Quotes about old age

“That’s the duty of the old,” said the Librarian, “to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.”

He had noted that with older people. They often try to control younger, more popular and vivacious people; usually due to the fact that they are jealous of the qualities the younger people have and they lack. These inadequacies are disguised with a benign, protective attitude.

All we can do is keep applying the creosote, propping ourselves up with health and success, trying to keep the rain and the damp and the rot at bay for a little longer, trying to postpone the moment of complete collapse of abandonment for the same reason that one waits as long as possible for the alcoholic drink of the day: because the longer you leave it, the better it will feel. (p. 227).

Once you turn forty...the whole world is water off a duck’s back. Once you turn forty you realize that life is there to be wasted. (p. 165).

As a man grows older the memory of his youth begins to act as nothing less than an immunization against further experience. And he was thirty-eight. It was an age when one felt strangely unready to say that one had lived and yet reluctant to acknowledge the death of youth. An age when the savor of one’s experiences turned ever so slightly sour, and when, day by day, one took less pleasure in new things. An age when the charm of every diverting foolishness quickly faded.

The old and powerful never want to let go. They always think they’re both profoundly indispensable and uniquely right. They are always wrong. Part of the function of ageing and dying is to let the next generation have its say, its time in the sun, to sweep away the mistakes of the previous age while, if they’re lucky, retaining the advances made and the benefits accrued.

Some problems were generational; you just had to wait for the relevant elders to die off and be replaced with more progressive types. With luck.

Mocking the wisdom that comes with age is a fit sport only for those who expect never to attain much of it themselves.

"Some people go on wanting [sex] as long as they live, but other people, they let it go as if it were a garment that had worn out." (Malkah, nine: REVISING THE FAMILY ALBUM)

What if a sense of humour is like hair — something a lot of man lose as they get older?

As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of the people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive.

Your tears come easy , when you're young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you're old, and leaving it.