID-19 is the killer of the elderly and the obese.”
― Steven Magee

“She said that one of the advantages of being ninety was that she could read a detective story again, only two weeks after she first read it, without any notion of which character was the villain.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It’s better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“After it emerged that COVID-19 was predominantly killing the elderly, I decided to maintain the body chemistry of younger person to protect myself.”
― Steven Magee

“Before you become elderly, learn how to care for, respect, and love elder ones since you will be that one thereupon and ultimately.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“The aging process can be cruel to some people.”
― Steven Magee

“Malnutrition is a plague in the elderly.”
― Steven Magee, Hypoxia, Mental Illness & Chronic Fatigue

“For falling in love, is there a maximum age?
Who ever said that? Which book or sage?”
― Avinash Chikte, The Old Man & She!

“Hurricane Ian seemed to have the biggest impact on the sick, disabled and the elderly in Florida.”
― Steven Magee

“The nice thing about dating in your fifties is the people that are going to age well are easy to spot!”
― Steven Magee

“Lately I’m too tired to care
about getting old. I never put my phone down.
I scroll many futures away. I sleep many futures
away, I write them away, the longer I live,
the more the future disappears.”
― Lena Moses-Schmidt

“Maggie perked up on hearing the word “aged”. “There. That’s a reasonable word ‘Geriatric’ drives me crazy, and ‘elderly’ is so loosely and rudely, it seems to be. ‘Aged’ is just a technical term. Anyway – ‘Boomer’ Is the cutest.”
― Anne Schlebusch, Bloomer

“Wasn’t it indeed a time to plant a new society for the oldies? Take them out of their glass cabinets. They’re not only feel-good ornaments. Sad old hug machines. They aren’t the moth-balled walking-dead. Take them out of their pre-coffins. Cultivate everything that would add value to their lives. Believe in agency.”
― Anne Schlebusch, Bloomer

“I’m actually an old woman, no more arsing around with faking youth. The world could see my wrinkles and dodder a while back. I’m only a spring chicken inside my deluded brain. On the outside, I’m a chicken-neck. Not a chick anymore. Just an old bird.”
― Anne Schlebusch, Bloomer

“Old folks’ kind of night. Hello, the wee hours. And that refers to the loo, too. The wee hours and the wonky bladders. Like a newborn.”
― Anne Schlebusch, Bloomer

“Mags continued: “I know it might look disrespectful for people to be standing among the gravestones but, to be honest, we old folk look at gravestones as our welcome mat to the next world and let’s not pretend we are heading anywhere else. Applies to all of us, of course, but we’re just a lot closer to it than you are.”
― Anne Schlebusch, Bloomer

“When had they started to talk about booking into a retirement place? Was it in their early sixties? Starting to worry about places being full? Peer pressure? Turning the dimmer switch on their lives.”
― Anne Schlebusch, Bloomer

“At the end, when Christiane invited her to address old people directly, she had looked the camera in the eye and said, “Don’t be so scared of protecting your future that you can’t live in the present. You only have one life and only one body; don’t check yourself out of joy.”
― Anne Schlebusch, Bloomer

“Maggie was surprised to find her heart flipping. At 70 you think that’s all over. You’re too creaky, too selfish, too afraid of infirmity, too focused on staving off dependency, too focused on your unreliable knees and your wobbles on the stairs. Too farty.”
― Anne Schlebusch, Bloomer

“He thought how the world would feel if it were populated solely by elderly women--a world of forbearance, where all touches were careful.”
― Lydia Millet, How the Dead Dream

“When you reach our age, everyone wants to keep you alive with granola.  Consider this breakfast an act of liberation.  I got greasy egg sandwiches, bacon, and hash browns.”
― Circa24, Thomas Hardy was an Optimist: A Collection of Short Stories From the Plague Years.

“Dealing with a stubborn, medically challenged parent later becomes an integral component within our grief process.”
― Wyatt Pringle Jr