All Quotes By Tag: Old-age

“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.”

“And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he’s gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.”

“I just got a rather nasty shock. In looking for something or other I came across the fact that one of my cats is about to be nine years old, and that another of them will shortly thereafter be eight; I have been labouring under the delusion they were about five and six. And yesterday I happened to notice in the mirror that while I have long since grown used to my beard being very grey indeed, I was not prepared to discover that my eyebrows are becoming noticeably shaggy. I feel the tomb is just around the corner. And there are all these books I haven’t read yet, even if I am simultaneously reading at least twenty…”

“In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness, except that which associates itself especially with romantic love. Yet the cleanliness and dignity of Michel Angelo’s male figures are incontestable, and bear striking witness to that nobility of the sentiment in him, which we have already seen illustrated in his sonnets.”

“When the last autumn of Dickens’s life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute?”

“The ninety degree shift does not cancel the effects of old age upon the physical body, but it does enable warriors to retain control of all their faculties, their knowledge, sobriety, and power, right up to and even beyond the moment of physical death. This is every warrior’s reward for having been willing to fight impeccably right up until the final breath.”

“DisciplineI am old and I have hadmore than my share of good and bad.I’ve had love and sorrow, seen sudden deathand been left alone and of love bereft.I thought I would never love againand I thought my life was grief and pain.The edge between life and death was thin, but then I discovered discipline.I learned to smile when I felt sad, I learned to take the good and the bad, I learned to care a great deal morefor the world about me than before.I began to forget the “Me” and “I”and joined in life as it rolled by: this may not mean sheer ecstasybut is better by far than “I” and “Me.”

“When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary.”

“When you are old and grey and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep”

“Hope is sweet.Hope is illumining.Hope is fulfilling.Hope can be everlasting.Therefore, do not give up hope,Even in the sunset of your life.”

“Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.”

“Old age had distilled her down to her essence.”

“It wasn’t right that you could only understand your parents’ pain once you’d experienced the things they had, and by then they were gone.”

“God preserve me from growing wise! Yes, I intend to mumble toothlessly to my deathbed bystanders: God preserve me from growing wise!”

“Only when a person reaches old age can he stop caring about the opinions of his fellows, or of the public, or of the future.”