Authors:
  • So they pass away: friends, kindred, the dearest-loved, grown people, aged, infants. As we go on the down-hill journey, the mile-stones are grave-stones, and on each more and more names are written; unless haply you live beyond man's common age, when friends have dropped off, and, tottering, and feeble, and unpitied, you reach the terminus alone.

    William Makepeace Thackeray (1869). “Miscellanies: The four Georges. The English humorists. Roundabout papers”, p.310