Clifton Fadiman Quotes

Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese.

Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese.

I'm really interested in the idea of long, long life and transformation and immortality.

Age is of no importance unless you are a cheese.

A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.

I feel about aging the way William Saroyan said he felt about death: Everybody has to do it, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case.

The Boomers will eventually have to accept that it is not possible to stay forever young or to stop aging. But it is possible, by committing to show up for others in community after community, to earn a measure of immortality.

I asked the waiter, 'Is this milk fresh?' He said, 'Lady, three hours ago it was grass.'

When you extend life span, that's really something. That's hard to do.

I don't have a fear of aging or a fear of death.

It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.

What would it be like to live 500 years? Healthy years, of course; no one wants to live 500 years in a coma on a respirator. But reasonably healthy all that time? That would be awesome!

I'm going through life's cycles at an alarmingly fast pace, but my persona has a Peter Pan quality: he doesn't age.

My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever.

I love milk. I always drink milk.

I don't think it is about stalling or curing: it's about reversing. Curing gives you the impression of immortality. Stalling gives you the impression that you'll be 85 forever, which is not great.

Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come.

The King's cheese is half wasted in parings: But no matter, 'tis made of the people's milk.

I'm like a good cheese. I'm just getting mouldy enough to be interesting.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142.

If you want milk, don't sit on a stool in the middle of a field in the hope that a cow will back up to you.

We want to live forever, and we're getting there.

Why shouldn't I milk it? We're an agricultural institution.

Neither lemonade nor anything else can prevent the inroads of old age. At present, I am stoical under its advances, and hope I shall remain so. I have but one prayer at heart; and that is, to have my faculties so far preserved that I can be useful, in some way or other, to the last.

My God, I'm four hundred years old and the most I can do is look three hundred.