Dorothy Dix Quotes

Where the despair of loneliness and poverty haunts every hour, the optimism to embark on new projects cannot find a place to alight on the brain's cortex. Poverty itself is an enormous obstacle to an enlightened and enlightening - not to say healthy - old age.

I know what it feels like to be broke and alone, and I don't ever want my loved ones to see that or know what it's like.

When he is forsaken, Withered and shaken, What can an old man do but die?

Loneliness and hunger were my fortunes of creation.

It's one of the terrors of old age that your body is not your friend. Or to be out on the street and be frightened of someone because you're not in good shape and can't do anything about it.

Old age is a woman's hell.

Those who have no hope pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.

There is a sort of indifference to the problem of old age. Indifference in the face of a revolution in longevity.

My sister women, those struggling with social problems, and those who slave all their lives long for a community – shop, factory and domestic slaves, earning barely a subsistence, and thrown aside to death or the parish when they are no longer profitable – mothers, bearing and rearing children, seeing them go forth… and spending their own last years, lonely and unconsidered in the cheerless wards of the workhouse.

I became bitter, hard, cold. I was always on a panic - couldn't buy clothes or a good place to live.

I know what it is like to feel vulnerable and fearful during a difficult time.

Not having a roof over your head at night must be frightening, cold, lonely and depressing. To be seriously ill as well must be beyond upsetting.

When I was around 18, I got kicked out of my parents' house, and I wasn't allowed to take anything with me. I slept on YMCA towels for a whole semester in university before my father found out and bought me a mattress. I felt really free because I was finally living on my own, but I was also really depressed because I had nothing.

I've lived out in a park sleeping on the grass with no place to go; I've not eaten. I've been there.

We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness.

We have two useless gods who never leave our island, but like to dwell in it constantly, Poverty and Helplessness.

To be shelterless and alone in the open country, hearing the wind moan and watching for day through the whole long weary night; to listen to the falling rain, and crouch for warmth beneath the lee of some old barn or rick, or in the hollow of a tree; are dismal things - but not so dismal as the wandering up and down where shelter is, and beds and sleepers are by thousands; a houseless rejected creature.

Growing old is not a thing to watch. It cannot be forgiven in others. Alone, it can be borne. Even indulged.

I couldn't do it at all. I was never really good at it, but I can't imagine what it can be like as a fortunate person not having to deal with it. I mean, people of all ages, not just my age, 25, 35, all the way down the line.

Getting older is hard.

Education is the best provision for old age.

There has been enough suffering in our country, there has been enough of children whose dreams die before they have a chance to grow and there has been enough of our elders who, having served their nation, are forced into indignity in their old age.

The fellow that has no money is poor. The fellow that has nothing but money is poorer still.

Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold.

Never once, during any of my bouts of depression, had I been inclined or able to pick up a telephone and ask a friend for help. It wasn't in me.