Virginia Woolf Quotes

At twenty a man is a peacock, at thirty a lion, at forty a camel, at fifty a serpent, at sixty a dog, at seventy an ape, at eighty a nothing at all.

To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content.

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

Words have longer lives than people.

To grow up requires a whole life but to become old one night is enough.

nobody ever intends to be old.

Maybe it's true that life begins at fifty. But everything else starts to wear out, fall out, or spread out.

Among human beings there is no greater banality than death. Second in order, because it is possible to die without being born, comes birth, and next comes marriage.

It's weird how people hate getting older.

And what's a life? - a weary pilgrimage, Whose glory in one day doth fill the stage With childhood, manhood, and decrepit age.

Time indeed has very little to do with living except at its beginning or near its end.

For the first fourteen years for a rod they do while for the next as a pearl in the world they do shine. For the next trim beauty beginneth to swerve. For the next matrons or drudges they serve. For the next doth crave a staff for a stay. For the next a bier to fetch them away.

If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.

Why is youth so short and age so long?

Old age spiritualizes people naturally

It's horrible getting older. I mean, it's wonderful because you see the circles of life get completed. But it's horrible losing your looks.

As the sun is best seen at his rising and setting, so men's native dispositions are clearest seen when they are children, and when they are dying.

I don't want to be married. I don't know - it sounds crazy, but in my mind, it's all connected. You get married, you have kids, you grow old, then you die. Somehow, it seems to me, if you didn't get married, you wouldn't die.

It wasn't really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left. Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty; and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed.

Life is a slope. As long as you're going up you're always looking towards the top and you feel happy, but when you reach it, suddenly you can see the road going downhill and death at the end of it all. It's slow going up and quick going down.

Old age is life's parody.

Life is a kind of sleep: old men sleep longest, nor begin to wake but when they are to die.

Every stage of human life, except the last, is marked out by certain and defined limits; old age alone has no precise and determinate boundary.

An old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as the young man who is unable to embrace it.

I feel like a spinning top or a DreidelThe spinning don't stop when you leave the cradleYou just slow downRound and around this world you goSpinning through the lives of the people you knowWe all slow down.