William Butler Yeats Quotes

Observation is an old man's memory.

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

So here I sit in the early candle-light of old age-I and my book-casting backward glances over out travel'd road.

Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.

And if I say to you that I am glad of everything we have done together, and sorry that we will not be here together in forty years, laughing at a faded photo of you impersonating a lion, it having withered well, you less so, as we stand fabulously old, in a city that understands what spirit it takes to be old, to be beautiful, to be much looked at, to be itself, to be never quite caught, to have a past, to be content, to have seen much, to have remained, to have continued...

I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago, and of people who will see a world that I shall never know.

Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.

I'm a lot older than I was when I was 30, which is kind of hard to believe.

I was born in 1949 - which seems like a long time ago... Actually, it is a long time ago, when I think about it.

When you reach 95, after you get over your surprise, you start looking back.

When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows.

You know you're old when you've lost all your marvels.

Once, I went speeding past an old couple and smiled as I imagined their conversation: him grumbling about me and her telling him not to be such an old grouch. Then, suddenly I was in tears, thinking, 'I'll never get to be a grumpy old grandpa!'

The notion of time bothers me. You look at thirty-year-old photographs and realize how the time has passed.

I'm saving that rocker for the day when I feel as old as I really am.

This house was our dream-the gardens, the study, even the swimming pool. Even though I can't see John when I wake up in the morning, I can always feel him here with me.

I am growing old, and my future, so to speak, is already behind me.

So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows upon most of us.

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

There is something to be said for being older - and memories.

It's odd but even when I was a kid, I would write about 'old and other times' as though I had a lot of years behind me. Now I do, so there is a difference in the weight of memory.

What should we speak of When we are old as you? when we shall hear The rain and wind beat dark December? how, In this our pinching cave, shall we discourse The freezing hours away?

Every man is obsessed by the memories of his own youth.

Swift defined observation to be an old man's memory.

Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.