William Cowper Quotes

Florida was a living tomb, she used to tell anyone who'd listen, an old-age home in the shape of a state, God's little waiting room, as she was fond of quoting.

Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I lay me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be: Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

Old age is - a lot of crossed off names in an address book.

When I go to the old folks' home, I'm gonna be sitting in a rocking chair, telling everybody how I worked with Jack [Lemmon] and Walter [Matthau].

Don't bury me with anyone old.

I grew up in a retirement community in Florida.

Most Americans have some experience with nursing homes or other long term care settings, and nearly half have had a family member or close friend in a home in the past three years.

For now I'm building up stories for the retirement home!

I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave - thank God for the quiet grave

Auntie Phyl's last months in the care home were extra pieces. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate enough to die swiftly and suddenly, in full possession of our faculties and our fate, but more and more of us will be condemned to linger, at the mercy of anxious or indifferent relatives, careless strangers, unwanted medical interventions, increasing debility, incontinence, memory loss. We live too long, but, like the sibyl hanging in her basket in the cave at Cumae, we find it hard to die.

People don't die of old age, they die of neglect.

Growing old beats the alternative - dying young.

It [retirement] was absolutely boring. You can't go and say, 'I'm retired now. That's it!' It won't take long and you're really gone for good and someone throws the last shovel of dirt on a coffin with your name on it. That's the moment you're really retiring - when you die.

The nearer I approach death the more I feel like one who is in sight of land at last and is about to anchor in one's home port after a long voyage.

There is nothing against which an old man should be so much upon his guard as putting himself to nurse.

How good we all are, in theory, to the old; and how in fact we wish them to wander off like old dogs, die without bothering us, and bury themselves.

In the end maybe what marriage offered was the determination of one's burial site.

Old age: The estuary that enlarges and spreads itself grandly as it pours into the Great Sea.

How gladly would I meet mortality, my sentence, and be earth in sensible! How glad would lay me down, as in my mother's lap! There I should rest, and sleep secure.

The moment comes when the great nurse, death, takes a human, the child, by the hand and quietly says, "It is time to go home. Night is coming. It is your bedtime, child of earth. Come; you're tired. Lie down at last in the quiet nursery of nature and sleep. Sleep well. The day is gone. Stars shine in the canopy of eternity."

I'm surrounded by the scene of aging. I myself am in my 70s and not getting any younger. Although I'm very healthy, and I have a lot of energy, and I still feel 50, I'm over 70 and I understand that I am preparing for later.

I think the last couple of years of life for many, many people are the same as they were 50, 60, 70 years ago. They could be really tough because of infirmity.

The world is tired, the year is old, The faded leaves are glad to die.

The great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.

The grave unites; where e'en the great find rest, And blended lie th' oppressor and th' oppressed!