old Quotes

“Of these older people many wear clothing reminiscent in some detail of home – an embroidered waistcoat or stomacher, or a gaily colored handkerchief, or a coat with large cuffs and fancy buttons. All these things are carefully avoided by the young, most of whom have learned to speak English and to affect the latest style of clothing. The girls wear ready-made dresses or shirt waists, and some of them look quite pretty. Some of the young men you would take to be Americans, of the type of clerks, but for the fact that they wear their hats in the room.”

“I’m too young to be old and too old to be young. I just don’t fit anywhere.”

One day you’re young and the next day your bosoms and your chin drops and you’re wearing a rubber girdle. But you don’t know you’re old.

“There were hardened criminals and innocent men too poor to give bail; old men, and boys literally not yet in their teens. They were the drainage of the great festering ulcer of society […] Into this wild-beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.”

“Old Pops and I have got four good legs between us...Maybe that’s enough.”

″ ‘I want you to be old. Ten years older. Twenty years older!’ What she meant was: I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.”

“As a girl, Sophie was scared of all dogs. Even as an old woman, she was quite alarmed by the two rows of white fangs in the creature’s open jaws. But she said to herself, ‘The way I am now, it’s scarcely worth worrying about,’ and felt in her sewing pocket for her scissors. She reached into the hedge with the scissors and sawed away at the rope round the dog’s neck.”

“I don’t want to be immortal if it mean living forever, cause then everybody else just die and get old in front of you...But maybe I’ll come back as some HeLa cells like my mother, that way we can do good together out there in the world.”

“I scotch to the edge of my seat and reach for my walker. By my estimation, I’m only eighteen feet from freedom. Well, there’s an entire city block to traverse after that, but if I hoof it I bet I can catch the last few acts. […] I may be in my nineties, but who says I’m helpless?”

“Even in your twenties you know how old you are. I’m twenty-three, you say, or maybe twenty-seven. But then in your thirties something strange starts to happen. It’s a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I’m – you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you’re not. You’re thirty-five. And then you’re bothered, because you wonder if this is the beginning of the end. It is, of course, but it’s decades before you admit it.”

“The light was too bad now for Shasta to see much of the cat except that it was very big and very solemn. It looked as if it might have lived for long, long years among the Tombs, alone. It’s eyes made you think it knew secrets it would not tell.”

“There were maples and oaks to the west, and a hemlock forest to the right that pulled me right across the sweet grasses, into it. Never, never have I seen such trees. They were giants--old, old giants. They must have begun when the world began.”

“I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise.”

“Someone who had just found an old key did not require a new one.”

“An honest farmer had once an ass that had been a faithful servant to him a great many years, but was now growing old and every day more and more unfit for work.”

“Even if you are aware that you may be struck down today and are firmly resolved to an inevitable death, if you are slain with an unseemly appearance, you will show your lack of previous resolve, will be despised by your enemy, and will appear unclean. For this reason it is said that both old and young should take care of their appearance.”

“But merely being tradition does not make something worthy, Kadash. We can’t just assume that because something is old it is right.”

“Trees and bushes grow over concrete, reclaiming little pockets and corners, but even more have been cleared away. Shattered glass crunches under my feet and clouds of dust drift in the wind, but somehow this place, the picture of neglect, doesn’t feel abandoned. I know this place from the histories, from the books and old maps.”

“That’s the duty of the old . . . to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.”

“Every man should lose a battle in his youth, so he does not lose a war when he is old.”

“I could tell you a scary story to get your teeth chattering, Something about a really old man, sitting in a squeaky rocking chair, pointing at you.”

“Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.”

“It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bride in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.”

“In the old days dogs in our town roamed freely. But the old ways changed.”

“It don’t matter how young you are or how old you get or how brittle your bones are or how leaky your gray cells, you are still going to flat like a happy ending.”

“Nothing else for it. Knock it down and start again.”

“When you are very old and gone childish-small again, with childish ways and childish yens and, in need of feeding, make a wish for the old teacher nurse, the dumb yet wise companion, send for me. I will come back. We shall inhabit the nursery again, never fear.”

“Then he saw a car. Could that old thing be his mother? No it could not.”

″ But the Rusty Old Engine sighed: ‘I am so tired. I must rest my weary wheels. I cannot pull even so little a train as yours over the mountain. I can not. I can not. I can not.’ ”

“The fourth person entering room 215 may have known he was being watched, but he did not care. He was Matt, sixty if he was a day, who at the moment was the bellboy.”

“He took off his only robe, which was old and tattered. “Here, he said, “Please take this.”

″‘But this big old hotel is positively spooky,’ Mrs. Gridley made one last protest. ‘It is probably full of mice.‘”

“Besides, he doesn’t look new. He’s lost the button to one of his shoulder straps.”

“When I am come to mine own again, I will always honor little children, remembering how that these trusted me and believed me in my time of trouble; whilst they that were older, and thought themselves wiser, mocked at me and held me for a liar.”

“With a little old driver so lively and quick, I knew in a moment he must be St. Nick.”

“Rebecca held out her arms and the old aunt crept into them feebly, as she did on that day when she opened the grave of her buried love and showed the dead face, just for an instant, to a child. Warmth and strength and life flowed into the aged frame from the young one.”

“A wonderful something that happens each year to the horns of all moose and the horns of all deer. Today was the day, Thidwick happened to know... that OLD horns come off so that NEW ones can grow!”

“Harry found an old box all grey with dust. He lifted the lid... dinosaurs!”

“He’s about fifty for a start, and he’s one of these old dudes that wear cool gear and try to act young and it doesn’t work because they’ve got grey hair and fat bellies and they just make themselves pathetic.”

“He’s let things beat him, Roy Luther has. The land, Kiser Pease, the poverty. Now he’s old and sick and ready to die and when he does, this is what we’ll inherit - his defeat and all that goes with it.”

“There was a great outcryin. The bent back straightened up. Old and young who were called slaves and could fly joined hands.”

“The quicker you let go of old cheese, the sooner you find new cheese.”

″‘That robber baby had better come soon,’ he said, ‘I’m old and rickety, and my robbing days will soon be over. It would be fine to see a new robber chief here before I’m finished.‘”

“The really unreal thing was that she didn’t care in the least what they thought of her. She felt a hundred years older and wiser than this love-mad rabble in her class.”

“Ah! well a-day! what evil looks Had I from old and young! Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung.”

“Why must the young die and the old wrecks go on living? Why do little children die? I shall never, never forgive God for that, do you hear?”

“Once there was a soft brown toy called Dogger. One of his ears pointed upwards and the other flopped over. His fur was worn in places because he was quite old.”

“They were all enamoured with the idea of progress and believed that whatever was new must be superior to what was old.”

“The stories are old and fluid, as old as humankind. They’re somehow familiar, as if she were born knowing them.”

“That is not English, Will. And when we speak to one another, you and I, we do not use English. We use the Old Speech. We were born with it in our tongues. You think you are speaking English now, because your common sense tells you it is the only language you understand, but if your family were to hear you they would hear only gibberish. The same with that book.”

“At the foot of an old, old wharf lived the cutest little tugboat you ever saw. His name was Little Toot. Blow hard as he could, the only sound that came out of his whistle was a small, merry toot-toot-toot”

“People say that you always have to tell the truth. But they do not mean this because you are not allowed to tell old people that they are old and you ‘re not allowed to tell people if they smell funny or if a grown-up has made a fart. And you are not allowed to say, ‘I don’t like you,’ unless that person has been horrible to you.”

″ Mrs. Bird smiled. ‘I used to hate it,’ she said. ‘But a mother bird can change her mind. You see there’s no nest like an old nest for a brand new bird!’ ”

“At last the people all came flocking, shouting in the great Town Hall: ‘Our Council’s attitude is shocking! High you sit and far you’ll fall. To think we buy fine gowns of ermine for dolts who can’t or won’t determine how to rid us of our vermin! You’re old and fat and still expect your furry robes to buy respect! Well, wake up! Give your brains a racking! Find the remedy we’re lacking or, sure as fate, we’ll send you packing!’ ”

“Time indeed did seem to stand still in and all about the old house, as if it and the people who inhabited it had got so old that they could not get any older, and had outlived the possibility of change.”

“Sounder might come home again. But you must learn to lose, child. The Lord teaches the old to lose. The young don’t know how to learn it. Some people is born to keep. Some is born to lose. We was born to lose, I reckon….”

“Stig did not seem much bigger than himself, but he looked very strong and his hands looked cleverer than his face. But how old was he? Ten? Twenty? A Hundred? A Thousand?”

“I grow old but I can still count the tally of my ten fingers. Two grandsons there are at the hearth fire; but a grandson at the hearth fire is not a grandson among the spear-warriors of the Tribe.”

“The thought of the old lady, carefully preparing for her solitary slumbers, was too much for Sylvia, and tears began to run silently down her cheeks...”

“But the true lover of an ancient and honorable breed would have recognized the blood and bone of this elderly and rather battered body; would have known that in his prime this had been a magnificent specimen of compact sinew and muscle, bred to fight and endure; and would have loved him for his curious mixture of wicked, unyielding fighter yet devoted and docile family pet, and above all for the irrepressible air of sly merriment which beamed in his little slant eyes.”

“He didn’t remember this street, and what is more, he hadn’t known there were any old houses in new little Radcliff-on-the-sea. ‘But then,’ he told himself sensibly, ‘I don’t know everything!‘”

“The little wooden horse knew that he was not so handsome now as in those days. The paint had worn off his red saddle; his blue stripes were scratched and bare; his four green wheels had travelled so far they were nearly worn out; but he hoped that the little girl would not notice these things.”

″‘How old are you?’ asked Susan. ‘All manner of ages,’ replied the scarecrow. ‘My face is one age, and my feet are another, and my arms are the oldest of all.‘”

“Daddy bought him out of kindness. He’s been half starved and he’s all over horse bites. He simply won’t go. He can’t jump either.”

“But when people get old, they don’t like change. And probably he put up with things rather than move.”

“To Baby Oh, what shall my blue eyes go see? Shall it be pretty Quack-Quack to-day? Or the Peacock upon the Yew Tree? Or the dear little white Lambs at play? Say Baby. For Baby is such a young Petsy, And Baby is such a sweet Dear. And Baby is growing quite old now- She’s just getting on for a year.”

“I love the way library books smell: more important than regular books, a grand olden-days smell, like the steps of a marble palace, or a senator.”

I am getting old, and I do not love wild elephants.