“Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.”
“When people talk about the good old days, I say to people, It s not the days that are old, it s you that s old. I hate the good old days. What is important is that today is good.”
“…. by the time they have reached the middle of their life’s journey, few people remember how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements, their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change anymore. It might even be asserted that they have been cheated, for one can nowhere discover any sufficient reason for everything’s coming about as it has. It might just have well as turned out differently. The events of people’s lives have, after all, only to the last degree originated in them, having generally depended on all sorts of circumstances such as the moods, the life or death of quite different people, and have, as it were, only at the given point of time come hurrying towards them”
“The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child s need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia. Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.”
“If you re not getting happier as you get older, then you re fuckin up”
“Oh, but we do age. We don’t grow up.”
“Old age is not as honorable as death, but most people seek it.”
“A lady is as young as the gentleman she feels, said Roy and cackled happily.”
“I was not so old that I would deny my own senses.”
“People talk to old people like they re children. Oh you re very old aren t you? Yeah I m old. I m not stupid.”
“I don t see, I said, how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you re young you re so self-reliant. You don t even need much religion.”
“Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.”
“Young men speak about the future because they have no past, and old men speak of the past because they have no future.”
“The good thing about being old is not being young.”
“At twenty life was like wrestling an octopus. Every moment mattered. At thirty it was a walk in the country. Most of the time your mind was somewhere else. By the time you got to seventy, it was probably like watching snooker on the telly.”
“You know, when I first went into the movies Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather. Later he played my father and finally he played my husband. If he had lived I m sure I would have played his mother. That s the way it is in Hollywood. The men get younger and the women get older.”
“I m a century old, an impossible age, and my brain has no anchor in the present. Instead it drifts, nearly always to the same shore. Today, as most days, it is 1962. The year I discovered love.”