Richard Rodriguez Quotes

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

Youth condemns; maturity condones.

Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age; and if you understand that old age has wisdom for its food, you will so conduct yourself in youth that your old age will not lack for nourishment.

It would be a good thing if young people were wise and old people were strong, but God has arranged things better.

To make good use of life, one should have in youth the experience of advanced years, and in old age the vigor of youth.

She had to live in this bright, red gabled house with the nurse until it was time for her to die... I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people. Children we understand, their fears and hopes and make-believe.

Do you believe in God? Perhaps you aren't old enough. The reason old people believe in God is because they've given up believing in anything else, and one can't exist without faith in something.... God is a sort of burglar. As a young man you knock him down; as an old man, you try to conciliate him because he may knock you down. Moral: don't grow old.

As for old age, embrace and love it. It abounds with pleasure if you know how to use it. The gradually declining years are among the sweetest in a man's life, and I maintain that, even when they have reached the extreme limit, they have their pleasure still.

Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.

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

The evening of life brings with it its lamps.

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

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.

Growing old-it's not nice, but it's interesting.

Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age

It is bad enough to see young fools, but worse to see old fools.

Throw yourself into the convulsions of the world. I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't believe progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it, to look at it, to witness it. Try and get it. Seize the moment.

There are three things to beware of through life: when a man is young, let him beware of his appetites; when he is middle-aged, of his passions; and when old, of covetousness, especially.

To be young is to live in the hope of escaping youth; to be old, in the despair of having succeeded.

A youth without fire is followed by an old age without experience.

Age - That period of life in which we compound for the vices that remain by reviling those we have no longer the vigor to commit.

For me, I say no, but then I am old, and life, with his sunshine, his fair places, his song of birds, his music and his love, lie far behind. You others are young. Some have seen sorrow, but there are fair days yet in store. What say you?

If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.

When you've lived as long as I have, nothing much surprises you.