Mary Steenburgen Quotes

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

Whereas in America we are so fearful of mortality, we don't want to talk about it, we don't think about it, and in many ways we treat elderly people as invisible because they are a constant reminder of our own mortality. We put them away and put them in retirement homes so we don't want to deal with that.

What will I be doing in twenty years' time? I'll be dead, darling! Are you crazy?

What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death.

My audience is going to die before I do.

I'm approaching 70. Unfortunately, from the wrong direction.

Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative.

Ageing's alright, better than the alternative, which is not being here.

When I turned 50, I realized I was now going to start counting backwards in terms of the years I had left. Then I turned 60, and I just stopped counting. I don't have a fear of death, but I have an awareness that there's a time limit.

I've spent a lot of words on my own mortality.

I tend not to think about living to some grand old age. Then again, I don't think about dying, either.

Listen, I must be 110 by now. Granny is going to kick the bucket at some point.

I don't want to die an old lady.

Now that I'm older, a real source of interest is the ages of the dead, the number; the day is off to an optimistic start when the departed are all older than I.

It's a weird feeling when you know you're going to die.

I have no desire to be a centenarian. I think 90 is a great time. You've had a good innings. You have to deal with the cards that have been dealt, of course, but I don't think very old age, if you haven't got your marbles, can be very nice.

Nobody wants to get old, but nobody wants to die young either.

It's paradoxical, that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn't appeal to anyone.

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.

I had assumed that I would age with all my friends growing old around me, dying off very gradually one by one. And here was a plague that cut them off so early.

You know, I don't mind dying. The thing that pisses me off is that I won't get to be an old man. I was looking forward to that.

In your teens and twenties, death doesn't exist. In your thirties, you glance down the road occasionally. But then in your forties, it becomes a full-time job looking the other way.

This year, when I turn 65, I thought, 'So weird;' when I was a kid, people who were 65 either retired or died. I'm so nowhere near that.

Death never takes the wise man by surprise, he is always ready to go.

No one longs to live more than someone growing old.