Myrtle Reed Quotes

Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey's end.

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

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.

For my eightieth year warns me to pack up my baggage before I leave life.

I used to not want to die in any way but in my sleep when I was a young man. I'd like to die awake now, if possible, with people around me who love me.

We usually say of ancient persons, that they have already one foot in the grave, and the rest of their life is nothing else but the bringing of these feet together.

I love things on the decline because that's really the natural progression of our lives. We're born, we're feisty for the first couple of years, and then the inevitable decline begins.

Friendship is the shadow of the evening, which increases with the setting sun of life.

Not even old age knows how to love death.

My next book's title is going to be, 'I Have One Foot in the Grave and Another on a Banana Peel.'

As I sit here writing and look across the room at Janice, I keep thinking of the most heartbreaking question: which of us will go first?

An old mans staffe is the rapper of deaths doore.

I venerate old age; and I love not the man who can look without emotion upon the sunset of life, when the dusk of evening begins to gather over the watery eye, and the shadows of twilight grow broader and deeper upon the understanding.

To my ninth decade I have totter'd on, And no soft arm bends now my steps to steady; She, who once led me where she would, is gone, So when he calls me, Death shall find me ready.

The story of my recent life.' I like that phrase. It makes more sense than 'the story of my life', because we get so many lives between birth and death. A life to be a child. A life to come of age. A life to wander, to settle, to fall in love, to parent, to test our promise, to realize our mortality- and in some lucky cases, to do something after that realization.

And may we find when ended is the page, Death but a tavern on our pilgrimage.

Death is the only physician, the shadow of his valley the only journeying that will cure us of age and the gathering fatigue of years.

Life means opportunity, and the thing men call death is the last wonderful, beautiful adventure.

We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.

I've never made love to a ghost but I have made love to men who are a few years away from becoming a ghost.

In this way they went on, and on, and on-in the language of the story-books-until at last the village lights appeared before them, and the church spire cast a long reflection on the graveyard grass; as if it were a dial (alas, the truest in the world!) marking, whatever light shone out of Heaven, the flight of days and weeks and years, by some new shadow on that solemn ground.

I have need of a friend. There is one and only one who will give the air from his failing lungs for my body's mend. And that one is my love.

Life is slippery. We all need a loving hand to hold onto.

All Kings, and all their favorites, All glory of honors, beauties, wits, The sun itself, which makes times, as they pass, Is elder by a year, now, than it was When thou and I first one another saw: All other things, to their destruction draw, Only our love hath no decay; This, no tomorrow hash, nor yesterday, Running, it never runs from us away, But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.