All Quotes By Tag: Old-age
“Time is unkind to all of us, but it is particularly sadistic to women. A man’s physical prowess may dwindle with time, but he has compensations: stature, wealth, eminence. Men grow distinguished while women simply grow old.”
“And last, the rending pain of re-enactmentOf all that you have done, and been; the shameOf things ill done and done to others’ harmWhich once you took for exercise of virtue.Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.”
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“Hypocrisy is something I have learned saturates every level of our society. I see it more with my old age than I did then. At some stage I started questioning everything that I was being taught and turned against various aspects of my upbringing. Maybe I had my reasons and maybe I needed new ways to cope.”
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” whatever else it might be, seems to be an investigation into the possibility of durational being, which Bergson had described as “the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states.” The succession that Bergson opposes to vitality is the realm in which the morbid Prufrock tries to imagine speaking Andrew Marvell’s line, “Now let us sport us while we may,” but then falls back on his indecision, his failure to pose his overwhelming question, and his inability to sing his love. Prufrock’s problems are shown to be symptoms of the form of time in which desire for youth runs defiantly against the remorselessness of aging, snapping the present in two. The “silent seas” that might bring relief from currents and countercurrents of time turn out to be like the troubling one that figures in Hamlet’s overwhelming question: “To be or not to be: that is the question: / Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them.” Prufrock understands but is unable to admit the ontological force of the question: the “whips and scorns of time” that threaten to reverse all his “decisions and revisions” make him wish to be merely “a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” That synecdochic figure is as much an anachronous peripeteia for Prufrock as it is for Polonius when Hamlet taunts him: “you yourself, sir, should be as old as I am if, like a crab, you could go backwards.”
“I just wish moments weren’t so fleeting!’ Isaac called to the man on the roof, ‘They pass so quickly!’ ‘Fleeting?!’ responded the tilling man, ‘Moments? They pass quickly?! . . . Why, once a man is finished growing, he still has twenty years of youth. After that, he has twenty years of middle age. Then, unless misfortune strikes, nature gives him twenty thoughtful years of old age. Why do you call that quickly?’ And with that, the tilling man wiped his sweaty brow and continued tilling; and the dejected Isaac continued wandering. ‘Stupid fool!’ Isaac muttered quietly to himself as soon as he was far enough away not to be heard.”
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“We envy people who are extremely old because we wish to live that long, not because we want to be that old.”
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“With regard to things such as independence, mental capabilities, and sexuality, a very old man is nothing but a gigantic infant with white hair and wrinkles.”
“Some social ills are preserved by the common misbelief that things such as ignorance, greed, and stupidity do not have the stamina required to reach old age.”
“Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.”
“Death devours not only those who have been cooked by old age; it also feasts on those who are half-cooked and even those who are raw.”
“As an unavoidable result of the inevitable loss of some physical and/or some mental abilities, many a man who has been alive for many years has become a boy again.”
“Loneliness tortures many if not most of the elderly more intensely and more frequently than it torments many if not most of us who will never be or have not yet been pushed or pulled into old age.”
“Old age doth in sharp pains abound;We are belabored by the gout,Our blindness is a dark profound,Our deafness each one laughs about.Then reason’s light with falling rayDoth but a trembling flicker cast.Honor to age, ye children pay!Alas! my fifty years are past!”
“The day before the Queen’s Ball, Father had a visitor–a very young girl with literary aspirations, someone Lord Lytton had recommended visit Father and sent over–and while Father was explaining to her the enjoyment he was having in writing this Drood book for serialisation, this upstart of a girl had the temerity to ask, ‘But suppose you died before all the book was written?’ […] He spoke very softly in his kindest voice and said to her, ‘One can only work on, you know–work while it is day.”
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