OLD AGE QUOTES III
quotations about old age
Age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimates youth.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
You read the past in some old faces.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The Virginians
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
Softly comes Old Age, the thief,
Steals the rapture, leaves the throes.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"Scherzo"
Sixty feels exactly like 50, with aching feet and more forgetfulness.... But your inside person doesn't age. Your inside person is soul, is heart, in the eternal now, the ageless, the old, the young, all the ages you've ever been.
ANNE LAMOTT
Salon, November 3, 2014
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook K", Aphorisms
Women are beautiful when they're young, and not after. Men can still preserve their sex appeal well into old age.... Some men can maintain, if they embrace it ... cragginess, weary masculinity. Women just get old and fat and wrinkly.
TRACY LETTS
August: Osage Country
Oft am I by the Women told,
Poor Anacreon, thou grow'st old,
Look how thy hairs are falling all;
Poor Anacreon how they fall.
Whether I grow old or no,
By th' Effects I do not know.
This I know without being told,
'Tis time to Live, if I grow Old.
'Tis time short Pleasures now to take;
Of little Life the best to make,
And manage wisely the last Stake.
ANACREON
"Ode X", Odes
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
Few know how to be old.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Age is information failure. The body loses fluency.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
After a man passes sixty, his mischief is mainly in his head.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
Old age is particularly difficult to assume because we have always regarded it as something alien, a foreign species.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Coming of Age
What Youth deemed crystal,
Age finds out was dew.
ROBERT BROWNING
"Jochanan Hakkadosh"
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
The art of growing old is the art of being regarded by the oncoming generations as a support and not as a stumbling-block.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
An Art of Living
Old men, what are they? Fast fading the leaf,
Three-footed they walk, yet frail as a child,
As a dream set afloat in the daylight.
AESCHYLUS
Agamemnon
Old age is perplexing to imagine in part because the definition of it is notoriously unstable. As people age, they tend to move the goalposts that mark out major life stages.
CERIDWEN DOVEY
"What Old Age Is Really Like", The New Yorker, October 1, 2015
When you're forty, half of you belongs to the past -- and when you're seventy, nearly all of you.
JEAN ANOUILH
Time Remembered