W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

Old age is a shipwreck.

We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book.

There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.

Let's put it this way: there wouldn't be much point in me attending a high-school reunion now because there wouldn't be anybody there. We'd struggle to raise a quorum.

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

One time, I was young. I was skinny. I was elegant. Getting old is terrible.

What makes old age so sad is not that our joys but our hopes cease.

They say the first thing to go is your legs, then it's your reflexes, then it's your friends.

When he is forsaken, Withered and shaken, What can an old man do but die?

I do not myself find it agreeable to be 90, and I cannot imagine why it should seem so to other people. It is not that you have any fears about your own death, it is that your upholstery is already dead around you.

The great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.

Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

I see no comfort in outliving one's friends, and remaining a mere monument of the times which are past.

There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.

I had many decades of me time and now I just don't have that anymore. There are days when I rail against it.

When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity - but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

Sometimes I wake up, I feel like, I'm like 80-years-old.

Old age: I fall asleep during the funerals of my friends.

I thoroughly object to getting old. If you could let me be 16 again, I'd give you everything I've got and everything I'll ever have.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.

What is the worst of woes that wait on age? What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each loved one blotted from life's page, And be alone on earth, as I am now.