Old Age and Ageing

Old people are a kind of monsters to little folks; mild manifestations of the terrible, it may be, but still, with their white locks and ridged and grooved features, which those horrid little eyes exhaust of their details like so many microscopes, not exactly what human beings ought to be.

Fun is like life insurance: The older you get, the more it costs.

Rose a nurse of ninety years,

 

Maturity means reacquiring the seriousness one had as a child at play.

Old age lives minutes slowly, hours quickly; childhood chews hours and swallows minutes.

All of one’s contemporaries and aging friends are living in a delicate balance, and one feels that one’s own consciousness is no longer as brightly lit as it once was. But then, twilight with its more subdued colors has its charms as well.

Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.

 

Envy not the old man the tranquillity of his existence, nor yet blame him if it sometimes looks like apathy. Time, the inexorable, does not threaten him with the scythe so often as with the sand-bag. He does not cut, but he stuns and stupefies.

Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay.

After sixty years the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something personal about it.

To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.

To know how to grow old is the masterwork of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.

One does not expect old heads on young shoulders.

It little profits that an idle king,

 

The gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.

 

And if I should live to be The last leaf upon the tree In the spring, Let them smile, as I do now, At the old forsaken bough Where I cling.

 

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!

Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.

I have recently been told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease. . . . I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.

People ought to be one of two things, young or old. No; what’s the use of fooling? People ought to be one of two things, young or dead.

Like so many aging college people, Pnin had long since ceased to notice the existence of students on the campus.

From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.

The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy.

Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. As one climbs higher, life becomes ever harder; the coldness increases, responsibility increases.