Old Years Quotes

“It is easy to make friends, but not so easy to keep them in the long term. You cancel a couple of arrangements because you are tired, or it seems too far to travel in traffic, and then next thing you know you have not seen somebody you considered a close friend in over a year. In the small town where I grew up, you saw the same people day in and day out for years. My mother was friends with the girls she went to school with until the day she died. I enjoyed the anonymous freedoms of the city, but now I wondered if I had enjoyed them enough to justify being lonely in my latter years. I missed seeing people every day, meeting old friends and making new ones.”

— Kate Kerrigan

“I am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that I catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what I said to myself about myself when I was sixteen and twenty-six and thirty-six but I am running into a new year and I beg what i love and I leave to forgive me.”

— Lucille Clifton

“The antithetical or perhaps mirror image to sadness is the experience, similarly unique to one's late years, of a swift, mysterious wave of happiness, also causeless, but of much shorter duration. I cannot remember a time, before my sixties, when the consciousness of happiness would sweep over me and, like a shower of cold water when one is desperately overheated, offer me a passing sensation very close to glee.
Both sadness and fleeting happiness relate, I think, to mortality, to the consciousness of being old and of nearing the end of life ... these sensations ... surge up from the unconscious, to be a gift of long life or fortunate old age. Both sadness and happiness, but sadness more, are related to the fact that nothing of all this will endure for long. [p. 179]”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

“How time packs new years over the old ones but how those old years are still in there, like the earliest, tightest rings centering a tree, the most hidden, enclosed in darkness and shielded from weather. But then a saw screams in and the tree topples and the circles are stricken by the sun and the sap glistens and the stump is laid open for the world to see.”

— Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter Crooked Letter

“I've known my mom since I was zero years old. She is quite dope.”

— Kanye West

“Don't worry about the water," said a man with a nervous grin. "This is hardwood, it won't ruin. You'll have this chair into your old years. How much do you have? I'll take anything. My children need to eat."
A few of the businessmen like Mister Mangochi bought things they later gave back. But most people had no money. They simply shrugged and shook their heads.”

— William Kamkwamba

“The old junky has found a vein ... blood blossoms in the dropper like a Chinese flower ... he push home the heroin and the boy who jacked off fifty years ago shine immaculate through the ravaged flesh, fill the outhouse with the sweet nutty smell of young male lust.”

— William S. Burroughs

“And if I went
back to sleep and slept for forty years and woke up without any teeth to the sound of Melody Radio in
an old people's home, I wouldn't worry that much, because the worst of life, i.e., the rest of it, would
be over. And I wouldn't even have had to kill myself.”

— Nick Hornby

“Unburdening, she'd told Laurie about a vision she'd had when she was four or five years old. Unable to sleep on Christmas Eve, she'd tiptoed downstairs and seen a fat bearded man standing in front of her family's tree, checking items off a list. He wasn't wearing a red suit-it was more like a blue bus driver's uniform-but she still recognized him as Santa Claus. She watched him for a while, then snuck back upstairs, her body filled with an ecstatic sense of wonder and confirmation. As a teenager, she convinced herself that the whole thing had been a dream, but it had seemed real at the time, so real that she reported it to her family the next morning as a simple fact. They still jokingly referred to it that way, as though it were a documented historical event-the Night Meg Saw Santa.”

— Tom Perrotta

“I got my first computer at, I don't know, when I was 11 years old? 10?”

— Jeff Moss

“That wasn't a true dream, but an ancient organic memory millions of years old. The innate releasing mechanisms laid down in your cytoplasm have been awakened. The expanding sun and rising temperatures are driving you back down to the spinal levels into the drowned seas of the lowest layers of your unconscious, into the entirely new zone of the neuronic psyche. This is the lumbar transfer, total psychic recall. We really remember these swamps and lagoons.”

— J.G. Ballard

“God, it sucks to disappoint your parents, even at forty-two years old.”

— Lauren Myracle

“Speaking generally, sociability stands in inverse ratio with age. A little child raises a piteous cry of fright if it is left alone for only a few minutes; and later on, to be shut up by itself is a great punishment. Young people soon get on very friendly terms with one another; it is only the few among them of any nobility of mind who are glad now and then to be alone;-but to spend the whole day thus would be disagreeable. A grown-up man can easily do it; it is little trouble to him to be much alone, and it becomes less and less trouble as he advances in years. An old man who has outlived all his friends, and is either indifferent or dead to the pleasures of life, is in his proper element in solitude; and in individual cases the special tendency to retirement and seclusion will always be in direct proportion to intellectual capacity. For”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

“I lived in upstate New York until I was ten years old and we moved overseas. I have a lot of nostalgic memories of that part of the world, and I love going back there by writing the Lakeshore books.”

— Susan Wiggs

“I was 12 years old, so auditioning for a TV show was something I didn't even think really happened. The next thing you know, I ended up booking the gig and I did four seasons on 'Emily of New Moon.' I got to learn on the job and kept going from there.”

— Shawn Roberts

“The old religion is what gets the crops up and keeps your cock hard and makes sure that nobody builds a bloody great motorway through an area of outstanding natural beauty. The Gateway stands, and the hill stands, and the place stands. It's well, well over two thousand years old. You don't go mucking about with anything that powerful.”

— Neil Gaiman

“The first painting that I realised I liked was 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' by Hieronymus Bosch, when I was six years old, at the Prado in Madrid. I still find myself returning there every time I'm in the city.”

— Carolina Herrera

“When I was born, I was almost fourteen years old. That's why I was able to understand more easily than most what it was all about.”

— Eugène Ionesco

“The decision to write full time was made when I was twenty-eight years old and had just had two small plays accepted for BBC Radio.”

— Douglas Kennedy

“In youth the days are short and the years are long. In old age the years are short and day's long.”

— Pope Paul VI

“My stepfather gave me a Kodak camera when I was 17 years old. I started working at a local photo store in Le Havre, France, taking passport pictures and photographing weddings.”

— Patrick Demarchelier

“You did not wake me," Maester Aemon replied. "I find I need less sleep as I grow older, and I am grown very old. I often spend half the night with ghosts, remembering times fifty years past as if they were yesterday. The mystery of a midnight visitor is a welcome diversion. So tell me, Jon Snow, why have you come calling at this strange hour?”

— George R.R. Martin

“Steve Laurence is the only person that was on the first 'Tonight Show,' right to the end. He was a little high school boy, 14 years old.”

— Jayne Meadows

“To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.”

— Susan Sontag

“They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words - words are for "typeheads," Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips - their only proficient vocabulary is in the society's platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from "a broken home." They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.”

— Joan Didion

“When high school students ask to spend their afternoons and weekends in my laboratory, I am amazed: I didn't develop that kind of enthusiasm for science until I was 28 years old.”

— Harold E. Varmus

“I didn't actually know what a vegetarian was until I was 13 years old. I know in this day and age it's hard to believe that, but I think because I grew up on a farm, I wasn't indulged in magazines, newspapers, Internet, television. And so, for some reason, I was never exposed to what a vegetarian was.”

— Abbie Cornish

“When I was at school, I was in choirs more than anything else, from a very young age, about 9 years old. And then I started taking drum lessons.”

— Ben Barnes

“Robert Sandler is a child who died when he was three years old, and he is a child who was the first child that we know of to be treated with chemotherapy.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

“An accident of brain development stacked the deck against children: the mother had three or four years to fuck with your head before your hippocampus began recording lasting memories. You'd been talking to your mom since you were one year old and listening to her for even longer, but you couldn't remember a single word of what you or she had said before your hippocampus kicked into gear. Your”

— Jonathan Franzen

“I started out in a professional choir at 13 years old. We traveled to different places, and I had a close relationship with the leaders of our choir. We were recording when I was 15, so it wasn't like I had to wait until 25 to find out certain things.”

— Yolanda Adams

“I doubt if I shall ever have time to read the book again
there are too many new ones coming out all the time which I want to read. Yet an old book has something for me which no new book can ever have
for at every reading the memories and atmosphere of other readings come back and I am reading old years as well as an old book.”

— L.M. Montgomery

“Speaking of WAMU, [bluegrass and old time music DJ] Ray Davis did a lot of work there. I've know Ray, I guess for 50 years - 40, or 50 years. And, he plays a lot of my records.”

— Ralph Stanley

“The boy who initiated me into smack, who I will call Tim, was at that time eighteen years old, and came from Castlemilk. His life was a helter-skelter ride of drug-fuelled binges.”

— Stephen Richards

“I was raised very, very strictly with Christian Science. I didn't have a shot or an aspirin or anything until I was 13 years old. We had to go to church, do testimonies every Wednesday night. I think all religion is based on what happens after this life. You live a certain way so that when you die, things can be good. But why can't things be good now? Why can't you understand that you're in heaven now? That's how I live. I believe in God. I think that God is everywhere. Every morning I look outside, and I say, "Hi, God." Because I think that the trees are God. I think that our whole experience is God.”

— Ellen DeGeneres

“When the year turns, there are bells on the wind. All the old years fall on the ground in lights.”

— Jayne Anne Phillips

“FBI laboratory scientists said Sunday they have determined that the anthrax mailed to Senate offices last fall was fresh. They say it's only two years old. If the stuff is two years old and it's still fresh, it's not anthrax, it's Velveeta.”

— Argus Hamilton

“When I was a kid, three years old, I couldn't walk by the piano without reaching up and trying to play a few notes on it. There are kids who are just drawn to listening to music and dancing to it and trying to conduct.”

— Michael Tilson Thomas

“I'm blessed, because I enjoy every part of my life. I enjoy writing songs. I've been trying to write songs since I was five years old.”

— Smokey Robinson

“A is for Alibi, my first book, was published in 1982. As it happened the next couple of books took place in June and August of that year. Without meaning to I painted myself into a corner. The other issue was the aging process. I did not want my main character to age one year for every book so I slowed the whole process down. This way I could get through all 26 letters of the alphabet without making her 109 years old in 2015. I might end the series in either 1990 or on New Years Eve 1989.”

— Sue Grafton

“The big leap that happened to me and my business came to me when one of my rules disappeared ... So much of what we believed about money was complete bullshit. An old rule that we'd been carrying around for years suddenly vanished.”

— Vishen Lakhiani

“I've always been into leopard print. No joke, when I was 14 years old I wanted my entire room to be covered in it.”

— Kim Kardashian

“I know I ain't too old. I always think of my fans about 10 years older and 10 years younger than me.”

— Ice Cube

“FORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.”

— Edsger Dijkstra

“I was about 16 years old years when my father took me to a square dance festival in North Carolina. For the first time in my life, I found there was music in my country that you never heard on the radio, and you didn't hear on the juke boxes, and in theaters. I fell in love with it, especially the long-necked banjos.”

— Pete Seeger

“You had every right to be. He raised his eyes to look at her and she was suddenly and strangely reminded of being four years old at the beach, crying when the wind came up and blew away the castle she had made. Her mother had told her she could make another one if she liked, but it hadn't stopped her crying because what she had thought was permanent was not permanent after all, but only made out of sand that vanished at the touch of wind and water.”

— Cassandra Clare

“When I was 18 years old, about to develop my sportsman career, the asthma complaints became already some years before.”

— Cathy Freeman

“More wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of the ocean. Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. All my days I have watched it and listened to it, and I know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more distant in space and time.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

“We are, always, reminded of the old saw: What would happen if the Soviet Union took over the Sahara Desert? Answer: Nothing for 50 years. After that there would be a shortage of sand.”

— William F. Buckley, Jr.

“And the look on her face as she opened the door Was like an old joke told by a friend. It'd taken ten more years but she'd found her smile And I watched the corners start to bend.”

— Harry Chapin