Miriam Margolyes Quotes

I am scared of getting old. I am scared of being ill.

In sharp contrast to the idea that this stage of life is enviable, we hear high levels of anxiety about getting old, anxieties about health, mobility, access to facilities, simple routine care and attention.

Getting older is hard.

They say the first thing to go is your legs, then it's your reflexes, then it's your friends.

It's when you get to 60 when everything starts to go pear-shaped. Everyone thinks that becoming an older guy is easy, but you never consider it fully. It comes as quite a shock.

Nobody ever said that growing old would be easy. Just having to hold the newspaper out in your forties and then hair growing out of unusual parts of your body in your fifties. It's tough on the ego.

Old age is a woman's hell.

I have the problems of, I must confess, old age.

The appearance of aged persons is too well known to make detailed description necessary. The skin of the face is dry and wrinkled and generally pale. The hairs on the head and the body are white. The back is bent, and the gait is slow and laborious, whilst the memory is weak. Such are the most familiar traits of old age.

What's the worst thing about getting old? Getting old.

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.

My father had several strokes and heart attacks. I was with him when he died, and it was a horrible death. He had been a very articulate man, and to lose that, never to be able to speak properly and to be unable to move - he had always been a very vigorous man, so to be in a wheelchair and mumbling - was terrible.

There's no such thing as ageing gracefully. I don't meet people who want to get Alzheimer's disease, or who want to get cancer or arthritis or any of the other things that afflict the elderly. Ageing is bad for you, and we better just actually accept that.

It's no fun getting older. I might be wearing beautiful diamond earrings, but they can't take away the pain of losing my hearing.

I don't fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach.

What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.

I thought it must be desperate to be old. To wake up in the morning and remember that you were ancient - and so behave that way. I thought old people were full of aches and pains and horrible illnesses.

There cannot live a more unhappy creature than an ill-natured old man, who is neither capable of receiving pleasures, nor sensible of conferring them on others.

Dying people often become childish.

Ageing is something that both men and women are utterly terrified about.

A lot of people stop short. They don't actually die but they say, 'Right I'm old, and I'm going to retire,' and then they dwindle into nothing. They go off to Florida and become jolly boring.

With age, life becomes complex and difficult, often fraught with risk on several levels, from the practical to the fiscal.

Old age is a wonderful time of life. At least, that's what everyone tells you. But let me tell you: it is not true. What's true is that your hips, knees and ankles gradually give up on you - everything is quite dreadful, really. And it was a terrible thing to have told us because we believed it.

The fact is, it wasn't enjoyable being in secondary school. I was a weird kid.

People don't really care to be around you when you're going through tough times.