Jane Addams Quotes

He had never looked forward to the wisdom and other vaunted benefits of old age. Would he be able to die young—and if possible free of all pain? A graceful death—as a richly patterned kimono, thrown carelessly across a polished table, slides unobtrusively down into the darkness of the floor beneath. A death marked by elegance.

I have not seen much dignity in the process by which we die. The quest to achieve true dignity fails when our bodies fail.

When grace combines with wrinkles, it is admirable. There is an indescribable light of dawn about intensely happy old age. . . . The young person is handsome, but the old, superb.

Can't you at least die with a little dignity?

I used to not want to die in any way but in my sleep when I was a young man. I'd like to die awake now, if possible, with people around me who love me.

Old age is the verdict of life.

I'm just growing old, darling. I don't know about gracefully.

When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.

I intend to grow old very disgracefully.

'Death with dignity' is our society's expression of the universal yearning to achieve a graceful triumph over the stark and often repugnant finality of life's last sputterings. But the fact is, death is not a confrontation. It is simply an event in the sequence of nature's ongoing rhythms.

I just pray I can keep working. I just pray I grow old gracefully.

Why, I am about doing very well, for I am preparing myself, sir, for a place where hardly any majors, and very few Lieutenant-Generals go. God save us, why should there be such a bustle about the taking off of an old grey head that cannot get up three steps without two men to support it?

There is a way to grow old and still have dignity.

I have lived long enough. My way of life is to fall into the sere, the yellow leaf, and that which should accompany old age, as honor, love, obedience, troops of friends I must not look to have.

There are so few who can grow old with a good grace.

I hope that when the time comes, I am treated with compassion and allowed to pass on to the next phase of life's journey in the manner of my choice.

The maester smiled...Hush now, child, I'm much older than you. I can....die as I please.

No man loves life like him that's growing old.

It must become a right of every person to die of old age. And if we secure this right for ourselves, we can, coincidentally, assure it for the planet.

See all the women seated, youth in their face lifts, old age in their hands.

The romance of life begins and ends with two blank pages. Age and extreme old age.

To one bent on age, death will come as a release. I feel this quite strongly now that I have grown old myself and have come to regard death like an old debt, at long last to be discharged.

To my ninth decade I have totter'd on, And no soft arm bends now my steps to steady; She, who once led me where she would, is gone, So when he calls me, Death shall find me ready.