My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety-seven now, and we don’t know where the hell she is.

 –Ellen DeGeneres

 

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

 –Winston Churchill

 

I know a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex, and rich food. He was healthy right up to the day he killed himself.

– Johnny Carson

 

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

 –Mark Twain

 

It’s only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth – and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up – that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.

 –Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

You learn something new every day. Actually, you learn something old every day. Just because you just learned it, doesn’t mean it’s new.

–George Carlin

Maybe you’re right, boss. It all depends on the way you look at it… Look, one day I had gone to a little village. An old grandfather of 90 was busy planting an almond tree. “What, grandad!” I exclaimed. “Planting an almond tree?” And he, bent as he was, turned round and said, “My son, I carry on as if I should never die.” I replied, “And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.” Which of us was right, boss?

 –Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

 

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.

 –Oscar Wilde

Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon it in the next. The shortest is old age because we shall never be able to think back on it.

 –Cesare Pavese

Man reaches the highest point of lovableness at 12 to 17 – to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of 70 to 90.

 –Isak Dinesen

When you become senile, you won’t know it.

 –Bill Cosby

I am perhaps the oldest musician in the world. I am an old man but in many senses a very young man. And this is what I want you to be, young, young, all your life, and to say things to the world that are true.

–Pablo Casals (the summer before his death at age 96)

Our lives are littered with mid-course corrections. A full half of us divorced. Many of the women have had career paths that look like games of Chutes and Ladders. We have changed directions and priorities again and again, But our “mistakes” become crucial parts, sometimes the best parts, of the lives we have made.

–Ellen Goodman

With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.

 –James Thurber

No man is ever old enough to know better.

–Holbrook Jackson

(Each week this column features quotations gleaned from the readings and experiences of our editors, reporters, readers, and friends. All are invited to submit quotations for inclusion here. They may be sent to Gleanings, c/o The Newtown Bee, 5 Church Hill Road, Newtown, CT 06470 or emailed to editor@thebee.com.)