Old age
Trollope well understood the changes that old age wrought on people, and allowed his characters to change accordingly.
As a man grows old he wants amusement, more even than when he is young; and then it becomes so difficult to find amusement.
The Earl had been a man quite capable of making himself disagreeable ... Of all of our capabilities this is the one which clings longest to us.
A man does, in truth, remember that which it interests him to remember; and when we hear that memory has gone as age has come on, we should understand that the capacity for interest in the matter has perished. A man will be generally very old and feeble before he forgets how much money he has in the funds.
A man's ideas of generosity change as he advances in age.
The juices of life had been pressed out of him; his thoughts were all of his cares and never of his hopes.
Now I stretch out my hand, and from the further shore I bid adieu to all who have cared to read any among the many words that I have written.
'Chignon' was a word which she had never been heard to pronounce. She would talk of 'those bandboxes which the sluts wear behind their noddles;' for Miss Stanbury allowed herself the use of much strong language
It is sad for a man to feel, when he knows that he is fast going down the hill of life ... [that] by some unconscious and unlucky leap he has passed from the unripeness of youth to the decay of age, without even knowing what it was to be in his prime.
My young friend! thou art ignorant in this - as in most other things ... that old man's heart is as soft as thine, if thou couldst but read it. The body dries up and withers away, and the bones grow old; the brain, too, becomes decrepit ... But the heart that is tender once remains tender to the last.
Years do not make a man old gradually and at an even pace. Look through the world and see if this is not so always, except in those rare cases in which the human being lives and dies without joys and without sorrows, like a vegetable. A man shall be possessed of florid youthful blooming health till, it matters not what age. Thirty - forty - fifty, then comes some nipping frost, some period of agony, that robs the fibres of the body of their succulence, and the hale and hearty man is counted among the old.
