The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down. – T.S. Eliot, quoted in Time, 23 October 1950
Growing old is not a gradual decline, but a series of drops, full of sorrow, from one ledge to another below it. But when we pick ourselves up we find our bones are, after all, not broken; while level enough and not unpleasing is the new terrace which lies unexplored before us. – Logan Pearsall Smith, “Age and Death,” Afterthoughts, 1931

