Aging & Wisdom Quote by James Lee Burke

Aging, in Burke's telling, isn't a slow march toward diminishment; it's a legal loophole out of performance. The line lands because it flips the usual script: youth is supposed to be freedom, age the tightening of options. Burke argues the opposite. The "great advantage" is not wisdom or serenity but permission - permission to disappoint people without losing your standing.

The syntax does a lot of work. "You can say" repeats like a mantra of newly granted rights, and the blunt triad - "I don't want to, I don't care" - is deliberately childish in its simplicity. Then he pushes it into comedy with "temper tantrums", a phrase that evokes toddlers on supermarket floors. It's funny because it's slightly indecent: the older person gets to reclaim the messiness adults are trained to suppress. The punchline, "and nobody minds", is the twist of the knife. Society infantilizes the elderly, yes, but it also lowers its demands. Burke is describing a bargain: lose some status, gain some latitude.

Context matters with Burke. His fiction is full of men carrying moral damage, fatigue, and memory like weather in the bones. This quote reads as hard-earned gallows humor from someone who has watched obligation chew through people. The subtext isn't "be rude when you're old". It's: stop auditioning. Age becomes a social alibi, and he treats that alibi as liberation.