Senile Quotes

Nurse, if she didn't have more money than any person ought to have, you might be tempted to call it senile dementia. As it is, she is in for a rest and a check-up. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

The reason I might forget something is because my mind is like a computer. I have so much useless stuff stored up in there, that when I forget to clean out my Mind's Cache, it has no room for new information. Like wearing pants! ~ James Hauenstein

Maybe I`m getting to the age when I`m starting to be senile or nostalgic or both, but people are so angry now. You used to be able to disagree with people and still be friends. Now you hear these talk shows, and everyone who believes differently from you is a moron and an idiot - both on the Right and the Left. ~ Clint Eastwood

Anyone who claimed that old age had brought them patience was either lying or senile. ~ Robert Jordan

You're old. You're senile. You're too calm about this. Something must be wrong ... "
"Wonderful. I'll pull out my hair and chase butterflies around the room. ~ John Grisham

Your wrinkles either show that you're nasty, cranky, and senile, or that you're always smiling. ~ Carlos Santana

Maybe I am senile already and people are too kind to tell me. People are not kind and would tell me. (Maybe people have told me, and I'm too senile to remember). ~ Joseph Heller

Has it ever occurred to you that married couples endure watching their spouses grow old and feeble and senile all the time? That it's part of marriage? A hard part, to be sure, but not so hard that one just gives up on the institution altogether. ~ Sabrina Jeffries

And I think a long time ago there were big stories. Stories so big you could live your whole life in them. The Powerful Hands of the Gods and Fate. The Journey to Enlightenment. The March of Socialism. But they all died or the world grew up or grew senile or forgot them, so now we're making up our own stories. Little stories. But we've each got one. ~ Mark Ravenhill

They came to a bend in the road where it turned more west than north, and there at the turn was a squat fir tree that for the last quarter mile Hadrian had suspected might be a bear.

Coincidentally, at the same time as they passed the tree, Hadrian finally reached the conclusion that Arcadius was senile. The man was old to be sure. Older than anyone he'd ever met. Older even than his father, who at the time of his departure was the oldest man in Hintindar-though everyone said he carried his age well. The professor didn't carry his age well at all, and old folks sometimes went batty. One didn't even need to be that old. Hadrian knew a warlord in the Gur Em who spoke of himself as if he were another person in the room. Sometimes he got in arguments to the point of refusing to speak to himself anymore and insisted others relay messages "to that idiot." And the warlord was nowhere near Arcadius's age. The best that could be said for Arcadius was that he carried his insanity well. So well in fact that it took Hadrian all the way to the bear tree to conclude the professor was crazy.

He had to be. There was just no sense in asking him to pair up with Royce. ~ Michael J. Sullivan

When I was young I was called a rugged individualist. When I was in my fifties I was considered eccentric. Here I am doing and saying the same things I did then and I'm labeled senile. ~ George Burns

He types his labored column - weary drudge! Senile fudge and solemn: spare, editor, to condemn these dry leaves of his autumn. ~ Robertson Davies

When you become senile, you won't know it. ~ Bill Cosby

She thinks she knows everything that goes on inside me, and she doesn't know a thing. What did she want from me – to tell the truth all the time? To run around saying it did matter to me that I live in a world where you can grow old and be alone and have to get down on your hands and knees and beg for friends? A place where people just sort of forget about you because you get a little old and your mind's a bit senile or silly? Did she think that didn't bother me underneath? ~ Paul Zindel

When the senile patient awakens in the morning and asks for his mother, remind him that she is long since dead, that he is over eighty years old and living in a convalescent home, and that this is 1992 and not 1913 and that he must face reality and the fact that ~ Philip K. Dick

Develop your eccentricities early, and no one will think you're going senile later in life ~ David Ogilvy

I cut an orange from the branch so that I could taste Palestine, but Umm Hassan yelled, "No! It's not for eating, it's Palestine." I was ashamed of myself and hung the branch on the wall of the sitting room in my house, and when you came to visit me and saw the mouldy fruit, you yelled, "What's that smell?" And I told you the story and watched you explode in anger.
"You should have eaten the oranges," you told me.
"But Umm Hassan stopped me and said they were from the homeland."
"Umm Hassan's senile," you answered. "You should have eaten the oranges, because the homeland is something we have to eat, not let it eat us. We have to eat the oranges of Palestine, and we have to eat Palestine and Galilee."
It came to me then that you were right, but the oranges were going bad. You went to the wall and pulled off the branch, and I took it from your hand and stood there confused, not knowing what to do with that bunch of decay.
"What are you going to do?" you asked.
"Bury it," I said.
"Why bury it?" you asked.
"I'm not going to throw it away, because it's from the homeland."
You took the branch and threw it in the rubbish.
"What a scandal!" you said. "What are these old women's superstitions? Before hanging the homeland up on the wall, it'd be better to knock down the wall and leave. We have to eat every orange in the world and not be afraid, because the homeland isn't oranges. The homeland is us. ~ Elias Khoury

It is pardonable for children to yell that they believe in fairies, but it is somehow sinister when the piping note shifts from the puerile to the senile. ~ Christopher Hitchens

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me. ~ Stephen King

The moment I entered the bright, buzzing lobby of Men's House I was overcome by a sense of alienation and hostility … The lobby was the meeting place for various groups still caught up in the illusions that had just been boomeranged out of my head: college boys working to return to school down South; older advocates of racial progress with utopian schemes for building black business empires; preachers ordained by no authority except their own, without church or congregation, without bread or wine, body or blood; the community "leaders" without followers; old men of sixty or more still caught up in post-Civil War dreams of freedom within segregation; the pathetic ones who possessed noting beyond their dreams of being gentlemen, who held small jobs or drew small pensions, and all pretending to be engaged in some vast, though obscure, enterprise, who affected the pseudo-courtly manners of certain southern congressmen and bowed and nodded as they passed like senile old roosters in a barnyard; they younger crowd for whom I now felt a contempt such as only a disillusioned dreamer feels for those still unaware that they dream - the business students from southern colleges, for whom business was a vague, abstract game with rules as obsolete as Noah's Ark but who yet were drunk on finance. ~ Ralph Ellison

The trouble with being a rock of sense is that, eventually, you lose the sense and become the rock. ~ Stewart Stafford

They say that doing ten sums a day prevents you from becoming senile. But by that argument bankers should be geniuses. That's not right. Thickest heads in the world. ~ Annie Proulx

Zia's senile grandfather? Nope. That was Ra, god of the sun, first divine pharaoh of Egypt and archenemy of Apophis. Last spring we'd gone on a quest to find him and revive him from his twilight sleep, trusting he would rise in all his glory and fight the Chaos snake for us. ~ Rick Riordan

March 1. DEAR BABY: I like the way you turn in half circles on the mattress, like a senile clock. ~ Karen Russell

(I was) slightly suspicious of these babbling children of intellectuals who were themselves babblers, my schoolmates who had already produced the next senile generation . . . I had noticed that behind their masks people were actually unhelpful, cold, brutally indifferent toward everything that at the moment did not fall within the sphere of their immediate interest. ~ Miroslav Krleza

It's human nature to view life from our own reality.
This causes serious problems when a rescue mission is being led by the senile or insane. ~ Jaime Buckley

​"Sure there's a hell..." I could hear him saying it now, now, as I lay here on bed with her breath in my face, and her body squashed against me... "It is the drab desert where the sun sheds neither warmth nor light and Habit force-feeds senile Desire. It is the place here mortal Want dwells with immortal Necessity, and the night becomes hideous with the groans of one and the ecstatic shrieks of the other. Yes, there is a hell, my boy, and you do not have to dig for it. ~ Jim Thompson

Psycho? The woman's senile. We had to stop at about thirty gas stations on the way over here. Finally I got tired of getting out of the car and showing her which was the Men's and which was the Women's, so I let her pick them herself. I worked out a system. The law of averages. I laid money on her and she came out about fifty-fifty. ~ John Kennedy Toole

But truly, the Autumn Provinces provide the most ideal situation for our program. Autumn is the very soul of metamorphosis, a time when the world is poised at the door of winter - which is the door of death - but has not yet fallen. It is a world of contradictions: a time of harvest and plenty but also of cold and hardship. Here we dwell in the midst of life, but we know most keenly that all things must pass away and shrivel. Autumn turns the world from one thing into another. The year is seasoned and wise but not yet decrepit or senile. If you wrote a letter of requisition, you could ask for no better place to practice alchemy. ~ Catherynne M. Valente

Don't ever get old. With each year that passes, the old Viking idea of jumping off a cliff to one's death looks better and better. The only thing to hope for is that you get so senile that you think you're twenty years old again. That would be fun to relive. ~ Camilla Lackberg

Inside me, there is an organ more important than my heart. Although you can't see it, I feel it going right through my head and down to my legs, and I know that it exists inside me. It's the one that lets me stand up and walk forward. So that I can walk forward, without ever trembling. If I stopped here I feel like it would break...My soul would break. Even more than if my heart stops beating, to me that is the most important. Even if I become senile and my back gets bent, I still have to walk forward. ~ Hideaki Sorachi

The breakdown of the neighborhoods also meant the end of what was essentially an extended family....With the breakdown of the extended family, too much pressure was put on the single family. Mom had no one to stay with Granny, who couldn't be depended on to set the house on fire while Mom was off grocery shopping. The people in the neighborhood weren't there to keep an idle eye out for the fourteen-year-old kid who was the local idiot, and treated with affection as well as tormented....So we came up with the idea of putting everybody in separate places. We lock them up in prisons, mental hospitals, geriatric housing projects, old-age homes, nursery schools, cheap suburbs that keep women and the kids of f the streets, expensive suburbs where everybody has their own yard and a front lawn that is tended by a gardener so all the front lawns look alike and nobody uses them anyway....the faster we lock them up, the higher up goes the crime rate, the suicide rate, the rate of mental breakdown. The way it's going, there'll be more of them than us pretty soon. Then you'll have to start asking questions about the percentage of the population that's not locked up, those that claim that the other fifty-five per cent is crazy, criminal, or senile.
WE have to find some other way....So I started imagining....Suppose we built houses in a circle, or a square, or whatever, connected houses of varying sizes, but beautiful, simple. And outside, behind the houses, all the space usually given ~ Marilyn French

I asked him once what he believed to be the basic flaw in the character of Germans, and he replied "obedience." When I consider the ghastly orders obeyed by underlings of Columbus, or of Aztec priests supervising human sacrifices, or of senile Chinese bureaucrats wishing to silence unarmed, peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square only three years ago as I write, I have to wonder if obedience isn't the basic flaw in most of humankind. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the 'lord of terrible aspect,' is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. ~ C.S. Lewis

He had senile dementia and liked to go outside naked, but he could still do two things perfectly: win at checkers and write out prescriptions. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

You saved my life. I never want to forget that. Even when I'm old and senile. Even if we drift apart. No matter what happens, I will always hold you close to my heart. ~ Eden Summers

Two things happen when you get to be old. One, you gather experience and knowledge. You learn from your mistakes, and thereby offer wisdom to others. The second thing that happens is that you grow forgetful, ornery and senile, and when you offer advice, well, you sometimes just don't know what you're talking about. Often it's hard for everyone-including me-to know the difference. ~ Camron Wright

I am of you," said Kip."I am Guile as much as you are. True, I have a scrap of decency, but only a scrap. How do you think you can treat a Guile with such disregard and get away with it? Because I am you. I'm as cold as you, I'm as smart as you, and when you push me, I'm as evil and cruel as you. I have a thin film of goodness floating on the top of my Guile, grandfather, but I don't know how senile you must be to miss just how thin it is. ~ Brent Weeks

Sometimes Valène dreamt of cataclysms and tempests, of whirlwinds that would carry the whole house off like a wisp of straw and display the infinite marvels of the solar system to its shipwrecked inhabitants; or that an unseen crack would run through the building from top to bottom, like a shiver, and with a long, deep, snapping sound it would open in two and be slowly swallowed up in an indescribable yawning chasm; then hordes would overrun it, bleary-eyed monsters, giant insects with steel mandibles, blind termites, great white worms with insatiable mouths: the wood would crumble, the stone would turn to sand, the cupboards would collapse under their own weight, all would return to dust. But no. Only these shabby squabbles over buckets and tubs, over matches and sinks. And behind that ever-closed door the morbid gloom of that slow revenge, that ponderous business of two senile monomaniacs churning over their feigned histories and their wretched traps and snares. ~ Georges Perec

Most people do not have a problem with being old. They have a problem with looking old. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I am old, not senile, ~ Sharon Ashwood

Jesus Christ is not a cosmic errand boy. I mean no disrespect or irreverence in so saying, but I do intend to convey the idea that while he loves us deeply and dearly, Christ the Lord is not perched on the edge of heaven, anxiously anticipating our next wish. When we speak of God being good to us, we generally mean that he is kind to us. In the words of the inimitable C. S. Lewis, "What would really satisfy us would be a god who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?' We want, in fact, not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven--a senile benevolence who as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves,' and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all.'" You know and I know that our Lord is much, much more than that.

One writer observed: "When we so emphasize Christ's benefits that he becomes nothing more than what his significance is 'for me' we are in danger. . . . Evangelism that says 'come on, it's good for you'; discipleship that concentrates on the benefits package; sermons that 'use' Jesus as the means to a better life or marriage or job or attitude--these all turn Jesus into an expression of that nice god who always meets my spiritual needs. And this is why I am increasingly hesitant to speak of Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. As Ken Woodward put it in a 1994 essay, 'Now I think we all need to be ~ Robert L. Millet

All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. People in trains, who lay their newspaper aside, fold their silly arms, and immediately, with an offensive familiarity of demeanour, start snoring, amaze me as much as the uninhibited chap who cozily defecates in the presence of a chatty tubber, or participates in huge demonstrations, or joins some union in order to dissolve in it. Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing. The strain and drain of composition often force me, alas, to swallow a strong pill that gives me an hour or two of frightful nightmares or even to accept the comic relief of a midday snooze, the way a senile rake might totter to the nearest euthanasium; but I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Things are much more complicated. Feminism versus pornography, for example. There are a lot of feminists who think it is bad, but others think it's good. I have become, you might call it mature - I would call it senile - and I can see both sides. But you can't write a satirical song with 'but on the other hand' in it, or 'however'. It's got to be one-sided. ~ Tom Lehrer

It was like having two children in the car with her. Okay, one child and a young adult that
kept backsliding. Hal, of course, was attempting to prove he was really only eight years old.
Taggart could resist the taunting part of the time. Nigel was the senile grandmother who never
noticed that the children were fighting. He sat in the backseat, smiling serenely at the passing
landscape. What made things worse was that Taggart called shotgun so he could film through the
front window. That made it so she couldn't reach Hal to swat him into silence. She found herself
tempted to hit Taggart just because he was beside her. And because he'd changed into a dark blue
silk shirt and cologne that smelled so good she just wanted to roll in it.
"I can kill us all," Jane growled, gripping the wheel tightly, and resisted the urge to drive the
production truck into the ditch to prove her point.
Somehow they reached downtown without her killing anyone. ~ Wen Spencer

Death has been tolerable to me only because Death has been the Great Democrat, treating all alike. But now Death plays favorites. Zaccur Barstow, can you understand the bitter, bitter jealousy of the ordinary man of-oh, say‚ fifty- who looks on one of your sort? Fifty years . . . twenty of them he is a child, he is well past thirty before he is skilled in his profession. He is forty before he is established and respected. For not more than the last ten years of his fifty he has really amounted to something." Ford leaned forward in the screen and spoke with sober emphasis: "And now, when he has reached his goal, what is his prize? His eyes are failing him, his bright young strength is gone, his heart and wind are‚ not what they used to be. He is not senile yet . . . but he feels the chill of the first frost. He knows what is in store for him. He knows-he knows! ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART. ~ Joseph Beuys

I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will depend on my being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia. ~ John Berryman

Soon I'll be old and I've done precious little in this world for lack of time. I am always afraid I'll become senile before I've finished what I've undertaken. ~ Paul Gauguin

the senile, lecherous expression of a camel. ~ Yann Martel

Anti-theses.- The most senile thing ever thought about man is contained in the celebrated saying 'the ego is always hateful'; the most childish is the even more celebrated 'love thy neighbor as thyself'. - In the former, knowledge of human nature has ceased, in the latter it has not yet even begun. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I'll never stop writing. It's one occupation in which being crazy, even senile, might help. ~ Fritz Leiber

When we sleep on someone else's pillow, we sometimes find ourselves having that person's dreams. If a married couple switches sides of the bed, for example, he will have her dreams for a while and she will have his. Nothing of the sort occurs in a hotel bed, naturally, for the simple reason that no one person has slept there long enough to leave a psychic imprint. Is the connection to the bedding place or to the space below it? Perhaps we draw up trans-neurological info-bits from the underworld to form dreams the way that exposed metal draws down oxygen molecules from the air to form rust. Dreams, the, may be a form of psychic oxidation. Each morning, the greasy rag of wakefulness wipes us clean. Sooner or later, however, we rust completely through, at which point we lose tensility, conductivity, and clear definition; turn senile or go bonkers; fade away. If we applied the rag more rigorously, this might not happen. which is why the message of Miho's Zen monks-the message of mystic masters everywhere-was and is, "Wake up! Wake up! ~ Tom Robbins

When Christianity says that God loves man it means that God LOVES man: not that He has some 'disinterested'; because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the 'lord of terrible aspect', is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds...
...How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes. It is certainly a burden of glory, not only beyond our deserts but also, except in rare moments of grace, beyond our desiring; we are inclined, like the maidens in the old play, to deprecate the love of Zeus. ~ C.S. Lewis

...if any single religion were in fact true, the Observer would have - indeed _should have_ already seen that religion emerge naturally and entirely unassisted wherever human beings were found, regardless of their isolation or epoch. It's deity (or deities) would wear a single hat, carry a single name and speak a single language audible to the deaf, coherent to infants, understood by the demented, and intelligible to the senile. [...] No religion has however emerged twice anywhere on the planet [...] not a solitary person in history has arrived independently at Mithraism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Scientology or Judaism without if first being taught to them. ~ John Zande

Neliss, why is this rug wet?"
Legna peeked around the corner to glance at the rug in question, looking as if she had never seen it before.
"We have a rug there?"
"Did you or did you not promise me you were not going to practice extending how long you can hold your invisible bowls of water in the house? And what on earth is that noise?"
"Okay, I confess to the water thing, which was an honest mistake, I swear it. But as for a noise, I have no idea what you are talking about."
"You cannot hear that? It has been driving me crazy for days now. It just repeats over and over again, a sort of clicking sound."
"Well, it took a millennium, but you have finally gone completely senile. Listen, this is a house built by Lycanthropes. It is more a cave than a house, to be honest. I have yet to decorate to my satisfaction. There is probably some gizmo of some kind lying around, and I will come across it eventually or it will quit working the longer it is exposed to our influence. Even though I do not hear anything, I will start looking for it. Is this satisfactory?"
"I swear, Magdelegna, I am never letting you visit that Druid ever again."
"Oh, stop it. You do not intimidate me, as much as you would love to think you do. Now, I will come over there if you promise not to yell at me anymore. You have been quite moody lately."
"I would be a hell of a lot less moody if I could figure out what that damn noise is."
Legna came around the corner, mo ~ Jacquelyn Frank

Wild animals almost never die of old age: starvation, disease, or predators catch up with them long before they become really senile. Until recently this was true of man too. Most animals die in childhood, many never get beyond the egg stage. Starvation and other causes of death are the ultimate reasons why populations cannot increase indefinitely. ~ Richard Dawkins

I attended a very small junior high and specially in the end that became a disaster. The principal was pretty senile and a drunk, so the children more or less runned the school. ~ Jonathan Brandis

I'm plotting revolution against this lie that the majority has a monopoly of the truth. What are these truths that always bring the majority rallying round? Truths so elderly they are practically senile. And when a truth is as old as that, gentlemen, you can hardly tell it from a lie. ~ Henrik Ibsen

Poetry is a will to put things right, an imaginary solution, a way of avoiding a catastrophe that already happened. Poetry is an escape, perhaps intelligent, perhaps idiotic, from a senile situation. It is a dialectical movement, it keeps tearing open the wounds while trying to heal them. Here we see the only acceptable path open up towards an existence worthy of human beings. Here the seriousness is unfaltering and absolute. Where it will lead no one knows. ~ Aase Berg

I was like, JUST GREAT! Grandma is finally going SENILE! Doesn't she understand that some things in life you're STUCK with and powerless to change?! Jeez! ~ Rachel Renee Russell

Computers, however, have nothing better to do; keeping track is their only job. They don't lose the scrapbook, or travel, or get drunk, or grow senile, or even blink. They just sit there and remember. ~ Christian Rudder

During the crushing insomnia brought on by his asthma he would measure and remeasure the depth of his misfortune as he went through the shadowy house where the senile fussing of Úrsula had instilled a fear of the world in him. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

How did it die?" he asked.
"Short circuit," I said. "Old and frayed wires."
He looked at me like I was senile.
"Could have been disease. Violence. Or, sometimes, things die because we don't love them enough. ~ Jonathan Messinger

So, you tumbled that wolf you were with?" Mercy was too much a pack animal to take offense at the personal question. She grinned. "How did you know it was me?" "Do I look senile to you?"
...
"Yes," Mercy said. "And I'm not doing it again." If she kept telling herself that, maybe her traitorous body would actually notice and shut up with its demands. The older woman gave her a sour look. "Damn shame. What, you like them prettier?" A snort. "In my day, we liked men who looked like men. ~ Nalini Singh

Look at the four-spaced year
That imitates four seasons of our lives;
First Spring, that delicate season, bright with flowers,
Quickening, yet shy, and like a milk-fed child,
Its way unsteady while the countryman
Delights in promise of another year.
Green meadows wake to bloom, frail shoots and grasses,
And then Spring turns to Summer's hardiness,
The boy to manhood. There's no time of year
Of greater richness, warmth, and love of living,
New strength untried. And after Summer, Autumn,
First flushes gone, the temperate season here
Midway between quick youth and growing age,
And grey hair glinting when the head turns toward us,
Then senile Winter, bald or with white hair,
Terror in palsy as he walks alone. ~ Ovid

Again, how will we keep them loyal? What measures can ensure our machines stay true to us? Once artificial intelligence matches our own, won't they then design even better ai minds? Then better still, with accelerating pace? At worst, might they decide (as in many cheap dramas), to eliminate their irksome masters? At best, won't we suffer the shame of being nostalgically tolerated? Like senile grandparents or beloved childhood pets? Solutions? Asimov proposed Laws of Robotics embedded at the level of computer DNA, weaving devotion toward humanity into the very stuff all synthetic minds are built from, so deep it can never be pulled out. But what happens to well-meant laws? Don't clever lawyers construe them however they want? Authors like Asimov and Williamson foresaw supersmart mechanicals becoming all-dominant, despite deep programming to "serve man. ~ David Brin

The houses all seemed a little senile, with arthritc hinges and window screens hanging at embarrassing angles. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Jordan, there isn't a straight woman or gay man alive who wouldn't drop everything to have dinner with you. I've been in this business for all of my life, and I know the difference between people who pretend to like you to get ahead, and people who are actually interested in getting to know you. Patrick wants to get to know you. Preferably naked, but that's up to you."
"I can't wait until you're old enough to be senile and start saying these things in public."
"I'm very lucky to have such a loving son. ~ Matthew Haldeman-Time

Autumn is the very soul of metamorphosis, a time when the world is poised at the door of winter - which is the door of death - but has not yet fallen. It is a world of contradictions: a time of harvest and plenty but also of cold and hardship. Here we dwell in the midst of life, but we know most keenly that all things must pass away and shrivel. Autumn turns the world from one thing into another. The year is seasoned and wise but not yet decrepit or senile. ~ Catherynne M Valente

All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent ~ Tennessee Williams

All the nut eaters and food faddists I have ever known, died early after a long period of senile decay - Winston Churchill ~ Stuart Finlay

But a haiku by Buson came into his mind: 'I try to forget this senile love; a chilly autumn shower.' The gloom only grew denser. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

We want, in fact, not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven: a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all." ~ C.S. Lewis