Retirement Transition Quotes

It [retirement] was absolutely boring. You can't go and say, 'I'm retired now. That's it!' It won't take long and you're really gone for good and someone throws the last shovel of dirt on a coffin with your name on it. That's the moment you're really retiring - when you die.

When some people retire, it's going to be mighty hard to be able to tell the difference.

The thing you want to be able to do is to be well-liked when you retire. I know right now I'm not close to retiring, and I'm not close to being liked.

I always likened retirement to falling off a cliff, and then you have to kind of brush yourself off.

Nothing is more usual than the sight of old people who yearn for retirement: and nothing is so rare than those who have retired and do not regret it.

The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.

In retirement, the passage of time seems accelerated. Nothing warns us of its flight. It is a wave which never murmurs, because there is no obstacle to its flow.

Two weeks is about the ideal length of time to retire.

Retirement revives the sorrow of parting, the feeling of abandonment, solitude and uselessness that is caused by the loss of some beloved person.

Retiring was hard. I'd spent 15 years doing something I loved, but when you get older everything seems to go. When I started spending too long with the physio and the doctor, I knew it was time to call it a day. But I had no preparation for being retired and I didn't know what to do.

When I retired, I felt that I lived more in that year than I had the previous 27 years of my life.

Retiring is one thing. Being retired is something else altogether.

At retirement, switching from "I must" to "I want" leaves me puzzled and uneasy.

Retirement wasn't a reward at the end of a well-run career ... it was a void surrounded by endless dull hours, haunted by memories of work.

The rare, delicate flavor of a life after retiring in one's sixties, whatever one has "retired" from, the pleasure I experienced beyond my job at Columbia, is a gift of life in the last decades. but it is not easily learned. . . . But sometimes, the only way to live is to get out, or at least seriously to contemplate getting out, doing the impossible,flinging the conventional tea.

I think you have to keep going. Otherwise, you know these fellas that say, "Boy I can't wait to retire. Boy, I'm going to be 65 years old, and I'm retiring and I'm quitting and that's it." Well, two weeks later they're saying to themselves, "What the hell am I gonna do?" And first thing you know they find themselves in a wheelchair or in a rocking chair going back and forth, back and forth, and that's the end of it. And suddenly you're dead.

When you get to 60, the word "retirement" comes in on every conversation.

The happiest people I know are the ones that are still working. The saddest are the ones who are retired. Very few performers retire on their own. It's usually because no one wants them. Six years ago Sinatra announced his retirement. He's still working.

What is the point of working all your life and then stopping?

I have seen countless colleagues struggle to come to terms with retirement. I learned a lot from Richard Dunwoody when he was riding, and I completely understand why he took off and undertook what most people consider mad challenges.

I have known not a few men who, after reaching the summits of business success, found themselves miserable on attaining retirement age. They were so exclusively engrossed in their day-to-day affairs that they had no time for friend-making.... They may flatter themselves that their unrelaxing concentration on business constitutes patriotism of the highest order. They may tell themselves that the existing emergency will pass, and that they can then adopt different, more sociable, more friendly habits. [But] such a day is little likely to come for such individuals.

I have known not a few men who, after reaching the summits of business success, found themselves miserable on attaining retirement age. They were so exclusively engrossed in their day to day affairs that they had no time for friend making.

Considering retirement is like skirting with the reality of what's to come, and I think that's why so many athletes decide to do more introspection at that point.

Men and women approaching retirement age should be recycled for public service work, and their companies should foot the bill. We can no longer afford to scrap-pile people.

A short retirement urges a sweet return.