Aging & Wisdom Quote by Don Marquis

Marquis makes aging sound like a participation trophy: show up, keep breathing, and congratulations, you qualify. The jab lands because it deflates a culture that treats age as either a badge of honor or a horror show. By calling it "not a particularly interesting subject", he isn’t denying the realities of time, decline, and survival; he’s mocking the self-mythology we build around them. Getting old, he insists, isn’t an achievement. It’s an accident of endurance.

The second line is the knife twist: "Anyone can get old". It punctures the romantic idea that age automatically confers wisdom, virtue, or narrative depth. Marquis, a journalist with a satirist’s ear for pretension, is warning us not to confuse chronology with character. If you want a story worth telling, age is just the setting, not the plot.

There’s also a darker subtext hiding in the breeziness. "All you have to do is live long enough" quietly acknowledges that not everyone does. Aging is framed as inevitable, but the irony is that it’s also contingent: on health, money, luck, and social conditions. In early 20th-century America, when modern longevity was expanding but unevenly distributed, that tension would have been visible in everyday life. Marquis’s wit works because it’s both dismissive and unsettling: it treats old age as ordinary, then reminds you the privilege is surviving to complain about it.