Speaking of Age…

Some writers, a composer and a jurist – thinkers all – with some insight into what it’s like to get older.

“Every age has its springs which give it movement; but man is always the same. At ten years old he is led by sweetmeats; at twenty by a mistress; at thirty by pleasure; at forty by ambition; at fifty by avarice; after that what is left for him to run after but wisdom?”

- Rousseau at age 51

“I do not think that death is particularly hard for those who most loved life. On the contrary.”

- Andre Gide at age 52

“The general, besides, was in the prime of life – that is, fifty-six, and not a day older, which under any circumstances is the most flourishing age in a man’s life, the age at which real life can be rightly said to begin.”

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Idiot, at age 48

“With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.”

- James Thurber at age 59

“The pleasures that once were heaven, look silly at sixty-seven.”

- Noel Coward at 67

“If I had any decency, I’d be dead. Most of my friends are.”

- Dorothy Parker at age 70

“In age we feel again that love of our native place and our early friends, which in the bustle or amusements of middle life were overborne or suspended.”

- Samuel Johnson at age 73

“I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.”

- Sir Winston Churchill at age 75

“I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.”

- Edmund Wilson at age 75

“You couldn’t live eighty-two years in the world without being disillusioned.”

- Rebecca West at age 82

“I think I have lived long enough and worked hard enough, not without some recognized achievement, to have earned the privilege of not being addressed as ‘Pussycat’!”

- Stravinsky at age 87

“A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbours: he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost; and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel the enemy must get by him before he can come near their camp.”

- Oliver Wendell Holmes at age 91