Ellis Parker Butler

“ I think we should all take Noah as a model, and keep a young heart and an eager, forward-looking spirit until we are at least six hundred years two months and seventeen days old. Our forty days of glory and greatness and good service may come long after we are fifty—five hundred and fifty years after, for all we know. ”

“ Personally, I worried a great deal more about life insurance and what style of coffin I'd like when I was twenty-one than I do now. Now I carry all the life insurance I can afford, as a plain business proposition, and let it go at that. When I was twenty-one I worried about dying at some untimely age and leaving someone or other to starve to death, as per the prospectus. Well, I have become skeptical about people starving to death. ”

“ I feel young and lively, as if I were just beginning to live—"
"Slush!" said the young fellow. "You 're old. At fifty you have one foot in the grave. That stands to reason. Now be a nice old fellow and write something that will please the Neighborhood Society. Something about standing on the apex of the hill of life, looking down the farther side, and that sort of thing." So Noah did. He aimed to please. He wrote the essay and said he was now fifty and had but a few years to live, and that he did hate to think of so soon having to part from one and all. ”

“ It suggested that a man climbs up the bridge of life half his years and then goes down grade until he does n't need any more underwear, because of circumstances over which he has no control.
This bridge-of-life or hill-of-life idea, with its forty years up-hill and then forty years down-hill, is pure fake. If life were like that I would now be writing a sadly introspective farewell ode, telling how I had reached the apex of life's hill and now saw before me the long slope down into the valley, toward the river all must cross. ”

“ Until now I have been a raw hand, stopping to adjust the harness, talking about what I meant to do, studying the guide books, getting the stiff wagon greased, laying in provisions, fussing around one way and another trying to find out where I wanted to go, and why I wanted to go there, and how to get there when I started.
At fifty a man should feel younger and stronger and more fit than he ever felt before. ”

“ For the past few years, thirty or forty of them, I have been experimenting around and trying to get my bearings and learn what life really is. I have done some pretty raw, inexperienced stuff, but it has been worth while because a young fellow has to go through the experimental stage. It takes time to decide what one really wants to do, and how he wants to do it. But when a man is fifty, with a long life ahead of him and a fair notion of what he wants to do, he begins to be hopeful.
At fifty, I feel that I am about ready to begin writing the eight or ten novels I have been wanting to write. ”

“ At fifty a man begins to live the worth-while life of a man, as distinguished from his life as a mere animal. At fifty he should have his family pretty well built up and complete, his experimental crops sown, and be ready to do his work and to enjoy his life in a hearty, unafraid, efficient manner. ”

“ Until lately I have been so busy raising a family, and getting a home, and one thing and another, that I have not had time to give proper attention to my golf. I am planning to put in thirty or forty good years improving my game. I have discovered that you cannot avoid faults in your golf unless you know what they are, and you cannot thoroughly know a golf fault until you acquire it. I think I have now acquired all the golf faults there are, and from now on I mean to have a lot of fun getting rid of them. ”

“ Probably they thought it was quite a feather in Noah's cap when one of them stopped him and asked him to write a short paper on the subject, "How it Feels to be Fifty."
"There is a chance for you to produce a wonder," the young fellow said to Noah. "Make the essay just as personal and real and funny as you possibly can. Age is one of the most interesting subjects in the world. Everybody either looks forward to being fifty or back to having been fifty. There is no subject about which human beings think more." ”

“ Most men do, I believe. Younger fellows do not even play properly. They make a sort of work of it. It is not until a man is fifty that he knows that golf and fishing and poker and pinochle are play, and that work is play, and that life itself is kind of an interesting big game, too. ”

“ I don't know why a young man should think a heavy head of hair is such an imperative necessity, when hats are so cheap, but I was haunted by a dire fear that I might grow bald while still young. I was in continual distress lest the Butler baldness might be hereditary. ”

“ I mention this death business because I am trying to imagine what a young fellow believes a man of fifty thinks of. I know some of them think we fifty-year-olders are decrepit old ruins, dwelling in the past and looking fearfully forward to an early dissolution. ”

“ I remember a lovely underwear advertisement that depicted a sort of "cradle to grave" scene, with a toddling youngster at one end of the bridge of life and an aged man at the other end, and men of various progressive underwear ages scattered between. They were all arrayed in nice comfy underwear, and the bridge over which they were ambling was highest in the middle. ”

“ Without checking up the items carefully, and without claiming that some things done by the youngsters are not worth keeping, I venture to say the world would be surprised to find how much of its best in literature, art, the drama, mechanical inventions and so on would remain if everything done by men and women under fifty were eliminated. ”