Billy Collins Quotes

I'm not getting old, I'm getting dead.

My Bubbie lived to 104, which is probably a little too old to consider a ripe old age, because she had already started to turn. I still say she died young.

You get to a certain point in your life where you get closer to the end of your life than the beginning, and it colors your life, in a way.

What will I be doing in twenty years' time? I'll be dead, darling! Are you crazy?

I guess I'd like to get old and die, in that order.

You feel a sense of urgency, especially at my advanced age, when you're staring into the grave.

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.

Not even old age knows how to love death.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

Listen, I must be 110 by now. Granny is going to kick the bucket at some point.

You know you're getting old when you go to more funerals than you do weddings.

It's paradoxical, that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn't appeal to anyone.

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.

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.

We usually say of ancient persons, that they have already one foot in the grave, and the rest of their life is nothing else but the bringing of these feet together.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you'd never complete your life, would you? You'd never wholly know you.

I'm approaching 70. Unfortunately, from the wrong direction.

If you're not getting older, you're dead.

Time, in general, has always been a central obsession of mine - what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own. So naturally, I am interested in old age.

When you're young, you think life is forever, but it's finite. I'm 68, so even by the maddest measurements, I'm in the last bit of life.

I think old people are scary. They remind you of your own death. People don't like to tell you that.

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.

I've worked very hard to become comfortable with how death works and why it happens. I now know that death isn't out to get me.

One of the things I noticed is that people really change when they realize their expiration date is coming, and they know what it is. Most of us don't: we just hope we can live as long as we can and do as much good as we can.