Loss of Vitality Quotes

Something’s died in me,” she goes. “It took a long time for it to do it, but it’s dead. You’ve killed something, just like you’d took an axe to it. Everything is dirt now.

My joints hurt. I'm slower. But I remember what it was like to run and play with the boys. I want to be one of the boys.

I believe that I am past my prime. I had reckoned on my prime lasting till I was at least fifty.

Years steal fire from the mind as vigor from the limb; and life's enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim.

No one looks forward to getting old do they?

Age is a terrible thief. Just when you're getting the hang of life, it knocks your legs out from under you and stoops your back. It makes you ache and muddies your head and silently spreads cancer throughout your spouse.

I see people allowing their lives to diminish, to become shallow, so they can't enjoy the deep wells of experience. Maybe it's always been this way, when the heart tends to shut down. If only the heart shut down and there were no repercussions, it would be O.K., but when the heart shuts down, the whole system goes into a kind of despair that is intolerable.

I feel like a 16-year-old trapped inside a dead woman's body.

Lord save us all from old age and broken health and a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.

Self-loathing is the silent hemorrhaging of the soul. You don't feel or see the life force fleeing until it's not longer there, and then, of course, it's too late.

My life had come to a sudden stop. I was able to breathe, to eat, to drink, to sleep. I could not, indeed help doing so; but there was no real life in me.

...my boredom might be described as a malady affecting external objects and consisting of a withering process; an almost instantaneous loss of vitality--just as though one saw a flower change in a few seconds from a bud to decay and dust.

The human species has all but lost its heart; we gave it up for the illusionary fruits of the material world. But a life without heart is a life without life force. The psyche, as well as the body, needs both heart and brain in order to survive. Like Chinese women who bound their feet and the could no longer walk freely, we have bound our hearts, and thus stunted our growth as moral beings.

I can't do a million things anymore like I could when I was younger.

But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float towards his end. He sees it quite clearly, and it fills him with (the word will not go away) despair. The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.

Never underestimate the human capacity for wishful thinking and willful blindness,' said Miles. Such as a whole society of people who became so wrapped up in avoiding death, they forgot to be alive?

I can still chase women, only downhill

Old age is the supreme evil, for it deprives man of all pleasures while allowing his appetites to remain, and it brings with it every possible sorrow. Yet men fear death and desire old age.

That sun, that light had faded, and she had faded with them. Now she was as grey as the season itself.

The bloom fell off my branches and joy did cast off its flower

I've aged. 'Patagonia' has robbed me of a decade of my life.

Age does take it out of you, and I haven't the energy I had before. Sometimes I have breakfast and sit in this chair, and I wake up and it is lunchtime. In the past, the idea of sleeping through a morning would have horrified me, but you have to accept the limitations that old age imposes on you.

Socialised humanity represses nature and degrades human nature; it takes life and waters it down - probably to control it - diluting existence with water that is lukewarm, sweet and murky.

Old age diminishes our strength; it takes away our pleasures one after the other; it withers the soul as well as the body; it renders adventure and friendship difficult; and finally it is shadowed by thoughts of death.