Old Age Quotes

Or was it the elaborate trick of an old lady convincing herself that she had a past? After all, once a time was over, it was done. You were always in the present. She may have been a girl once, but was not now. Her childhood was gone and nothing could fetch it back.

How a mind under such uncertain circumstances could retain so comparatively placid a vein is one of those marvels which find their explanation in the inherent trustfulness of the spirit of youth.
It is not often that the minds of men retain the perceptions of their younger days.
The marvel is not that one should thus retain, but that any should ever lose them Go the world over, and after you have put away the wonder and tenderness of youth what is there left? The few sprigs of green that sometimes invade the barrenness of your materialism, the few glimpses of summer which flash past the eye of the wintry soul, the half hours off during the long tedium of burrowing, these reveal to the hardened earth-seeker the universe which the youthful mind has with it always.
No fear and no favor; the open fields and the light upon the hills; morning, noon, night; stars, the bird-calls, the water's purl—these are the natural inheritance of the mind of the child.
Men call it poetic, those who are hardened fanciful.

I’m perfectly all right. Yet there’s something ominous about turning sixty-five. Suddenly old age is not a phenomenon which will occur; it has occurred.

He slipped his brittle ivory legs down from the bed, marveling at their desiccation. They seemed to be things which had been fastened to his body while he slept one night, while his younger legs were taken off and burned in the cellar furnace. Over the years, they had destroyed all of him, removing hands, arms, and legs and leaving him with substitutes as delicate and useless as chess pieces. And now they were tampering with something more intangible— the memory; they were trying to cut the wires which led back into another year.

You're not getting any younger.

...of which the weary breast
Would still, albeit in vain, the heavy heart divest.