Quotes: Old Age.

Old Age 501 "There is hardly a more difficult exercise of fancy, than, while gazing at a figure of melancholy age, to re-create its youth." Hawthorne: "Edward Fane's Rosebud." The hardest thing in the world is to look at decrepit old people and reconstruct the way they looked when they were young.

Old Age 501 "It is easier to conceive that such gloomy phantoms were sent into the world as withered and decrepit as we behold them now, with sympathies only for pain and grief, to watch at death beds and weep at funerals. Hawthorne:" "Edward Fane's Rosebud." We think that old people were always that way.