resilience in old age Quotes

There is a quiet repose and steadiness about the happiness of age, if the life has been well spent. Its feebleness is not painful. The nervous system has lost its acuteness. But, in mature years we feel that a burn, a scald, a cut, is more tolerable than it was in the sensitive period of youth.

In youth, grief comes with a rush and overflow, but it dries up, too, like the torrent. In the winter of life it remains a miserable pool, resisting all evaporation.

She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing.

They think old people are lame. But they're not. They're awesome, & I know exactly why I think so. It's because they've lived entire lifetimes. Loved. Laughed. Surrendered. Stumbled. Weathered, beaten, still they don't crumble, not even as they inch toward death.

The silver-leaved birch retains in its old age a soft bark; there are some such men.

Growing old is, of all things we experience, that which takes the most courage, and at a time when we have the least resources, especially with which to meet frustration.

It will not hurt me when I am old, A running tide where moonlight burned Will not sting me like silver snakes;The years will make me sad and cold, It is the happy heart that breaks.