How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
That is his temperament. His temperament is not going to change, he is too old for that. His temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body. (1.8)
Even though he's only 52 – not exactly an old man just yet – David sees himself as a man whose stubbornness is a product of his age.
Quote #2
Then one day it all ended. Without warning his powers fled. Glances that would once have responded to his slid over, past, through him. Overnight he became a ghost. If he wanted a woman he had to learn to pursue her; often, in one way or another, to buy her. (1.36)
For some men, getting old means dying your hair and buying a fast car. For David, getting older means trying hard to find women. Unfortunately, he can tell he doesn't have the same power over them as he used to. Now he has to try to pursue them himself (boo hoo) or pay prostitutes for sex.
Quote #3
He has a shrewd idea of how prostitutes speak among themselves about the men who frequent them, the older men in particular. They tell stories, they laugh, but they shudder too, as one shudders at a cockroach in a washbasin in the middle of the night. Soon, daintily, maliciously, he will be shuddered over. It is a fate he cannot escape. (1.40)
We're not really sure how David knows that this is how prostitutes talk to each other – maybe one of the prostitutes he has visited told him? Regardless, David knows that he's getting a little old for this game; at some point he'll stop being special because he's suave and handsome, and will instead be wrinkly and gray just like anyone else. This, of course, bums him out.
Quote #4
Do the young still fall in love, or is that mechanism obsolete by now, unnecessary, quaint, like steam locomotion? He is out of touch, out of date. Falling in love could have fallen out of fashion and come back again half a dozen times for all he knows. (2.27)
Clearly, David has been out of the game for a while.
Quote #5
"After a certain age, all affairs are serious. Like heart attacks." (5.62)
Here, David responds to his lawyer's question about whether or not his relationship is serious. Nice play on the heart imagery here, David. You can see love as a heart attack, since the heart is supposedly the seat of desire and emotion, but heart attacks are also not uncommon afflictions among the aging and elderly.
Quote #6
Perhaps it is the right of the young to be protected from the sight of their elders in the throes of passion. That is what whores are for, after all: to put up with the ecstasies of the unlovely. (5.82)
David's really knocking himself down here. Elderly and unlovely? Cry us a river, man.
Quote #7
He sighs again. How brief the summer, before the autumn and then the winter! (10.62)
Here, David ever-so-poetically bemoans the fact that his youth is over and that middle and old age are creeping up on him.
Quote #8
He has a sense that, inside him, a vital organ has been bruised, abused—perhaps even his heart. For the first time he has a taste of what it will be like to be an old man, tired to the bone, without hopes, without desires, indifferent to the future. (13.11)
After the attack, David and Lucy spend a lot of time moping around the house. Here, he thinks about how, like an old person, he doesn't have anything to look forward to. This says really depressing things about what David and Lucy are going through, but we also can't help thinking, dang that says sad things about the experience of old people, too!
Quote #9
As for her, she cannot hide from him what is passing through her mind: so this is the man my sister has been naked with! So this is the man she has done it with! This old man! (19.74)
OK, put yourself in Desiree's shoes. You find out your sister has had sex with a professor. Then you meet him and find him to be a little older and grayer than the guy you were picturing. Ew, you think as you make a face. Except that professor is at your place and sees you do it. Now put yourself in David's shoes. Ouch.
Quote #10
Byron, in the new version, is long dead; Teresa's sole remaining claim to immortality, and the solace of her lonely nights, is the chestful of letters and memorabilia she keeps under her bed, what she calls her reliquie, which her grand-nieces are meant to open after her death and peruse with awe. Is this the heroine he has been seeking all the time? Will an older Teresa engage his heart as his heart is now? (20.51-52)
While he originally intended to write his opera about the middle-aged-but-foxy Byron and his hot affair with a younger woman (projecting much, David?), David changes his mind and writes it about the woman as she ages. This twist takes David by surprise, and it also surprises us to some extent. Is it possible that David is maturing and seeking out women his own age? For more on what's going on with this whole Byron opera, check out "Symbolism."
Quote #11
He sighs. The young in one another's arms heedless, engrossed in the sensual music. No country, this, for old men. He seems to be spending a lot of time sighing. Regret: a regrettable note on which to go out. (21.44)
This moment comes straight out of a poem by William Butler Yeats called "Sailing to Byzantium." The poem begins, "That is no country for old men." The speaker thinks about how "that" country – the one he's sailing away from – is full of young people in love, lying in one another's arms, and he cannot take part in it. This is yet another instance where David realizes he's getting on in years and can't keep going on the way he used to. He has to move on, but it bums him out.
Quote #12
A grandfather. A Joseph. Who would have thought it! What pretty girl can he expect to be wooed into bed with a grandfather? (24.41)
All we're going to say is, we sure hope our grandparents didn't feel that way when they found out we were going to be born. David refers to himself as a "Joseph," referring to the husband of the Virgin Mary who never slept with her but stayed on as a faithful (albeit celibate) companion until his death. That's a nice way of saying "no sex for old people."