growing old Quotes

“No, that is the great fallacy, the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”

“No one should be alone in their old age, he thought.”

Akela said nothing. He was thinking of the time that comes to every leader of every pack when his strength goes from him and he gets feebler and feebler, till at last he is killed by the wolves and a new leader comes up—to be killed in his turn.

“At my age, I should not be afraid of anything—certainly not my own past.”

Yet it remained unsatisfied, and would exclaim, “Oh, if I could but keep on growing tall and old! There is nothing else worth caring for in the world!”

“I am too old and sad to play.”

″‘Come, Boy,’ she whispered, ‘come and play.‘”

“Sit by my side, and let the world slip: we shall ne’er be younger.”

″‘Nonsense,’ said Mama. ‘Old age isn’t such a tragedy. If he was the only old man in the world -- yes. But he has other old men to keep him company.‘”

“Old people are not unhappy. They don’t long for the things we want.”

“He don’t want to die. He wants to keep on living even though he’s so old and there’s nothing to be happy about anymore.”

“If there’s one thing certain, it’s that we all have to get old someday. So get used to the idea as quickly as you can.”

“You must be very old!” said Jane.”

“He must have had fire and mettle in his day, if we may judge from the name he bore of Gunpowder. He had, in fact, been a favorite steed of his master’s, the choleric Van Ripper, who was a furious rider, and had infused, very probably, some of his own spirit into the animal; for, old and broken-down as he looked, there was more of the lurking devil in him than in any young filly in the country.”

“Love is Love no matter old you are, and I knew if I gave you enough time, you’d come back to me.”

“You’re born and you keep getting older and grayer and sicker, and no matter what efforts you make to reverse the process, you die, every single time. To repeat: worse, worse, worse, and then death. I have a long way to go before the worst. This is only the beginning.”

“I told Morrie I was already feeing over the hill, much as I tried desperately to stay on top of it. . . . I had gone from being proud to say my age—because of all I had done so young—to not bringing it up, for fear I was getting too close to forty and, therefore, professional oblivion.”

“Well, that mother, she got older. She got older and older and older.”

“I am convinced that most people do not grow up. We find parking spaces and honor our credit cards. We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.”

“Halleck turned away to hide his emotions. Something burned in his eyes. There was pain in him -- like a blister, all that was left of some lost yesterday that Time had pruned off him. ”

“Growing older became something he wanted desperately to accomplish, rather than merely a dreaded inevitability.”

“I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area.”

“One of the greatest indignities about being old is that people insist on helping you with things like bathing and going to the washroom. I don’t in fact require help with either, but they’re all so afraid I’m going to slip and break my hip again that I get a chaperone whether I like it or not.”

“I try to brush the hairs flat with my hand and freeze at the sight of my old hand on my old head. I lean close and open my eyes very wide, trying to see beyond the sagging flesh. It’s no good. Even when I look straight into the milky blue eyes, I can’t find myself anymore. When did I stop being me?”

“But there’s nothing to be done about it. All I can do is put in time waiting for the inevitable, observing as the ghosts of my past rattle around my vacuous present. They crash and bang and make themselves at home, mostly because there’s no competition. I’ve stopped fighting them.”

“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. […]”

“Even in your twenties you know how old you are. I’m twenty-three, you say, or maybe twenty-seven. But then in your thirties something strange starts to happen. It’s a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I’m – you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you’re not. You’re thirty-five. And then you’re bothered, because you wonder if this is the beginning of the end. It is, of course, but it’s decades before you admit it.”

“Oh, Dad, I don’t care how old you are, ever! I don’t care what, I don’t care anything! Oh, Dad . . . I love you!”

“I don’t want to get old. I have this very silly fear, dear friend, that one day I’ll be old, without ever having really been young.”

“Ma, I don’t want to grow old. Why’s everybody pushing me so?”

“Age is just a number, not a state of mind or a reason for any type of particular behaviour.”

“What’s so good about being 20? I call them the materialistic years. The years we get distracted by all the bullshit. Then we cope on when we hit our 30s and spend those years trying to make up for the 20s. But your 40s? Those years are for enjoying it.”

“People create little ideas about ages so they can write silly self-help books, stick stupid comments in birthday cards, create names for Internet chat rooms, and look for excuses for crises that are happening in their life. For example the man’s so called ‘midlife crisis’ is just a bunch of hype. Age is not the problem; it’s the male brain that’s the problem. Men have been cheating since they were apes (insert your own joke there), since cavemen times (and again there) all the way up to now, the age of what is supposed to be the civilized man. That’s the way they were made. Age is not the issue.”

“I watched him go, looking old and tired, and wondered for a minute what on earth we were doing up here. We weren’t boys anymore.”

It occurred to me that we will never be young again.

“You live that long, things start happening to you. You get too impressed with yourself. Ends up, you think you’re God. Suddenly the little people, thirty, maybe forty years old, well, they don’t really matter anymore. You’ve seen whole societies rise and fall, and you start to fell you’re standing outside it all, and none of it really matters to you.”

“You love most of all those who need you as they need a crowbar or a hoe. You have not grown old, and it is not too late To dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out its own secret.”

“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.”

“She glared, daring us to pay her a compliment. But the cat had our tongues. Mary Alice stared up at her, transfixed. Was she seeing herself fifty years hence? ”

“The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized. Another war came, World War II, and I wanted to get in it. The war looked like my chance to realize my old dream of flying.

“I was thirteen at last, so I’d thank you to call me Joe, not Joey, and I walked a few strides ahead of Mary Alice. For one thing, she’d been taking dancing lessons all year and never went anywhere without her tap shoes in a drawstring bag.”

“If you don’t get out of that old house, you’ll waste away, a bitter woman like your mother and grandmother.”

“She carried a thin, small cane made from an umbrella, and with this she kept tapping the frozen earth in front of her. This made a grave and persistent noise in the still air that seemed meditative, like the chirping of a solitary little bird.”

“She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock.”

“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.”

“You’ll learn, as you get older, that rules are made to be broken. Be bold enough to live life on your terms, and never, ever apologize for it.”

“When I am old and alone, I will remember that once I held something truly beautiful.”

“Exercise II. Write a diary, imagining that you are trying to make an old person jealous. I have written an example to get you started: Dear Diary, I spent the morning admiring my skin elasticity. God alive, I feel supple.”

“You can see why this would have been a dreadful thing for Jonathan to have to tell you. You never had the injections. That meant that while he stayed young, you would grow older, and older, and finally die. He loved you, and he could hardly stand that thought. Yet if it was distressing to him — he thought — how much more painful it would be to you! That is what he could not bring himself to tell you.”

“To tell you the truth, I didn’t feel any different. I don’t think you ever do. I think one day you just become sixty or seventy, and it must be a shock to be so old because it’s still the same you on the inside; it’s just that all the outside of you has got wrinkled from the weather.”

“She had grown very old and was sick a lot of the time. The quilt kept her legs warm. ”

“But then,” thought Alice, “shall I never get any older than I am now? That’ll be a comfort, one way—never to be an old woman—but then—always to have lessons to learn! Oh, I shouldn’t like that!”

“How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June.... If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!”