Ninon de L'Enclos Quotes

Getting older is hard.

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.

For in all the world there are no people so piteous and forlorn as those who are forced to eat the bitter bread of dependency in their old age.

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

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.

The awful thing about a conductor becoming geriatric is that you seem to become more desirable, not less.

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

Stories about the ongoing dramas in our lives as we age are not being told because women find it difficult to be honest about what's going on - about, for example, our heightened sexuality as we age or about living in a society that only values youth.

What makes old age so sad is not that our joys but our hopes cease.

It's really hard being old - it's horrible.

Life is very tough for women. When you are a certain age, you are left alone at home with no one to share your life with.

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

Growing old is not all sweetness and light. Old women especially are invisible.

We who are old know that age is more than a disability. It is an intense and varied experience, almost beyond our capacity at times, but something to be carried high.

But a day must come when the fire of youth will be quenched in my veins, when winter will dwell in my heart, when his snow flakes will whiten my locks, and his mists will dim my eyes. Then my friends will lie in their lonely grave, and I alone will remain like a solitary stalk forgotten by the reaper.

There are only two periods in a woman's life when she hopes to be taken for older than she is, under sixteen and over ninety.

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

When I'm 70 I might be a man in a park just wandering around, speaking in tongues with kids throwing bread at me.

The arctic loneliness of age.

He that wants money, means, and content is without three good friends.

It is hard to conceive that the old, whose thoughts have been all thought out, should ever love to live alone. Solitude is surely for the young, who have time before them for the execution of schemes, and who can, therefore, take delight in thinking

I have always had plenty of friends, and now at age sixty, I face four walls as a common prisoner.

Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.

No one should be alone in their old age, he thought.

You can live in the same city your entire life and still be completely a foreigner when you step out, in your old age, onto the street.