“When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.”

—  Don DeLillo , book White Noise

White Noise (1984)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four ye…" by Don DeLillo?
Don DeLillo photo
Don DeLillo 101
American novelist, playwright and essayist 1936

Related quotes

Steven Wright photo
Jair Bolsonaro photo

“Look, working nine, ten years old at the farm, I was not harmed at all. When a nine-year-old, ten-year-old goes to work somewhere, it's full of people there. Now, when I'm smoking a crack pipe, nobody says anything. [...] But I want to say that I, my older brother, a sister of mine, a little younger, at that age, eight, nine, ten, twelve years, worked on the farm.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

In a live social media broadcast on 4 July 2019, defending child labor. Bolsonaro Defends Child Labor https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/brazil/2019/07/bolsonaro-defends-child-labor.shtml. Folha de S.Paulo (5 July 2019).
2019

James Thurber photo

“I’m 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I’d only be 48. That’s the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

Quoted from an an interview with Glenna Syse in Time Magazine (New York, 15 August 1960); Times editors corrected Thurber's arithmetic
Letters and interviews

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. photo

“Old age is always fifteen years older than I am.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) United States Supreme Court justice

Actually by financier Bernard Baruch.
Misattributed

Jayant Narlikar photo
Bernard Baruch photo

“To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am.”

Bernard Baruch (1870–1965) American businessman

On his 85th birthday, as quoted in The Observer [London] (21 August 1955)

Saki photo
Fernando Alonso photo
Lionel Messi photo
Douglas Coupland photo

Related topics