Norman MacCaig Quotes

When you get to my age, you find that most of your dear friends are gone.

You get to an age when you lose people close to you.

Old age: I fall asleep during the funerals of my friends.

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book.

Death is hacking away at my address book and party lists.

I had assumed that I would age with all my friends growing old around me, dying off very gradually one by one. And here was a plague that cut them off so early.

The common denominator of all my friends is that they're dead.

Now, I'm the only living member of that group. There was the six of us originally and they're now all gone.

Papa died when he was 77.

I can't forgive my friends for dying; I don't find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.

Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.

What is the worst of woes that wait on age? What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each loved one blotted from life's page, And be alone on earth, as I am now.

I think I've become more aware of aging in the last couple of years because of friends dying of cancer or friends' parents dying and myself - I'm still healthy, but I'm aging, and that's something that I think about more, even though I shouldn't be too concerned.

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

I am older than everyone I ever knew. All my dogs are dead. Half a dozen cats, parakeets... all gone.

My father passed away at, like, 87.

Even if you live to be a ripe old age, you live long enough to see the people you love pass away.

Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death.

One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not everybody is goin to get older with you.

Old age is - a lot of crossed off names in an address book.

The sad events that occur in my life are the sad events that happen to everybody, with losing friends and family, but that is a natural occurrence, as natural as being born.

When friends and lovers die and your world gets quieter; that's when the silence comes closer; that's when next isn't the least bit theoretical or abstract.

At a certain age, death becomes familiar to you-or a loss becomes familiar-the tragedies that are more commonplace in life.

I had a friend, Melissa, who was 28 years old. She was my best friend's wife, and she was my wife's best friend. She died of breast cancer. When she passed away back in 2004 was the last time I cried.

I have lost almost every friend that I had before Casey died.