Old People Quotes

Harlem is not a playground for rich bankers and consultants. It's got students of all colors. It's got old people who keep history and tell tall tales. ~ Marcus Samuelsson

So long as our parents are alive, we are children. Then we become childish. ~ Ljupka Cvetanova

Didn't anyone stop to reflect that the so-called old people of today used to smoke pot, for heaven's sake, and wear bandannas tied around their heads and picket the White House? When Amanda chided her for saying that something was "cool" ("I hate it when the older generation tries to copy the younger," she had said), did she not realize that "cool" had been used in Abby's time, too, not to mention long before? ~ Anne Tyler

I don't want to see old people doing rap or rock and roll. It makes me cringe. ~ Grace Slick

Elsa learned all about LPs and CDs that afternoon. That was when she worked out why old people seem to have so much free time, because in the olden days until Spotify came along they must have used up almost all their time just changing the track. She ~ Fredrik Backman

When young people grow up ... they shine so much that old people want to avert their gaze. ~ Tite Kubo

My life after childhood has two main stories: the story of the hustler and the story of the rapper, and the two overlap as much as they diverge. I was on the streets for more than half of my life from the time I was thirteen years old. People sometimes say that now I'm so far away from that life - now that I've got businesses and Grammys and magazine covers - that I have no right to rap about it. But how distant is the story of your own life ever going to be? The feelings I had during that part of my life were burned into me like a brand. It was life during wartime. ~ Jay-Z

One spares old people just as one spares children. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Childermass knew what games the children on street-corners are playing - games that all other grown-ups have long since forgotten. Childermass knew what old people by firesides are thinking of, though no one has asked them in years. Childermass knew what young men hear in the rattling of the drums and the tooting of the pipes that makes them leave their homes and go to be soldiers - and he knew the half-eggcupful of glory and the barrelful of misery that await them. And all that Childermass knew made him smile; and some of what he knew made him laugh out loud; and none of what he knew wrung from him so much as ha'pennyworth of pity. ~ Susanna Clarke

It doesn't matter to me. We're still cousins in our own way. Blood's just something old people talk about to make you feel bad. ~ Rita Mae Brown

Pure entertainment is not an egotistical lady singing boring songs onstage for two hours and people in tuxes clapping whether they like it or not. It's the real performers on the street who can hold people's attention and keep them from walking away. ~ Andy Kaufman

But you cant be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you have exhausted the possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere; all that could not have been invented and created just to be thrown away. And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to the rock. And the earth dont want to just keep things, hoard them; it wants to use them again. ~ William Faulkner

Try to imagine its good old days whenever you see a ruin and try to do the same whenever you see an old person! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

With age come the inner, the higher life. Who would be forever young, to dwell always in externals? ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

If someone says to you, 'Go to an old-folks' home,' that's kind of ridiculous, because a lot of old people are doing terrific things for society. ~ Myron Scholes

I don't need a steak knife to cut my meat. That's why karate chops were created. I'm like a butter knife, only slightly less deadly. But I'm great with bagels - and disobedient old people. ~ Jarod Kintz

We're going down to the Margarita Grill to smell the lobster, then we're going to watch the sunrise, and in between we'll probably have hot, unsafe animal sex. ~ Darynda Jones

I believed that old people never laughed. I thought they sighed a lot and groaned. They walked with sticks, and they didn't like children on bicycles or roller skates ... or with big dogs. ~ Maeve Binchy

But then I stopped allowing myself to dream, because it was more painful to long for things and never get them than to deal with whatever was in front of me. [ ... ] I'm too old to hear confront nonsense anymore. Too old to believe that everything will be alright. ~ Veronica Roth

Peter sighed into the water, and his breath sent a small circle of it into tiny ripples. "It seems cowardly, getting old. Don't you think?"
She rolled onto her side to look at him, pillowing her ear with her right arm, and letting her fingers dangle in the water beyond her head. "How is it cowardly?"
Peter kept his eyes on his reflection. "You just curl up around yourself, and sit by the fire, and try to be comfortable. When you get old, you just get smaller inside, and you try not to pay attention to anything but your blankets and your food and your bed."
"Being comfortable is not a bad thing."
Peter shrugged and turned his head to look at her as if it was a matter of fact. "Of course it is. Old people lock out all the scary, wild things. It's like they don't exist."
She wanted to say that she would have liked for those things not to exist, either, but she held her tongue, because she didn't want to sound like a coward. ~ Jodi Lynn Anderson

Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned. ~ Gerald Brenan

Still, it's important not to let practical considerations such as daunting toilet facilities stop you from venturing out. Experience has taught us that sad lesson: once old people stop doing something, they are unlikely ever to do it again. ~ Hendrik Groen

I've often told people who ask if there is a God: Get around enough people with horses and see what happens. See how they survive in spite of all the things they do, and you'll become a believer! ~ Buck Brannaman

I don't care about age very much. I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life. ~ Chinua Achebe

When old people talk too much in presence of younger persons, they wouldn't know when their value would be diminishing.

Talk less especially when a younger person is in your midst, it's a sign of dignity ~ OMOSOHWOFA CASEY

Never get behind old people. Their bodies are littered with hidden metal and they never seem to appreciate how little time they have left ~ George Clooney

Autumn is always a time of Fear and Greed and Hoarding for the winter coming on. Debt collectors are active on old people and fleece the weak and helpless. They want to lay in enough cash to weather the known horrors of January and February. There is always a rash of kidnapping and abductions of schoolchildren in the football months. Preteens of both sexes are traditionally seized and grabbed off the streets by gangs of organized perverts who traditionally give them as Christmas gifts to each other to be personal sex slaves and playthings.

Most of these things are obviously Wrong and Evil and Ugly - but at least they are Traditional. They will happen. Your driveway will ice over, your furnace will blow up, and you will be rammed in traffic by an uninsured driver in a stolen car.

But what the hell? That's why we have Insurance, eh? And the Inevitability of these nightmares is what makes them so reassuring. Life will go on, for good or ill. But some things are forever, right? The structure may be a little Crooked, but the foundations are still strong and unshakable. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

The paradox of life; everyone desire a fuller life. But no one wishes to increase in age. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

But Galen hasn't been responsible in looking for road signs since this conversation first started. Even now, another exit-maybe theirs-zooms by them. He's in a bit of awe of human drivers who seem to be able to conduct all sorts of business while driving. Apparently, Galen isn't capable of carrying on simple conversations while watching for road signs. The worst part is, they should be reaching their exit any time now. But then again, Galen hasn't been able to drive the speed limit. Every time he gets up to speed, Grom tenses up and scowls at him until he slows down. Old people.
Abruptly, Galen sees their exit and takes it. He slows down to a crawl around the curve, which appears to irritate the driver behind him. But the driver behind him doesn't have hundreds of years left to put up with Grom. ~ Anna Banks

Nothing is more ridiculous in old people that were once good-looking, than to forget that they are not so still. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

I've always despised old people. I got angry at my father when he began to show signs of age. ~ William Steig

He had the distracted chuckle of troubled old people who look within, keeping watch on failing organs. ~ John Crowley

Sometimes I wonder who'll come after me," he says. "Oh, we have plenty of
excellent people in the next generation. But after that -- well, I don't know.
I guess all old people feel like the world is coming to an end. ~ Neal Stephenson

These old people. These human ruins. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

But if someone calls me 'poor thing' one more time, I may go postal and kill everyone around me. Except children and dogs. And old people. And you. And Connor. Fine, I won't kill anyone. But it's driving me crazy. ~ Kristan Higgins

In 1976 I was working in the Gulf Country around Cape York, in an aboriginal community of about 300 people. The Health Department sent around a team and vaccinated about 100 of them against flu. Six were dead within 24 hours or so and they weren't all old people, one man being in his early twenties. They threw the bodies in trucks to take to the coast where autopsies were done. It appeared they had died from heart attacks. ~ Archie Kalokerinos

Oh, no, no, you've got that all wrong. You're not required to respect elders. After all, most people are idiots, regardless of age. In tribal cultures, we just make sure that elders remain an active part of the culture, even if they're idiots. Especially if they're idiots. You can't just abandon your old people, even if they have nothing intelligent to say. Even if they're crazy. ~ Sherman Alexie

Neither old people nor sour people seem to make friends easily; for there is little that is pleasant in them ... ~ Aristotle.

Get on a bus full of old people and you'll understand what I mean. It's easy to pick the woman who's spent her life indulging herself in moral indignation, tightening her lips against mothers who are too young, mothers who are too old, young men with dangerous-looking haircuts, and Winifred Martin going off with May Charleston's husband, and at their age, honestly. Yes, you'll be able to pick her in a trice, since she'll be the one with the cat's arse where her mouth ought to be. ~ Danielle Wood

Now, as a non-Amish person in the twentieth century who is not a part of the aging and thus noncoveted seventy-five-plus marketing demographic that views things like cell phones and iPads with that quaint, old-people mixture of astonishment, fascination, confusion, and abject fear, I spend as much time pawing my cell phone as members of the postpubescent marketing demographic spend pawing each other and themselves. ~ BikeSnobNYC

The glory of the age is beauty of grayhair. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I wanted to ask which war
the Boer or the Crimean? It was amazing how old people could talk about The War, as though that meant something. ~ John Christopher

I'm the one running the show, you petulant geezer. ~ Brad McKinniss

If there's a world with ghosts, shouldn't we be constantly walking through hundreds of apparitions of just regular old people? ~ Jake Tapper

Even the best-natured people, if uninstructed, are always blind and uncertain. We must take pains to instruct ourselves so that ignorance makes us neither too timid nor too bold. ~ Madeleine De Souvre, Marquise De ...

I don't find it surprising that super-old people are so odd and grumpy. Half their friends are dead, they feel like shit most of the time, and the next major event in their lives is going to be their last. They ~ Michael Marshall

He knew that these creatures were dead, that they were reanimated echoes who wore the disguise of the people they had once been, but Tom's words rang in his mind. They used to be people. How could he strike them? How could he hurt them? Children, women, old people. Lost souls. ~ Jonathan Maberry

The house stank; a stench all its own pervaded every corner. It was a threnody in the key of Cat minor, with a ground-bass of Old Dog, and modulations of old people, waning lives, and relinquished hopes. ~ Robertson Davies

In Washington, the air quality today was described as 'red.' ... You know what 'red' is? It's bad for everyone. Not just old people, sick people and babies. When it's just bad for old people, sick people and babies, that's called a Republican budget. ~ Bill Maher

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I can see myself as a very old man in a terrific wheelchair. Only, I won't be photographing the tree outside my window, the way Steichen did. I'll be photographing other old people. ~ Richard Avedon

Someday decades from now, when you and Sabine are hobbling around in your old-people pants and orthopedic shoes, yelling at grandchildren and reminiscing about the days when you could still see your feet, unimpeded by the view of your gut, I will still be basking in the glow of eternal youth, forever young, forever golden, forever - "
"In love with the face in the mirror and the sound of your own voice," I finished for him, and Nash laughed. ~ Rachel Vincent

Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

I think age is just something written down on a piece of paper. I mean, you come across 20-year-olds who are like old people sometimes. I've never taken much account of age throughout my life - my own or anyone else's. ~ Emmanuelle Seigner

She lived with the doctor on Via Po, in a gloomy, dark apartment, barely warmed in winter by just a small Franklin stove, and she no longer threw out anything, because everything might eventually come in handy: not even the cheese rinds or the foil on chocolates, with which she made silver balls to be sent to missions to free a little black boy. ~ Primo Levi

The people who have impacted the world didn't live long. Martin Luther King. John F. Kennedy. These people who impact the world were not old people, but they lived so effectively that we cannot erase them from history. ~ Myles Munroe

Children write essays in school about the unhappy, tragic, doomed life of Anna Karenina. But was Anna really unhappy? She chose passion and she paid for her passion - that's happiness! She was a free, proud human being. But what if during peacetime a lot of greatcoats and peaked caps burst into the house where you were born and live, and ordered the whole family to leave house and town in twenty-four hours, with only what your feeble hands can carry?... You open your doors, call in the passers-by from the streets and ask them to buy things from you, or to throw you a few pennies to buy bread with... With ribbon in her hair, your daughter sits down at the piano for the last time to play Mozart. But she bursts into tears and runs away. So why should I read Anna Karenina again? Maybe it's enough - what I've experienced. Where can people read about us? Us? Only in a hundred years?
"They deported all members of the nobility from Leningrad. (There were a hundred thousand of them, I suppose. But did we pay much attention? What kind of wretched little ex-nobles were they, the ones who remained? Old people and children, the helpless ones.) We knew this, we looked on and did nothing. You see, we weren't the victims."
"You bought their pianos?"
"We may even have bought their pianos. Yes, of course we bought them."
Oleg could now see that this woman was not yet even fifty. Yet anyone walking past her would have said she was an old woman. A lock of smooth old woman's ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

See?" he said, with an unholy amount of glee. "I hardly broke any laws at all. I should drive more often."
"No. Trust me, you shouldn't," Eve said. "Think of all the little old people and the children. ~ Rachel Caine

Now that I am older, I am rounder and softer, which isn't always a bad thing. I remember fewer names so I try to focus on someone's eyes instead. Sex is better and I'm better at it. I don't miss the frustration of youth, the anticipation of love and pain, the paralysis of choices still ahead. The pressure of "What are you going to do?" makes everybody feel like they haven't done anything yet. Young people can remind us to take chances and be angry and stop our patterns. Old people can remind us to laugh more and get focused and make friends with our patterns. Young and old need to relax in the moment and live where they are. Be Here Now, ~ Amy Poehler

I never weigh myself, but the brutal truth of television is that they don't employ old people or fat people. ~ Ruby Wax

Mr. Phillips! Are you just getting in for the night? And Lord, have mercy! Where are your pants? ~ Will Willingham

I always hated hearing old people yammering on like this when I was young. And I do what to assure you: I'm aware that many thing were not better in the 1940s. Underarm deodorants and air-conditioning were woefully inadequate, for instance, so everybody stank like crazy, especially in the summer, and also we had Hitler. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Societies who do not care for their young people and old people are decadent, decaying societies. ~ Suzan Shown Harjo

Elderly people are like plants. Whereas some go to seed, or to pot, others blossom in the most wonderful ways. I believe beauty competitions should be held only for people over seventy years of age. When we are young, we have the face and figure God gave us. We did nothing to earn our good looks. But as we get older, character becomes etched on our face. Beautiful old people are works of art. Like a white candle in a holy place, so it the beauty of an aged face. ~ James Simpson

Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead. ~ Bill Bryson

I know it's common for old people to complain about the modern moment, and lament the passing of a golden age when children were polite and you could buy a kilo of meat for pennies, but in our case, my boy, I think I am not mistaken when I say that something fundamental has changed about the world in which we live. We have reached a state of constant reinvention. Revolutions have moved off the battlefield and on to home computers. ~ G. Willow Wilson

Very old people are the real victors of this world! And the bitterish beauty in their faces is the most valuable beauty of the earth! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Appeal with respect to elderly people as you would to the members of your own family. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I like old people when they have aged well. And old houses with an accumulation of sweet honest living in them are good. And the timelessness that only the passing of Time itself can give to objects both inside and outside the spirit is a continuing reassurance. ~ M.F.K. Fisher

You either evolve or you don't. I don't like old people on a rock n' roll stage. I think they look pathetic, me included. And the fact that I represent an era means I can't just go out there and do all new stuff. They would all say, 'Sing 'White Rabbit,' and I'd say no? That's rude. ~ Grace Slick

When there is no feeling of accomplishment, children fail to develop properly and old people rapidly decline. ~ Joe Whitney

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion. ~ Doris Lessing

As one grows older, the sense of separateness is slowly reduced. Old people do not live on an ego level. Their concerns are not about their individuality but about the river of life, the family, the community, the nation, people, animals, nature, life. They can die easily if they are assured that life will continue positively, for they feel part of the river again, and soon they will be part of the ocean. When they are very old, they no longer belong to our time and space, but to all time and all space. ~ Alexander Lowen

We treat old people so badly. There is nothing easy about 80. ~ Jack Klugman

...when you're young you think you'll always be young. Then one day you suddenly wake up and you're over fifty. And the names in the obituary columns are no longer anonymous old people. They're your contemporaries and friends. ~ Jacqueline Susann

Don't tell me God works in mysterious ways,' Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. 'There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about - a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?'
'Pain?' Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife pounced upon the word victoriously. 'Pain is a useful symptom. Pain is a warning to us of bodily dangers.'
'And who created the dangers?' Yossarian demanded ... 'Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us? ~ Joseph Heller

My aim was to create armaments to protect the borders of my motherland. It is not my fault that the Kalashnikov became very well-known in the world; that it was used in many troubled places. I think the policies of these countries are to blame, not the designers. Man is born to protect his family, his children, his wife. But I want you to know that apart from armaments, I have written three books in which I try to educate our youth to show respect for their families, for old people, for history. ~ Mikhail Kalashnikov

Old age is the most precious time of life, the one nearest eternity. There are two ways of growing old. There are old people who are anxious and bitter, living in the past and illusion, who criticize everything that goes on around them. Young people are repulsed by them; they are shut away in their sadness and loneliness, shriveled up in themselves. But there are also old people with a child's heart, who have used their freedom from function and responsibility to find a new youth. They have the wonder of a child, but the wisdom of maturity as well. They have integrated their years of activity and so can live without being attached to power. Their freedom of heart and their acceptance of their limitations and weakness makes them people whose radiance illuminates the whole community. They are gentle and merciful, symbols of compassion and forgiveness. They become a community's hidden treasures, sources of unity and life. They are true contemplatives at the heart of community. ~ Jean Vanier

I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.
I remember how much I used to stutter.
I remember the first time I saw television. Lucille Ball was taking ballet lessons.
I remember Aunt Cleora who lived in Hollywood. Every year for Christmas she sent my brother and me a joint present of one book.
I remember a very poor boy who had to wear his sister's blouse to school.
I remember shower curtains with angel fish on them.
I remember very old people when I was very young. Their houses smelled funny.
I remember daydreams of being a singer all alone on a big stage with no scenery, just one spotlight on me, singing my heart out, and moving my audience to total tears of love and affection.
I remember waking up somewhere once and there was a horse staring me in the face.
I remember saying "thank you" in reply to "thank you" and then the other person doesn't know what to say.
I remember how embarrassed I was when other children cried.
I remember one very hot summer day I put ice cubes in my aquarium and all the fish died.
I remember not understanding why people on the other side of the world didn't fall off. ~ Joe Brainard

We must oppose programs that would take food from the mouths of younger generations to buy prescription drugs for old people, and we must do it ... for the children. ~ L. Neil Smith

In any case, the most lively young people become the best old people, not those who pretend to be as wise as grandfathers while they are still at school. ~ Hermann Hesse

Medicines are only fit for old people. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

They sat in a row on the couches and in wheelchairs listening to the radio, their faded eyes fixed on the fish or on nothing or something they saw a long time ago.
Francis would always remember the shuffle of feet on linoleum in the hot and buzzing day, and the smell of stewed tomatoes and cabbage from the kitchen, the smell of old people like meat wrappers dried in the sun, and always the radio. ~ Thomas Harris

I highly recommend getting older! There's less tendency to people-please. ~ Alanis Morissette

I'm not making music for old people or young people. [It's] for everybody that wants to listen to it. ~ Stromae

I don't like old people on a rock and roll stage. Me included. ~ Grace Slick

Old people don't need companionship. They need to be isolated and studied so it can be determined what nutrients they have that might be extracted for our personal use. ~ Homer

I work at a retirement home. I'm a CNA."
"What's that?"
"It stands for Certified Nursing Assistant."
"That sounds important," I said.
She laughed. "If changing old people's diapers is important."
I thought for a moment, then said, "It is for the old people. ~ Richard Paul Evans

Develop your eccentricities while you are young. That way, when you get old, people won't think you're going gaga. ~ David Ogilvy

Humanity also suffered; though, save in the regions near the seat of war, it was in general only the children and the old people who suffered greatly. ~ Olaf Stapledon

Catholic media sucks. It's boring. It's for old people. It's not interesting. It's like you're in a class with an 80 year old nun. ~ Lino Rulli

Our culture teaches that sex is for the sexy, and the only way to be sexy is to be pretty.
No wait
that's still too weak. Sex should properly arise from sexiness. For unsexy people
fat people, old people, funny-looking people, disabled people
to even feel sexual desire is inappropriate, perverse, disgusting. For them to engage in sexual display is offensive. For them to have sex ... well, there oughta be a law. ~ Vinnie Tesla

Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness. ~ Willa Cather

I stroke them, and they always like that, because old people don't have anyone who touches them, and I get them hooked on a TV series, because nobody wants to die before the final episode. Some of them find comfort in prayer, but there are lots of atheists here, and they don't pray. What's most important is not to leave them on their own. ~ Isabel Allende

Tissue gas was most common in bedsores - big, nasty ones on hospital patients, or on old people who never moved for weeks or months at a time. Gangrene was another possible source of the bacteria, and usually showed up in the same types of cases. It was possible that this body could have developed tissue gas in one of those ways if she'd been held in one place for months on end, without being allowed to move. ~ Dan Wells

Science has salvaged scrap metal and even found vitamins and valuable oils in refuse, but old people are extravagantly wasted. ~ Anzia Yezierska

You're not one of those cranky old people who uses their age as an excuse to be a prick, are you? ~ Corrine Jackson

You know, 'The Golden Girls' was a very unusual show to start on. I was young, and it was a show about old people, and it was a very traditional show, but it was also an amazing training ground for a joke-writer. It forced me to learn those skills. ~ Mitchell Hurwitz

This is the lament of older women, and ultimately of all old people - that you become invisible. It is especially hard for women, though, whose entire lives have been spent spinning around the idea that if no one is staring at you, you've somehow failed. ~ Jessi Klein

The notion of ever more old people needing ever more young people, who in turn will grow old and need ever more young people and so on, ad infinitum, is an obvious ecological Ponzi scheme. ~ David Attenborough