Old English Quotes

Is that all?" asked the butler. His slightly melodic accent was nearly impossible to place. It could have been British, but it wasn't any British accent I had ever heard. The words Old English came to mind, too. As in old, old English. This, I'm certain, was a psychic hit, but I could have been wrong. Just how old Franklin was remained to be seen. "Thank you, Franklin. That will be all," said Kingsley, waving him off. The butler nodded. "If you and the lady need anything else, please do not hesitate to rouse me from a deep and satisfying sleep." "We won't, Franklin. Now, off you go! ~ J.R. Rain

Shelby looked over to see Andrew silently mouthing syllables to himself, as if he were part of an ecstatic rite. He grinned as he bit fricatives and tongued plosives. He was tasting English origins, mulling over words ripped from bronze-smelling hoards. Words that had slept beneath centuries of dust and small rain, sharp and bright as scale mail. Poetry had never moved her quite so much as drama. She loved the shock of colloquy, the beat and treble of words doing what they had to on stage. Andrew preferred the echo of poems buried alive. ~ Bailey Cunningham

The Silmarils are Eorclanstánas (also treated as an Old English noun with plural Silmarillas). There are several different forms of this Old English word: eorclan-, eorcnan-, and eorcan- from which is derived the 'Arkenstone' of the Lonely Mountain. The first element may be related to Gothic airkns, 'holy'. With middangeard line 37 cf. my father's note in Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings, in A Tolkien Compass, p. 189: 'The sense is 'the inhabited lands of (Elves and) Men', envisaged as lying between the Western Sea and that of the Far East (only known in the West by rumour). Middle-Earth is a modern alteration of medieval middel-erde from Old English middan-geard'. ~ Christopher Tolkien

Here's a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It's from the Old English bereafian, meaning 'to deprive of, take away, seize, rob'. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try. ~ Helen Macdonald

My reading has been lamentably desultory and immedthodical. Odd, out of the way, old English plays, and treatises, have supplied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or country gentlemen, in King John's days. I know less geography than a schoolboy of six weeks standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into Asia, whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions, nor can form the remotest, conjecture of the position of New South Wales, or Van Diemen's Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a very dear friend in the first named of these two Terrae Incognitae. I have no astronomy. I do not know where to look for the Bear or Charles' Wain, the place of any star, or the name of any of them at sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness - and if the sun on some portentous morn were to make his first appearance in the west, I verily believe, that, while all the world were grasping in apprehension about me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer incuriosity and want of observation. Of history and chronology I possess some vague points, such as one cannot help picking up in the course of miscellaneous study, but I never deliberately sat down to a chronicle, even of my own country. I have most dim apprehensions of the four great monarc ~ Charles Lamb

Cwaedon þaet he waere wyruld-cyninga,
manna mildust ond mon-ðwaerust,
leodum liðost ond lof-geornost. ~ Anonymous

The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent. ~ Karl Marx

I was looking for a name with an old English sound, very easy to pronounce in every language and easy to remember. At the beginning I used J. P. Tod's, but then in 1999 it was shortened since too many people were asking who was Mr. J. P. Tod's. ~ Diego Della Valle

I'd love to have been in things like 'The Jewel in the Crown,' but of course they're terribly old English. I can do that. But I'm not that. ~ Julia McKenzie

The word coach comes from the old English word coach, which was a vehicle, a carriage that took royalty or very important people from where they were to where they wanted to go. That's really what a coach is. He or she tries to create a vehicle that will help you get where you're going, not where the coach wants you to go. ~ Timothy Gallwey

Another reason we know that language could not determine thought is that when a language isn't up to the conceptual demands of its speakers, they don't scratch their heads dumbfounded (at least not for long); they simply change the language. They stretch it with metaphors and metonyms, borrow words and phrases from other languages, or coin new slang and jargon. (When you think about it, how else could it be? If people had trouble thinking without language, where would their language have come from-a committee of Martians?) Unstoppable change is the great given in linguistics, which is not why linguists roll their eyes at common claims such as that German is the optimal language of science, that only French allows for truly logical expression, and that indigenous languages are not appropriate for the modern world. As Ray Harlow put it, it's like saying, Computers were not discussed in Old English; therefore computers cannot be discussed in Modern English. ~ Steven Pinker

The association of the wild and the wood also run deep in etymology. The two words are thought to have grown out of the root word wald and the old Teutonic word walthus, meaning 'forest.' Walthus entered Old English in its variant forms of 'weald,' 'wald,' and 'wold,' which were used to designate both 'a wild place' and 'a wooded place,' in which wild creatures -- wolves, foxes, bears -- survived. The wild and wood also graft together in the Latin word silva, which means 'forest,' and from which emerged the idea of 'savage,' with its connotations of fertility.... ~ Robert Macfarlane

Tim Berners-Lee, the 44-year-old English physicist who created the World Wide Web, is precisely the kind of hero that a relatively simple invention with profound social and economic consequences should lay claim to. He is not just creative but democratic, diplomatic, polite and generous with credit and praise. ~ Katie Hafner

Fear
My dictionary informs me that the word "fear" comes from the Old English word faer, which is related to the word faerie and means to cast enchantments. Faerie, or fairy, has roots in the word fae or fay, meaning of the Fates, or fate, which in turn is linked to faith, derived from the Latin word meaning to trust ...
He appeared, when I fist sumoned him, tall and stooped, big, hooded, and draped in mists and swathes of gray, from pale to almost black. There was a line between him and me. He walked over the line and stood just behind my left shoulder. He's there now. He stoops and whispers in my ear, "Watch out!" "Don't trust what you're hearing," "Slow down the car down," "Trust the omens!" He is Fear. He warns me of probable danger, and I listen to him because he is always correct.
Fear is your ally! It is your instinct to survive. Worry is a useless thing, it achieves nothing. Resolution is the key to success. ~ Ly De Angeles

was fascinated by a 9th-century poem by the Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf, whose religious poem Christ included the Old English word for the known inhabited world: middangeard, translated as "Middle-earth." The poem makes reference to a being called Earendal, who is the brightest of angels above Middle-earth and is sent to humans. ~ Wyatt North

Old English, the heart and soul of the old regime at Oxford, ceased to be a required course only as of 2002. ~ Philip Zaleski

The author of the quaint old English classic, The Cloud of Unknowing, teaches us how to do this. Lift up thine heart unto God with a meek stirring of love; and mean Himself, and none of His goods. And thereto, look thee loath to think on aught but God Himself. So that nought work in thy wit, nor in thy will, but only God Himself. This is the work of the soul that most pleaseth God. ~ A.W. Tozer

A lot of men who have accepted - or had imposed upon them in boyhood - the old English public school styles of careful modesty in speech, with much understatement, have behind their masks an appalling and impregnable conceit of themselves. ~ J.B. Priestley

The Roman rule was, to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, "All summer in the field, and all winter in the study." And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow men. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's funny how a film about a murderous old English toff can help you. ~ Jim Broadbent

It was a bitch living with your old English teacher, especially when your old English teacher wasn't old at all, and he had exactly the kind of body that most appealed to her, tall and lean, broad in the shoulder, narrow at the hip. Then there was his brain. It had taken her a lot of years to find that particular part of a man appealing, but she'd finally gotten in the habit, and she couldn't seem to give it up. ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Pierre Eliot Trudeau's gift of an official policy of multiculturalism appeared in our midst in a period of rapid influx of third world immigrants into Canada, as well as in a moment of growing intensity of the old English-French rivalry....In this context the proclamation of multiculturalism could be seen as a diffusing or muting device for francophone national aspirations, as much as a way of coping with the non-European immigrants' arrival. It also sidelined the claims of Canada's aboriginal population, which had displayed a propensity toward armed struggles for land claims, as exemplified by the American Indian Movement (AIM). The reduction of these groups' demands into cultural demands was obviously helpful to the nationhood of Canada with its hegemonic anglo-Canadian national culture....It is not an accident that Bissoondath, who confuses between antiracism and multiculturalism, should fall for a political discourse of assimilation which keeps the so-called immigrants in place through a constantly deferred promise....As the focus shifts from processes of exclusion and marginalization to ethnic identities and their lack of adaptiveness, it is forgotten that these officially multicultural ethnicities, so embraced or rejected, are themselves the constructs of colonial - orientalist and racist - discourses. ~ Himani Bannerji

Now!
Forgive me not for what I say
Much less what I feel...
My lady,
You the one who stole my soul and hid it thou heart
My lady!
Gave my this curse of love!...
Love, love gave it life
But at what cost?
Now... Now I know not what is to belong to my self
I have lost my will to live if not by your side.
But how tis' came to be?
I know little of what came to pass but one thing I know
My love for you is true
I belong to you ~ Alexander Caban Jr.

The nineteenth-century clergyman William Barnes preferred wheelsaddle to bicycle and folkwain to omnibus. By the same token forceps would be nipperlings, and pathology would be painlore. Some of his new words recalled the language of Old English poetry: he proposed glee-mote in place of concert, and the wonderful cellar-thane instead of butler. ~ Henry Hitchings

Cabinet is a conscious, explicit attempt to portray the Doctor himself as myth. "He's a mischief, a leprechaun, a boojum," says one character, bookseller and collector of incunabula, Syme. "The Doctor is a myth. He's straight out of Old English folklore, typical trickster figure really."29 Neither part of an ongoing narrative, nor specifically located within the series' past, Cabinet is in a position to challenge the portrayal of the Doctor. ~ Anthony Burdge, Jessica Burke, Kristine Larsen

The ruinous deeds of the ravaging foe

(Beowulf)

The best-known long text in Old English is the epic poem Beowulf. Beowulf himself is a classic hero, who comes from afar. He has defeated the mortal enemy of the area - the monster Grendel - and has thus made the territory safe for its people. The people and the setting are both Germanic. The poem recalls a shared heroic past, somewhere in the general consciousness of the audience who would hear it.
It starts with a mention of 'olden days', looking back, as many stories do, to an indefinite past ('once upon a time'), in which fact blends with fiction to make the tale. But the hero is a mortal man, and images of foreboding and doom prepare the way for a tragic outcome. He will be betrayed, and civil war will follow. Contrasts between splendour and destruction, success and failure, honour and betrayal, emerge in a story which contains a great many of the elements of future literature. Power, and the battles to achieve and hold on to power, are a main theme of literature in every culture - as is the theme of transience and mortality.
................
Beowulf can be read in many ways: as myth; as territorial history of the Baltic kingdoms in which it is set; as forward-looking reassurance. Questions of history, time and humanity are at the heart of it: it moves between past, present, and hope for the future, and shows its origins in oral tradition. It is full of human speech and sonorous images, ~ Ronald Carter

Christian monks and nuns were, in effect, the guardians of culture, as they were virtually the only people who could read and write before the fourteenth century. It is interesting therefore that most of the native English culture they preserved is not in Latin, the language of the church, but in Old English, the language of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. ~ Ronald Carter

At school, myself and some pals, all football-daft, divided up the old English First Division and wrote off to half a dozen clubs each asking for a trial. ~ Drew Busby

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies - for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry - I say to myself, What a pity I can't buy that book, for I already have a copy at home. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

When Winston Churchill wanted to rally the nation in 1940, it was to Anglo-Saxon that he turned: "We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on the landing grounds; we shall fight in the fields and the streets; we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." All these stirring words came from Old English as spoken in the year 1000, with the exception of the last one, surrender, a French import that came with the Normans in 1066
and when man set foot on the moon in 1969, the first human words spoken had similar echoes: "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Each of Armstrong's famous words was part of Old English by the year 1000. ~ Robert Lacey

Keys parachuted down into one of the exact seats he purchased that he and his father sat in as season ticket holders in the Old Barn on Grand River Avenue. Keys slipped his arm around the empty chair dressed with his father's withering Tiger's baseball cap, secured to the seat with a quarter inch drywall screw. Keys reflected upon his father, who chauffeured Keys and other players, every weekend, to a hockey tournament somewhere, "You know pop…every kid you gave a ride too game or practice, came to your funeral. When this hat falls away, no more screws, pop. I'm gonna branch out…make new friends. Soon as these gypsy moths get a hold of your precious, Old English "D", here--turn your glory years, Kaline and Mclain into tree threads. ~ Kevin Moccia

The concept of an author, the single creative person who gives the text 'authority', only comes later in this period. Most Old English poetry is anonymous, even though names which are in no way comparable, such as Caedmon and Deor, are used to identify single texts. Caedmon and Deor might indeed be as mythical as Grendel, might be the originators of the texts which bear their names, or, in Deor's case only, the persona whose first-person voice narrates the poem. Only Cynewulf 'signed' his works, anticipating the role of the 'author' by some four hundred years. ~ Ronald Carter

In Old English, thou (thee, thine, etc.) was singular and you was plural. But during the thirteenth century, you started to be used as a polite form of the singular - probably because people copied the French way of talking, where vous was used in that way. English then became like French, which has tu and vous both possible for singulars; and that allowed a choice. The norm was for you to be used by inferiors to superiors - such as children to parents, or servants to masters, and thou would be used in return. But thou was also used to express special intimacy, such as when addressing God. It was also used when the lower classes talked to each other. The upper classes used you to each other, as a rule, even when they were closely related.
So, when someone changes from thou to you in a conversation, or the other way round, it conveys a different pragmatic force. It will express a change of attitude, or a new emotion or mood. ~ David Crystal

It's kind of a cross between, I think. It's not, you know, over the top Old English, like Lord of the Rings would be or something like that, but there is a very sophisticated air about the Asgardians[?], you know, in their dialogue, and - hold on. Okay. Um, and I'm doing an English accent in the movie. ~ Jaimie Alexander

We are always giving foreign names to very native things. If there is a thing that reeks of the glorious tradition of the old English tavern, it is toasted cheese. But for some wild reason we call it Welsh rarebit. I believe that what we call Irish stew might more properly be called English stew, and that it is not particularly familiar in Ireland. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

I do tend to be an analyzer. I'm an old English major from way back, so I do have fun tearing apart texts and trying to find the hidden secrets and the subtexts in there. ~ Cynthia Nixon

In my time first cousins did not meet like strangers. But we are learning modesty from the Americans, and old English ways are too gross for us. ~ J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Biddy entered on our special agreement, by imparting some information from her little catalogue of Prices, under the head of moist sugar, and lending me, to copy at home, a large old English D which she had imitated from the heading of some newspaper, and which I supposed, until she told me what it was, to be a design for a buckle. Of ~ Charles Dickens

And I hope that all my readers are acquainted with an old English Cathedral town or I fear the significance of Mr Norrell's chusing that particular place will be lost upon them. They must understand that in an old Cathedral town the great old church is not one building among many; it is the building - different from all others in scale, beauty, and solemnity. Even in modern times when an old Cathedral town may have provided itself with all the elegant appurtenances of civic buildings, assembly and meeting rooms (and York was well-stocked with these) the Cathedral rises above them - a witness to the devotion of our forefathers. It is as if the town contains within itself something larger than itself. When going about ones business in the muddle of narrow streets one is sure to lose sight of the Cathedral, but then the town will open out and suddenly it is there, many times taller and many times larger than any other building, and one realizes that one has reached the heart of the town and that all streets and lanes have in some way led here, to a place of mysteries much deeper than any Mr Norrell knew of. Such were Mr Segundus's thoughts as he entered the Close and stood before the great brooding blue shadow of the Cathedral's west face. ~ Susanna Clarke

Twelve years ago I left Boston and New York, and moved east and west at the same time. East, to a little village in Devon, England, a town I've been familiar with for years, since my friends Brian and Wendy Froud and Alan Lee all live there. It had long been my dream to live in England, so I finally bought a little old cottage over there. But I decided, both for visa and health reasons, living there half the year would be better than trying to cope with cold, wet Dartmoor winters. At that point, Beth Meacham had moved out to Arizona, and I discovered how wonderful the Southwest is, particularly in the wintertime. Now I spend every winter-spring in Tucson and every summer-autumn in England. Both places strongly affect my writing and my painting. They're very opposite landscapes, and each has a very different mythic history. In Tucson, the population is a mix of Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Euro-Americans of various immigrant backgrounds - so the folklore of the place is a mix of all those things, as well as the music and the architecture. The desert has its own colors, light, and rhythms. In Devon, by contrast, it's all Celtic and green and leafy, and the color palette of the place comes straight out of old English paintings - which is more familiar to me, growing up loving the Pre-Raphaelites and England's 'Golden Age' illustrators. I've learned to love an entirely different palette in Arizona, where the starkness of the desert is offset by the brilliance of t ~ Terri Windling

I've always used Old English in certain songs. ~ Erik Rutan

an 'old English lady'. Henry, though, had other ~ Thomas Penn

Old English poetry is characterised by a number of poetic tropes which enable a writer to describe things indirectly and which require a reader imaginatively to construct their meaning. The most widespread of these figurative descriptions are what are known as kennings. Kennings often occur in compounds: for example, hronrad (whale-road) or swanrad (swan- road) meaning 'the sea'; banhus (bone-house) meaning the 'human body'. Some kennings involve borrowing or inventing words; others appear to be chosen to meet the alliterative requirement of a poetic line, and as a result some kennings are difficult to decode, leading to disputes in critical interpretation. But kennings do allow more abstract concepts to be communicated by using more familiar words: for example, God is often described as moncynnes weard ('guardian of mankind'). ~ Ronald Carter

We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now. ~ Julie Taymor

The word heaven means harmony. The word hell is from the old English hell, meaning to build a wall around, to separate; to be helled was to be shut off from. Now if there is such a thing as harmony there must be that something one can be in right relations with; for to be in right relations with anything is to be in harmony with it. Again, if there is such a thing as being helled, shut off, separated from, there must be that something from which one is held, shut off, or separated. ~ Ralph Waldo Trine

What good is ye world when ye canst not livest hither. ~ K. Hari Kumar

It happened that I had just finished co-writing a screen adaptation of Beowulf, the old English narrative poem, and was mildly surprised by the number of people who, mishearing me, seemed to think I had just written an episode of "Baywatch." So I began retelling Beowulf as a futuristic episode of "Baywatch" for an anthology of detective stories. It seemed to be the only sensible thing to do. Look, I don't give you grief over where you get your ideas from. ~ Neil Gaiman

It's Smith, actually.' Dr Smith smiled, bowing. 'I've remembered that my name is Smith. Almost definitely. Good old English name. Hopefully means 'noble valiant warriot' and not 'he who hits kittens with a hammer.' You'd be surprised the derivations of common surnames in the English countryside ... ~ James Goss

I had an old band in Scandinavia, the beginning of Mercyful Fate, so it reminds me of my roots as a teenager. We used to play songs like Grinder and all that. It's really like being a teenager again. (Laughs) ~ Yenz Leonhardt

Reggie made him feel like he was nine years old and out for dinner with his family at the Ponderosa Steak House and he had run into his French teacher and his mother invited her to dine with him.
Reggie made him feel like he was sitting in a public bathroom stall and someone had come into the bathroom and began singing a song about what a stinky bastard he was while he was in there sweating it out.
Reggie made him feel like someone had taken the red Tonka fire engine he had always wanted and painfully corkscrewed it down the front of his jeans.
Reggie made him feel like the ice cream man had just rolled by and all his dead grandparents were mooning him out the truck window. ~ Jonathan Goldstein

Ours is an age between worldviews, creative yet disoriented, a transitional era when the old cultural vision no longer holds and the new has not yet constellated. Yet we are not without signs of what the new might look like ~ Richard Tarnas

I was actually picked on as a kid. I guess in high school it started to change for me. I guess being picked on made a lasting impression on me so I never - whenever somebody calls me handsome or anything like that, I never take it for granted. I appreciate it every time I hear it, so it's never something that gets old. ~ Lance Gross

As the year comes to a close, it is a time for reflection – a time to release old thoughts and beliefs and forgive old hurts. Whatever has happened in the past year, the New Year brings fresh beginnings. Exciting new experiences and relationships await. Let us be thankful for the blessings of the past and the promise of the future. ~ Peggy Toney Horton

Sidney, our tomorrows are shaped by the choices we make today. The Dark place we saw may never come to pass if humanity chooses to embrace the Light. As Guardians, it's our desire to help humanity return to the sacred truths. When you're old enough, you may choose to cultivate a path of Light for others to follow. It will be dangerous, and you may fail. The choice will be yours. ~ Feather Stone

Writing novels reminds me of being an awkward 15-year-old typing on a Commodore 64 in his bedroom, trying to be the next Stephen King. ~ Duane Swierczynski

The things you get fired for when you're young are the same things that you get lifetime achievement awards for when you're old. ~ Francis Ford Coppola

Everyone has an identity crisis when they are 16 or 17 years old. ~ Sara Zarr

Please, please, help me grow to be like them, the ones'll soon be here, who never grow old, can't die, that's what they say, can't die, no matter what, or maybe they died a long time ago but Cecy calls, and Mother and Father call, and Grandmere who only whispers, and now they're coming and I'm nothing, not like them who pass through walls and live in trees or live underneath until seventeen-year rains flood them up and out, and the ones who run in packs, let me be the one! If they live forever, why not me? ~ Ray Bradbury

Better still [than pure sugar] was the remedy known as theriac, the root of the English word 'treacle,' which was kept in ornate ceramic jars on the shelves of every self-respecting apothecary shop. The name comes from the Greek therion, meaning 'venomous animal,' for theriac was supposed in Classical times to counteract all venoms and poisons. ~ Philip Ball

On the day of the show, I sit down with someone that speaks very good English and someone who speaks the local language very well and work out what I'm going to say. ~ Phil Collins

IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT.
In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating wraithlike shadows that raced along the ground.
The house shook.
Wrapped in her quilt, Meg shook.
...
The window rattled madly in the wind, and she pulled the quilt close about her. Curled up on one of her pillows, a gray f luff of kitten yawned, showing its pink tongue, tucked its head under again, and went back to sleep. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

The middle seat holds an old woman, teeny, not much bigger than a doll. She is creased and wrinkled and rheumy-eyed. Her eyes, though, beneath their cloudy scrim, sparkle like emeralds. And she is bright. She is very bright. Her cheeks rouged a happy pink. Her sweater a hot pink, the vibrant color masking the heavy load on her sloped, thin shoulders. ~ Cherise Wolas

You ought never to sass old people- unless they sass you first. ~ Mark Twain

ENGINEERS and programmers have an old saying that Eric's father liked to quote: no design survives an encounter with reality. His mother preferred the military version: no plan survives contact with the enemy. ~ D.A. Hill

In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet. ~ V.S. Naipaul

If you look in the eyes of the young, you see flame. If you look in the eyes of the old, you see light. ~ Victor Hugo

It was a rustling sound that woke me up. Because I'd had my eyes closed, the whiteness of the room seemed even brighter than before. There wasn't a shadow anywhere in front of me, and every object, every angle and curve stood out so sharply it made my eyes hurt. That's when Maman's friends came in. There were about ten in all, and they floated into the blinding light without a sound. They sat down without a single chair creaking. I saw them more clearly than I had ever seen anyone, and not one detail of their faces or their clothes escaped me. But I couldn't hear them, and it was hard for me to believe that they really existed. Almost all the women were wearing aprons, and the strings, which were tied tight around their waists, made their bulging stomachs stick out even more. I'd never noticed what huge stomachs old women can have. Almost all the men were skinny and carried canes. What struck me most about their faces was that I couldn't see their eyes, just a faint glimmer in a nest of wrinkles. When they'd sat down, most of them looked at me and nodded awkwardly, their lips sucked in by their toothless mouths, so that I couldn't tell if they were greeting me or if it was just a nervous tic. I think they were greeting me. It was then that I realized they were all sitting across from me, nodding their heads, grouped around the caretaker. For a second I had the ridiculous feeling that they were there to judge me. ~ Albert Camus

Since coming to Harwell I have met English people of all kinds, and I have come to see in many of them a deep rooted firmness which enables them to lead a decent way of life. ~ Klaus Fuchs

Our plan depended on the Renselaeus warriors being fast and accurate and brave, for they were as outnumbered as Bran and I had been up in the mountains.
I was also, therefore, intensely aware that my life was now in the hands of people I had considered enemies not two dawns ago. Did they still consider me one?
I tried to calm my nerves by laughing at myself; for someone who so recently had tried her best to ride to her death, my innards were a pit of snakes, and my palms were sweaty despite the rain. Bran was alive, I was alive, and suddenly I wanted to stay that way. I wanted to go home and clean out the castle and replant Mama's garden. I wanted to see Oria and Julen and Khesot again, and I wanted to walk on the high peaks and dance with the Hill Folk on long summer nights, miming age-old stories to the windborne music…
I blinked. Had I just heard a reed pipe?
I lifted my head and listened, heard nothing but the thud of hooves and clatter of our accoutrements, and the soft rain in the leaves overhead. ~ Sherwood Smith

I wish [that when] I was 12 years old I'd been able to watch a video of my favourite actress explaining in such an intellectual, beautiful, poignant way the definition of feminism - I would have understood it and then earlier on in my life I would have proudly claimed that I was a feminist, because I would have understood what the word means. ~ Taylor Swift

When you're old-fashioned like I am, you know marriage is forever. Those vows are a promise. ~ Brad Paisley

I have no idea why one of our most original filmmakers would want to spend two years of his life translating someone else's movie from Spanish into English. And it wasn't such a good film in Spanish, either. ~ Joel Siegel

An old story is told about Rabia of Basra, an eighth-century Sufi mystic who was seen running through the streets of her city one day carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she said she wanted to burn down the rewards of paradise with the torch and put out the fires of hell with the water, because both blocked the way to God, 'O, Allah,' Rabia prayed, 'if I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise. But if I worship You for Your Own sake, grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.'

In Christian tradition this comes under the heading of unconditional love, though it is usually understood as the kind of love God exercises toward humans instead of the other way around. Now, thanks to a Muslim mystic from Iraq, I have a new way of understanding what it means to love God unconditionally. Whenever I am tempted to act from fear of divine punishment or hope of divine reward, Rabia leans over from here religion into mine and empties a bucket of water on my head. ~ Barbara Brown Taylor

Quite apart from anything else, the rule of money sees to it that we shall be governed largely by the old - that is, by people utterly unable to grasp what age they are living in or what enemy they are fighting. ~ George Orwell

Parents, keep your children closer when they are young, because they will keep you closer when you're old ~ "Beta" Metani' Marashi

Book reviewers are little old ladies of both sexes. ~ John O'Hara

All the men of the Old Testament were polygamists, and Christ and Paul, the central figures of the New Testament, were celibates, and condemned marriage by both precept and example. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Who on Earth could read a Vonnegut book and think that he was a grandfatherly bundle of warm fuzzy happiness? I mean, I read Vonnegut first as a ten year old, and it was shocking because he could joke in the face of such blackness and bleakness, and I'd never seen an author do that before. Everything was pointless, except, possibly, a few moments of love snatched from the darkness, a few moments in which we connect, or fail to. ~ Neil Gaiman

One spring afternoon as a child in the strange town of Portland, I walked down to a different street corner, and saw a row of old houses, huddled together like seals on a rock. ~ Richard Brautigan

Coyotes don't eat dachshunds," Johnson said. "Dachshunds were bred to go down badger tunnels and drag the badgers out by their ass. A good-sized dachshund could weigh thirty pounds and has jaws like a crocodile. Old Dixie would straight-out fuck up a coyote." "Didn't know that," Virgil said. - ~ John Sandford

We have all seen them circling pastures, have looked up from the mouth of a barn, a pine clearing, the fences of our own backyards, and have stood amazed by the one slow wing beat, the endless dihedral drift. But I had never seen so many so close, every limb of the dead oak feathered black; and I cut the engine let the river grab the jon boat and pull it toward the tree ... Then as I passed under their dream, I saw for the first time its soft countenance the raw fleshy jowls, wrinkled and generous like the faces of the very old who have grown to empathize with everything. And I drifted away from them, reluctant, looking back at their roost, calling them what they are- transfiguring angels who pray over the leaf graves of the anonymous lost with mercy enough to consume us all and give us wings. ~ David Bottoms

Aging is not the process of making you old and ugly, aging is the process of making you bold and beautiful ~ 'SON Of GOD' P.S.Jagadeesh Kumar

As the editor-in-chief of the do-it-yourself magazine 'Make,' I've met scores of dedicated makers. They come from all walks of life - rich, poor, young, old, male, female, religious, atheist, liberal, conservative. ~ Mark Frauenfelder

I see all these old people who don't have anything to do but eat, drink and sleep. I will never say 'retired' because that's such a finality that I don't want to be part of my life. I'll work until they throw me in a box. ~ Mario Andretti