Tom Robbins Quotes

At the end of our lives we all ask, 'Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter?'

To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or may not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be.

I frequently hear persons in old age say how they would live, if they were to live their lives over again: Resolved, That I will live just so as I can think I shall wish I had done, supposing I live to old age.

When you're dying and your life is flashing before your eyes, you're gonna be thinking about the great things that you did, the horrible things that you did and the emotional impact that someone had on you and that you had on somebody else. Those are the things that are relevant. To have some sort of emotional impact that transcends your time, that's great. As long as you don't mess it up by being undignified when you're old.

I'm turning 58, and you get that kind of weird, old-guy feeling of you don't have an infinite number of years left and if there's anything you want to say or represent, it's time to try it.

Make every decision based on your last years of life instead of your next 10.

There are not many regrets that I have. There are a few things that I wish I'd changed in my life, but they are not so dramatic that I'd go out of my way to change them. But I go back and think about my life so far periodically in my head.

At the end of the day I'm gonna be dead one day, and what people say about me is going what I accomplished and what I did in my life and how my children are. And I don't think it's gonna be what was printed in the tabloids this year.

When you're 21 you think, "Old people sound like this. Old people think like this." I don't think my ideas about aging and about eternal life changed that much, but it became more poignant to me as I did get older and I could better imagine, as you sort of inch closer to death every day, why legacy, more than aging, becomes important to people.

Each part of life has its own pleasures. Each has its own abundant harvest, to be garnered in season. We may grow old in body, but we need never grow old in mind and spirit. No one is as old as to think he or she cannot live one more year.

A 20-year-old is never going to give death a second thought, whereas someone in their late 50s is going to think about it... I don't know, 20 times a day.

I didn't mind getting old when I was young. It's the being old now that's getting to me.

Most all of the writers I admired when I was in my teens and twenties died young. Fitzgerald lived the longest. He was 44. Dylan Thomas was 39. And then once you're approaching 40, you suddenly think, "Well, maybe I would like to live longer than Fitzgerald or Thomas."

I think you die the way you live.

As we grow older we think more and more of old persons and of old things and places. As to old persons, it seems as if we never know how much they have to tell until we are old ourselves and they have been gone twenty or thirty years. Once in a while we come upon some survivor of his or her generation that we have overlooked, and feel as if we had recovered one of the lost books of Livy or fished up the golden candlestick from the ooze of the Tiber.

The reasons that drive me to write are many and the most important are the most secret, I think. Perhaps most of all this: to put something out of death's reach.

Until today, you may not have realized that your life provides the content of your obituary. Just for today, examine your life. Think about all of the things you want to leave behind. Remember, the good thing about doing this today is that you still have time to rewrite your life's content if necessary.

I've got cheekier with age. You can get away with murder when you're 71 years old. People just think I'm a silly old fool.

Old age is not synonymous with being 'glad to die.

It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.

But years hath done this wrong, To make me write too much, and live too long.

Speeches are for the younger men who are going places. And I'm not going anyplace except six feet under the floor of that little chapel adjoining the museum and library at Abilene.

I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.

I never thought I'd be 52 years old. I don't think that anybody at 16 thinks like that.

I don't think of myself as old. Obviously I am - I have a free bus pass, I'm going to be a grandad in two months time, and my hip is giving me jip, so it's all telling me something I don't really want to hear.