Senility Quotes

Quotes tagged as "senility" Showing 1-19 of 19
Christopher Hitchens
“It is pardonable for children to yell that they believe in fairies, but it is somehow sinister when the piping note shifts from the puerile to the senile.”
Christopher Hitchens, Arguably: Selected Essays

Patrick White
“I would like to believe in the myth that we grow wiser with age. In a sense my disbelief is wisdom. Those of a middle generation, if charitable or sentimental, subscribe to the wisdom myth, while the callous see us as dispensable objects, like broken furniture or dead flowers. For the young we scarcely exist unless we are unavoidable members of the same family, farting, slobbering, perpetually mislaying teeth and bifocals.”
Patrick White, Three Uneasy Pieces

Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“Most people do not have a problem with being old. They have a problem with looking old.”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Marcus Aurelius
“We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer death, but also because the conception of things and the understanding of them cease first.”
Marcus Aurelius, The Thoughts of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Translated by George Long

Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“After a certain point, all natural bodily changes are for the worst.”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“We envy people who are extremely old because we wish to live that long, not because we want to be that old.”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Angelica Hopes
“There is no such thing as senility when it comes to envy, greed laziness, wrath and pride. It's her destructive character from childhood." ~ Angelica Hopes, If I Could Tell You”
Angelica Hopes

Stewart Stafford
“The trouble with being a rock of sense is that, eventually, you lose the sense and become the rock.”
Stewart Stafford

John Connell
“Senility is best described in the old tongue, duine le Dia, for in that phrase is a kinder, more understanding view of the condition. Its literal meaning is “a person of God,” for only the person’s maker can now understand him.”
John Connell, The Farmer's Son: Calving Season on a Family Farm

Darnell Lamont Walker
“You should be so lucky to be like me. I allow myself to be disturbed too often. I'll probably end up talking to birds in a park. But you'll probably end up with regrets.”
Darnell Lamont Walker

“Silly youth and presumptuous senility: the world remains the same as always...”
Jeff Ampolini

“Настовбурчені брови, на лобі кривуля,
хмуровоке барило, і ніс як багруля.

Щось обрезкле і тмасте, —
Якої ж я масти?

Сивий, голубе, сивий…”
Ліна Костенко, Берестечко

Ellis Peters
“Brother Reece ... had the capacious if capricious memory of the very old”
Ellis Peters, A Morbid Taste for Bones

Saul D. Alinsky
“Senility is a relinquishment of life as it is in the here and now and the taking of refuge into the security and familiarity of the past. When life becomes too confusing, too complex, too strange, too much, then you turn away.”
Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

Elie Wiesel
“I know: even the most eminent doctors are sometimes wrong. I sometimes wonder if the diagnosis is correct. I wonder if my father is suffering from amnesia or some other disease. He may know everything that's happening to him, everything said in his presence, everything going on around him and within him, and he may want to react, to respond, but he may be incapable of it. Or he may not want to. He may be disappointed in mankind. And in its language. He may reject our worn and devalued words. He may need others altogether. And as there are no others, he may be choosing to feign forgetfulness so that he can remain speechless.”
Elie Wiesel, The Forgotten

Percival Everett
“Mother was down for one of the great battery of daily naps on which she had come to rely for a semblance of stability. Her most lucid moments seemed to occur when she first awoke and after that there were any number of cracks in the surface of her world through which to fall. There was no steering her toward solid ground; she stepped where she stepped.”
Percival Everett, Erasure

Percival Everett
“How's Mother?"

"In and out." As I said it I wondered which was the bad way: in or out? Was she lost when she was in her mind or out of it?”
Percival Everett, Erasure