Everybody’s gonna get old and die. The Sopranos s4e8: Mergers & Acquisitions, Tony to Pauli
Sweet little old lady like her. Just doesn’t seems right for her to be working with us on a stick-up caper. The Ladykillers 1955 starring Alec Guinness & Peter Sellers & Cecil Parker & Herbert Lom & Danny Green & Jack Warner & Frankie Howerd & Katie Johnson et al, director Alexander Mackendrick, big bloke
3478.2: On a routine mission to re-supply the experimental colony on Gamma Hydra IV we discovered a most unusual phenomenon: of the six members of the colony, none of whom were over thirty, we found four had died and two were dying of ... old age. Star Trek s2e12: The Deadly Years, Kirk’s log
Back in 1911 the average woman died at just fifty-four, and the average man at fifty. This is Britain with Andrew Marr
The fastest-growing age-group of all: centenarians ... There are 12,000. ibid.
Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old. Franz Kafka
Politicians find it very hard to cut back on spending on the elderly ... Politicians are much more scared of their grannies. Nick Robinson, Your Money and How They Spend It I BBC 2011
When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they take so long. Groucho Marx
At forty-five,
What next, what next?
At every corner,
I meet my Father,
my age, still alive. Robert Lowell, Middle Age, 1964
Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered. Graham Greene
I mean who’s going to look after me in my old age? Oliver! 1968 starring Ron Moody & Oliver Reed & Shani Wallis & Harry Secombe & Mark Lester & Peggy Mount & Leonard Rossiter & Kenneth Cranham & Hugh Griffith & Jack Wild et al, director Carol Reed, Fagin to owl
It’s a terrible thing, old age. ibid. Fagin to Oliver
He’s a vegetable now. And that’s something we’ve all got to look forward to. The Office: The Quiz s1e3, BBC 2001
The abbreviation of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life. Edward Gibbon
A long life may not be good enough but a good life is long enough. Benjamin Franklin
If you give up smoking, drinking, loving, you don’t live longer. It just seems longer. Clement Freud, Liberal politician
You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred. Woody Allen
I recently turned sixty. Practically a third of my life is over. Woody Allen, Sayings of the Week Observer 10th March 1966
I was telling you I went down a coalmine the other day. We sank into a pit half a mile deep. We then walked underneath the mountain, and we did about three-quarters of a mile with rock and shale above us. The earth seemed to be straining around us and above us to crush us in.
You could see the pit-props bent and twisted and sundered until you saw their fibres split in resisting the pressure. Sometimes they give way, and then there is mutilation and death. Often a spark ignites: the whole pit is deluged in fire, and the breath of life is scorched out of hundreds of breasts by the consuming flame. In the very next colliery to the one I descended just a few years ago three hundred people lost their lives in that way. And yet when the Prime Minister and I knock at the door of these great landlords, and say to them: Here, you know, these poor fellows who have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lives, some of them are old, they have survived the perils of their trade, they are broken, they can earn no more. Won’t you give them something towards keeping them out of the workhouse? They scowl at us, and we say: Only a ha’penny, just a copper. They say: You thieves! And they turn their dogs on to us, and you can hear their bark every morning. If this is an indication of the view taken by these great landlords of their responsibility to the people who at the risk of life create their wealth, then I say their day of reckoning is at hand. Lloyd George, address Limehouse London
It is rather a shame for a rich country like ours, probably the richest in the world, if not the richest the world has ever known, that it should allow those who have toiled all their lives to end in penury and possibly starvation. ibid.
No more games. No more bombs. No more walking. No more fun. No more swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No fun – for anybody. 67. You are getting greedy. Act your old age. Relax – This won’t hurt. Hunter S Thompson, suicide note
That’s the in thing now, is it? Gerontophilia. Rumpole of the Bailey: Rumpole and the Miscarriage of Justice s7e2, Rumpole to Guthrie, ITV 1997
The baby boomers are getting older, and will stay older for longer. And they will run right into the dementia firing range. How will a society cope? Especially a society that can't so readily rely on those stable family relationships that traditionally provided the backbone of care? Terry Pratchett
The nearer people approach old age the closer they return to a semblance of childhood, until the time comes for them to depart this life, again like children, neither tired of living nor aware of death. Desiderius Erasmus
Nan: Where do you want me?
Jim: Next door. The Royle Family s2e2: Family Lunch, BBC 1999
I wonder what’ll happen to Elsie’s tele now? The Royle Family: Family s3e4, Nana
Elsie were only eighty-eight, you know. She’d got all of her life ahead of her. ibid.
He doesn’t respect the dead, Denise. That’s his trouble. ibid.
Demand for cataract surgery has grown with an ageing population. Keeping Britain Alive: The NHS in a Day III, BBC 2012
I never guessed that I’d live to be 103. There you are. That’s life, isn’t it. Betsy Drax, interview
Then Old Age, and Experience, hand in hand,
Lead him to Death, and make him understand,
After a search so painful, and so long
That all his life he has been in the wrong.
Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies,
Who was so proud, so witty and so wise. John Wilmot Lord Rochester, 1647-80, A Satire Against Mankind
Ancient person for whom I
All the flattering youth defy,
Long be it ere thou grow old,
Aching, shaking, crazy, cold;
But still continue as thou art,
Ancient person of my heart. John Wilmot Lord Rochester, A Song of a Young Lady to her Ancient Lover, 1691
And almost every one when age,
Disease or sorrows strike him,
Inclines to think there is a God,
Or something very like Him. Arthur Hugh Clough, 1819-61, Dipsychus
What good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, as if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer? Sigmund Freud
I haven’t been much of a success at anything. I’ve gotten old and stupid. I look perfectly happy up here but you know what I’d really like to do is start screaming at the top of my lungs. Or run somewhere where nobody could find me. And there’s nobody I can complain to. There are times when I feel like crying. Chekhov: Comedy Shorts: The Proposal starring Sheridan Smith & Mathew Horne, Sky Arts 2010
Thousands of books and no eyes to read them! Old age is a wonderful source of irony if nothing else. Game of Thrones s4e9: The Watchers on the Wall, blind bloke, HBO 2014
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.