Old Age Quotes

“People have told me 'Betty, Facebook is a great way to keep in touch with old friends...'
.. At my age, if I wanted to keep in touch with old friends, I'd need a Ouija board”
― Betty White

“song of elli (old age)

"What is plucked will grow again,
What is slain lives on,
What is stolen will remain
What is gone is gone...
What is sea-born dies on land,
Soft is trod upon.
What is given burns the hand -
What is gone is gone...
Here is there, and high is low;
All may be undone.
What is true, no two men know -
What is gone is gone...
Who has choices need not choose.
We must, who have none.
We can love but what we lose -
What is gone is gone.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“Getting older is no problem. You just have to live long enough.”
― Groucho Marx

“I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly. I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. I tell all old men that to their face, all these venerable old men, all these silver-haired and reverend seniors! I tell the whole world that to its face! I have a right to say so, for I shall go on living to sixty myself. To seventy! To eighty!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“Why should be fruit be held inferior to the flower?”
― George Orwell, 1984

“A man doesn't grow old because he has lived a certain number of years. A man grows old when he deserts his ideal. The years may wrinkle his skin, but deserting his ideal wrinkles his soul.”
― Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel

“It is like being two foreigners, trapped in a land we have come to, unable to return to our own, and having only each other to confirm the reality of the place we once lived.”
― Robin Hobb, Royal Assassin

“At a certain age men began to shrink, and yet it was precisely at that age that their trousers became too short for them.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“I’m a nosy old woman, it’s a perk of getting old. You can be annoying and people just call you eccentric.”
― Lauren Dane, Taking Chase

“I unwrapped my love for her like one might unwrap leftovers. Gotta eat up the old stuff first, as a cannibal might say in a retirement home.
”
― Dark Jar Tin Zoo, Love Quotes for the Ages. Specifically Ages 19-91.

“There are too many steps in this castle, and it seems to me they add a few every night, just to vex me"
- Maester Cressen”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“I can't really tell how old I am, only that I'm too young to wonder if I asked the right questions in the past, and too old to wish the future will bring me all the answers.”
― Gabriel Bá

“What was needed, was not merely a resolute man, but a man who was also free from the net of legal controls. Such being the circumstances, Quinctius declared that he would nominate Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus as Dictator, convinced that in him were courage and resolution equal to the majestic authority of that office. The proposal was unanimously approved, but Cincinnatus, hesitating to accept the burden of responsibility, asked what the Senate was thinking of to wish to expose an old man like him to what must prove the sternest of struggles; but hesitation was in vain, for when from every corner of the House came the cry that in that aged heart lay more wisdom - yes, and courage too - than in all the rest put together, and when praises, well deserved, were heaped upon him and the consul refused to budge an inch from his purpose, Cincinnatus gave way and, with a prayer to God to save his old age from bringing loss or dishonor upon his country in her trouble, was named Dictator by the consul.”
― Livy, The History of Rome, Books 1-5: The Early History of Rome

“This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can’t get fresh fruit in the shops.”
― Geoff Ryman, Paradise Tales: and Other Stories

“I came to feel a tenderness for them all. This was something new to me. It gave me a curious pleasure to touch them, to help them in and out of the chair, to shave their weather-toughened old faces. They had known hard use, nearly all of them. You could tell it by the way they held themselves and moved. Most of all you could tell it by their hands, which were shaped by wear and often by the twists and swellings of arthritis. They had used their hands forgetfully, as hooks and pliers and hammers, and in every kind of weather. The backs of their hands showed a network of little scars where they had been cut, nicked, thornstuck, pinched, punctured, scraped, and burned. Their faces told that they had suffered things they did not talk about.Every one of them had a good knife in his pocket, sharp, the blades whetted narrow and concave, the horn of the handle worn smooth.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.”
― Alain de Botton

“Early youth is a baffling time. The present moment is nice but it does not last. Living in it is like waiting in a junction town for the morning limited; the junction may be interesting but some day you will have to leave it and you do not know where the limited will take you. Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made. In this respect early youth is exactly like old age; it is a time of waiting before a big trip to an unknown destination. The chief difference is that youth waits for the morning limited and age waits for the night train.”
― Bruce Catton, Waiting for the Morning Train

“When Lytle was born, the Wright Brothers had not yet achieved a working design. When he died, Voyager 2 was exiting the solar system. What does one do with the coexistence of those details in a lifetime’s view? It weighed on him.”
― John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead

“Old age is a humble victory in this killing universe.”
― Mehmet Murat ildan