J. J. Cale Quotes

At some point, your memories, your stories, your adventures, will be the only things you'll have left.

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book.

I am an aging Girl Scout.

When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity - but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

My nieces and my nephews think the only thing that I do is 'Ice Age.' That's fine with me because pretty soon they'll grow up enough to realize that I suck or that my time has passed, whichever it might be.

Experience is what you have after you've forgotten her name.

I'm growing old, I delight in the past.

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.

Old age is a shipwreck.

While all old people have been young, no young people have been old, and this troubling fact engenders the frustration of all parents and elders, which is that while you can describe your experience, you cannot confer it.

I'm 78. We've lost a lot of our great stars. I can't hang out with those who aren't here. The phone service to Heaven is so bad, you know. But I get to visit with their memories.

It's amazing, seeing people of all different ages singing lyrics to songs we wrote when we were so young and thought we knew everything.

Gerald Wilson was one of my mentors: he was in his nineties before he passed and, literally, every time I saw him, he'd be like, 'Man, Kamasi, I've got this new thing! Nobody ever heard anything like this before!' It's amazing hanging out with somebody that was born in 1918.

I used to love getting older.

[At age 92:] There are places I'd like to return to. But not as I was then but as I am now. 'Cause I'm trying to understand. And I've understood nothing.

The old men know when an old man dies.

Let's put it this way: there wouldn't be much point in me attending a high-school reunion now because there wouldn't be anybody there. We'd struggle to raise a quorum.

Many of my old friends are gone now. I have a hard time dealing with the fact that they're just not there to talk to. I can't call them up for a rabbit-skin glue recipe anymore.

As life runs on, the road grows strange with faces new - and near the end. The milestones into headstones change, Neath every one a friend.

I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.

A lot of people are frightened by old age - by being around people who are, basically, on their way out - but I'm fascinated by it. It's an amazing thing to be around someone who has had a life well lived.

Everything, everything, everything! I want to know everything. I want the privilege of being a crone.

I think we should be proud of the fact that our face has got lines, because at least that means we have lived.

The fear of old age is something that one feels when they're younger. Once you get to being old, you're already there, so you don't even think about it anymore.

To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am.