aging Quotes

“Instead of being enfeebled by age, the Elder had been empowered by it; He could outfly any gull in the Flock, and he had learned skills that the others were only gradually coming to know.”

“As we age and plasticity declines, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to change in response to the world, even if we want to. We find familiar types of stimulation pleasurable; we seek out like-minded individuals to associate with, and research shows we tend to ignore or forget, or attempt to discredit, information that does not match our beliefs, or perception of the world, because it is very distressing and difficult to think and perceive in unfamiliar ways.”

“I am told that I am vague and confused, and if I am vague and confused now, what shall I be later on?”

“Thus she passed from generation to generation—dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.”

“There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus, than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travellers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to enquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult.”

“For let me tell you, that the more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation.”

“If you still think you’re a young pup then you are, no matter what the calendar says.”

“Of course, you’re very young… you haven’t got to that yet. But it does come! The blessed relief when you know that you’ve done with it all—that you haven’t got to carry the burden any longer. You’ll feel that too, someday….”

“They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. ”

“I was thirty-five and I’d thought I was playing political poker and it turned out I’d been playing in some other game I didn’t even know about. ”

“Sometimes when you get older – and I’m not talking about you, I’m talking generally, because everyone ages differently – things you think on and wish on start to seem real. And then you believe them, and before you know it they’re a part of your history, and if someone challenges you on them and says they’re not true – why, then you get offended. Because you don’t remember the first part. All you know is that you’ve been called a liar. […]”

“By the time she returns, I have managed to undo three buttons on my other shirt. Not bad for gnarled fingers. I’m rather pleased with myself. Brain and body, both in working order.”

“No. About… Oh hell, don’t you understand? I didn’t even realize I was talking. It’s the beginning of the end. It’s all downhill from here, and I didn’t have very far to go. But I was really hoping to hang on to my brains. I really was.”

“Mr. Twit was a twit. He was born a twit. And, now at the age of sixty, he was a bigger twit than ever.”

“As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time.”

“Evidently in the six months since I’d last seen them, I’d changed more than I realized.”

“Age acquires no value save through thought and discipline.”

“She had Poppy. She had friends. And she had Mrs. Murdo, who was somewhere between a relative and a friend. But she felt as if she had suddenly gotten older in the last three days. She was sort of a mother herself now. What happened to Poppy was more or less up to her.”

“I am a teenage boy aflame with health, strong and virile and pounding with energy. But I get older. Every second ages me. [...] Each death around me adds a decade. Each atrocity, each tragedy, each small moment of sadness. Soon I will be ancient.”

“It is so silly of people to fancy that old age means crookedness and witheredness and feebleness and sticks and spectacles and rheumatism and forgetfulness! It is so silly! Old age has nothing whatever to do with all that. The right old age means strength and beauty and mirth and courage and clear eyes and strong painless limbs.”

“Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can’t quite name.”

“I may be old, but I never forget my friends.”

“By the time she reached her fifties, she was ageless—and, with her constant silence, her upright figure and her measured gestures, she seemed like a woman made out of wood, a kind of automaton that moved without thinking. ”

“I ought to be shut up for good,” she said with laughter. “My senses is gone. I too old. I the oldest people I ever know. Dance, old scarecrow,” she said, “while I dancing with you.”

“I don’t know if I’ve come of age, but I’m certainly older now. I feel shrunken, as if there’s a tiny ancient Oliver Tate inside me operating the levers of a life-size Oliver-shaped shell. A shell on which a decrepit picture show replays the same handful of images.”

″...He asked himself if May’s face was doomed to thicken into the same middle-aged image of invincible innocence. Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!”

A botanist, Mrs Jones is a feisty, aging, good-hearted woman who has an amazing (and eye-opening) vocabulary and who adopts Theodore into her band of travelers.

At your age we have faith in life; it is the privilege of youth to believe and hope, but old men see death more clearly.

Fourteen years had changed the worthy merchant, who, in his thirty-sixth year at the opening of this history, was now in his fiftieth; his hair had turned white, time and sorrow had ploughed deep furrows on his brow, and his look, once so firm and penetrating, was now irresolute and wandering, as if he feared being forced to fix his attention on some particular thought or person.

“My poor girl, in ten years I shall be old, and you will be still young.”

I cannot cry; at my age they say that we have no more tears,—still I think that when one is in trouble one should have the power of weeping.

Barrois ran, half-scared, to his master; for nothing frightens old people so much as when death relaxes its vigilance over them for a moment in order to strike some other old person.

M. de Saint-Méran and Noirtier had never been on strict terms of friendship; still, the death of one old man always considerably affects another.

“What’s to be done—you tell me that, what’s to be done? Your wife gets older, while you’re full of life. Before you’ve time to look round, you feel that you can’t love your wife with love, however much you may esteem her. And then all at once love turns up, and you’re done for, done for,” Stepan Arkadyevitch said with weary despair.

I am getting old, and I do not love wild elephants.