Old Jokes Quotes

This kind of pragmatism has become a hallmark of our psychological culture. In the mid-1990s, I described how it was commonplace for people to "cycle through" different ideas of the human mind as (to name only a few images) mechanism, spirit, chemistry, and vessel for the soul.14 These days, the cycling through intensifies. We are in much more direct contact with the machine side of mind. People are fitted with a computer chip to help with Parkinson's. They learn to see their minds as program and hardware. They take antidepressants prescribed by their psychotherapists, confident that the biochemical and oedipal self can be treated in one room. They look for signs of emotion in a brain scan. Old jokes about couples needing "chemistry" turn out not to be jokes at all. ~ Sherry Turkle

Because, as we are told - a sad old joke, too - Ghosts, like the ladies, never speak till spoke to. ~ Bill Vaughan

All life was weather, a waiting through the hot where events had no significance for the cool that was soft and caressing like a woman's hand on a tired forehead. Down in Georgia there is a feeling - perhaps inarticulate - that this is the greatest wisdom of the South - so after a while the Jelly-bean turned into a poolhall on Jackson Street where he was sure to find a congenial crowd who would make all the old jokes - the ones he knew. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I had a slight feeling of babysitting as we walked soberly along together using all our old phrases, making all our old jokes, not quite feeling all our old fondness. ~ Ben Dolnick

Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went.
No, why?
You moved.
Just don't move. ~ Margaret Atwood

It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

Leo," Jason said, "you're weird."
"Yeah, you tell me that a lot." Leo grinned. "But if you don't remember me, that means I can reuse all my old jokes ... ! ~ Rick Riordan

People who don't like cats haven't been around them. There's the old joke: dogs have masters, cats have staff. ~ Betty White

My comedy notebooks are filled with random journal entries. It's all the same. I can look back on old joke notebooks, and know exactly what was going on in my life. ~ Sarah Silverman

Even evangelicals realize that Pinocchio's father was a carpenter too. That's the old joke. ~ Robin Williams

There is an old joke that went around- it goes, in the beginning God made man in His own image, and since the fall, man has been seeking to return the compliment. ~ Alistair Begg

By exiling human judgment in the last few decades, modern law changed role from useful tool to brainless tyrant. This legal regime will never be up to the job, any more than the Soviet system of central planning was, because ti can't think. The comedy of law's sterile logic
large POISON signs warning against common sand, spending twenty-two years on pesticide review and deciding next to nothing, allowing fifty-year-old white men to sue for discrimination
is all too reminiscent of the old jokes we used to hear about life in the Eastern bloc.
Judgement is to law as water is to crops. It should not be surprising that law has become brittle, and society along with it. ~ Philip K. Howard

Watching an adaptation of your novel can be a violent experience: seeing your old jokes suddenly thrust at you can be alarming. But I started to enjoy 'Money' very quickly, and then I relaxed. ~ Martin Amis

You know that old joke about the guy who lives to be 104? The punch line goes something like 'If I knew I was gonna get this old, I'd have taken much better care of myself.' Well, guess what? We actually are living longer, and the time to start taking care of ourselves is right this minute. ~ Oprah Winfrey

Pulled pork jokes never get old. ~ Joel Edgerton

Barack Obama is like the old joke about boats. The two best days of owning a boat are the day you buy it and the day you sell it. ~ Howie Carr

Everyone has a photographic Memory, some just don't have film. ~ Steven Wright

Every day was like a day out of someone else's life. Nothing had ever happened to me, and now everything was happening to me -- and by everything, I really meant Lena. An hour was both faster and slower. I felt like I had sucked the air out of a giant balloon, like my brain wasn't getting enough oxygen. Clouds were more interesting, the lunchroom less disgusting, music sounded better, the same old jokes were funnier, and Jackson went from being a clump of grayish-green industrial buildings to a map of times and places where I might run into her. I found myself smiling for no reason, keeping my earphones in and replaying our conversations in my head, just so I could listen to them again. I had seen this kind of thing before. I had just never felt it. ~ Kami Garcia

Being a military child, we moved a lot and we developed different vernaculars from moving from the south, to the Midwest, and seeing the world. Going from New York to California and from Jamaica Queens to the South, I was always the new kid, or had the army crew haircut. I expected people to pick up on me. My brother kinda stole all of my old jokes. He got his inspiration from me. ~ Joe Torry

Cities controlled by big companies are old hat in science fiction. My grandmother left a whole bookcase of old science fiction novels. The company-city subgenre always seemed to star a hero who outsmarted, overthrew, or escaped "the company." I've never seen one where the hero fought like hell to get taken in and underpaid by the company. In real life, that's the way it will be. That's the way it always is. ~ Octavia E. Butler

Whatever voice spoke him was no demon but some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity. a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrath. ~ Cormac McCarthy

After a man falls madly in love, he no longer cares how old she is. ~ Helen Fisher

Not enough." Margo rose and tucked the towel in place. " Come on, let's go stuff her in a locker. For old time's sake. ~ Nora Roberts

She never sent the castle to sleep", said Granny, "that's just and old wife's tale. She just stirred up time a little. It's not as hard as people think, everyone does it all the time. It's like rubber, is time, you can stretch it to suit yourself."
Magrat was about to say: That's not right, time is time, every second lasts a second, that's its job. The she recalled weeks that had flown past and afternoons that had lasted forever. Some minutes had lasted hours, some hours had gone past so quickly she hadn't been aware they'd gone past at all.
"But that's just people's perception, isn't it?"
"Oh yes", said Granny, "of course it is, it all is, what difference does that make? ~ Terry Pratchett

People call things 'vulgar' when they are new to them. When they have become old, they become 'good taste.' ~ Mary Quant

I came across an account of a young man named Kim Malthe-Bruun, who was eventually captured and executed by the Nazis when he was only twenty-one years old. I read his story as I had read many others, turning the pages, skimming here and there: this sabotage, that tactic, this capture, that escape. After a while even courage becomes routine to the reader. Then, quite unprepared, I turned the page and faced a photograph of Kim Malthe-Bruun. He wore a turtleneck sweater, and his thick, light hair was windblown. His eyes looked out at me, unwavering on the page. Seeing him there, so terribly young, broke my heart. ~ Lois Lowry

There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror. ~ Karl Marx

Have you ever been in love, Hadrian?"
"I'm not sure. How do you tell?"
"Love? Why, it's like coming home."
Hadrian considered the comment.
"What are you thinking?" Bulard asked.
Hadrian shook his head. "Nothing."
"Yes, you were. What? You can tell me. I'm an excellent repository for secrets. I'll likely forget, but if I don't, well, I'm an old man in a remote
jungle. I'm sure to die before I can repeat anything."
Hadrian smiled, then shrugged. "I was just thinking about the rain. ~ Michael J. Sullivan

Dear old al-Maarri was a great skeptic poet. He wrote a parody of the Koran, and his friends would tease him and say, "al-Maarri, but no one says your Koran." And he said, "Yes, but give me time. Give me time. If people recite it for twenty years it will become as popular as the other one." ~ Tariq Ali

If we cannot leave something tangible behind - such as a gene or a poem - perhaps it is enough if we just make the world a little better? You can help somebody, and that somebody will subsequently help somebody else, and you thereby contribute to the overall improvement of the world, and constitute a small link in the great chain of kindness. Though it has its merits, the great chain of happiness is a bit like the great chain of turtles - it is far from clear where its meaning comes from. A wise old man was asked what he learned about the meaning of life. 'Well,' he answered, 'I have learned that I am here on earth in order to help other people. What I still haven't figured out is why the other people are here. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Old persons are sometimes as unwilling to die as tired-out children are to say good night and go to bed. ~ Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

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

When I naturally write a story and I feel that the guy (is) sitting across the table from the girl and flirting with her ... I think, 'God, that can't be me' because I'm just too old for that part. You need a 30-year-old or a 35-year-old for that part. And so I've given myself less and less roles. ~ Woody Allen

You went back in time," he repeated, "and you expect his cell phone to work?"
"Well, no, I just, I mean, I came back and he hasn't! Shouldn't he have?"
Morrison, very steadily, said, "Were you together?"
"No! I just said he went to fight the Morrigan!"
"I see." There was a pause. "The man is seventy-four years old, Joanie. He can take care of himself. If you were," a great and patient pause filled the line before he went on, "time traveling. If you were time traveling and got separated, then I can't think of any reason he would necessarily come back to the present at the same time you did."
"Except I was the focal point, it was my fault, it
!"
"Joanne. Siobhan. Siobhan Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick."
I didn't think anybody had ever said my name like that before. I gulped down a hysterical sob and whispered, "Yeah?"
Morrison, with gentle emphasis, said, "I love you. Now pull yourself together and go find the bad guy," and hung up. ~ C.E. Murphy

There's too much rock that relies a fetishism or nostalgia for the old ways. That's a real enemy to music. ~ Matt Tong

I don't know why I am in such a reminiscent mood except that spring and the reappearance of toads always awakens the old acquisitive instinct. The only thing that keeps me from starting a collection is the fact that no rule exists against it. ~ Jean Webster

That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don't they? She's a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. ~ Gillian Flynn

Everything we do means something, Ender realized. Them laughing. Me not laughing. He toyed with the idea of trying to be like the other boys. But he couldn't think of any jokes, and none of theirs seemed funny. Wherever their laughter came from, Ender couldn't find such a place in himself. ~ Orson Scott Card

If I was to meet my eight-year-old self, I would say, 'Don't listen to what they say about you. Wear your anorak with pride!' ~ Peter Capaldi

A huge maze of tents and mud huts and homes built from plastic and aluminum siding in a labyrinth of narrow passageways littered with dirt and shit. It was a city in the belly of a yet greater city. He had lived in a small mud house there with his brothers ... In its alleyways, he and his brothers had learned to walk and talk. They had gone to school there. He had played with sticks and rusty old bicycle wheels on its dirty streets, running around with other refugee kids, until the sun dipped and his grandmother called him home. ~ Khaled Hosseini

We shouldn't be here at all, if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually - their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on - and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same - like old Mr Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into? ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Three years in London had not changed Richard, although it had changed the way he perceived the city. Richard had originally imagined London as a gray city, even a black city, from pictures he had seen, and he was surprised to find it filled with color. It was a city of red brick and white stone, red buses and large black taxis, bright red mailboxes and green grassy parks and cemeteries.

It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names - Crouch End, Chalk Farm, Earl's Court, Marble Arch - and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, dirty, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or, more recently, motorized, and the need of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every color and manner and kind. ~ Neil Gaiman

Across the way there lies a wee lass, no' yet five years old, suffering from a fever. Her name is Sadie Floyd. I want you tae go with me tae see her. ~ Laura Frantz

I'm just a regular 16 year old kid. I make good grilled cheese and I like girls. ~ Justin Bieber

Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul. ~ Epicurus

A pet rock is a serious commitment and too much responsibility for a ten year old to handle on his own ~ Kyle Adams

Notice, for instance, that Galileo does not pull out the old Aristotelian reductio and conclude from the paradoxical behavior of infinite sets that (infinity) can't be reasoned about. Instead, he manages somewhat to anticipate both Kant (by attributing (Infinity)-paradoxes to the hardwired constraints of 'finite minds' rather than to any extramental reality) and Cantor (by using one-to-one correspondence as a comparative measure of sets, by arguing that infinite quantities obey a different sort of arithmetic than do finite quantities, etc.) ~ David Foster Wallace

How I have walked ... day after day, and all alone, to see if there was not something among the old things which was new! ~ Thomas Cole

I grin at her enthusiasm. "Did you like the little gun-finger I flashed you after that goal? All for you, baby."
She grins back. "Sorry to burst your bubble, but you were actually pointing at the old guy a few seats over. He totally freaked out and started shouting to everyone that you scored that goal for him, and then I heard him ask his wife if maybe you knew that he was just diagnosed with diabetes, so I didn't have the heart to tell him who the goal was really for."
I break down in laughter. "Why is nothing ever simple with us?"
"Hey," she protests. "We're more interesting this way."
I can't argue with that. ~ Elle Kennedy

To me, reading through old letters and journals is like treasure hunting. Somewhere in those faded, handwritten lines there is a story that has been packed away in a dusty old box for years. ~ Sara Sheridan

Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us. ~ Thomas Carlyle