Crotchety Old Men Quotes

“Why hell, look at us. Old men alone. Decrepit old bachelors out here in the country seventeen miles from the closest town which don't amount to much of a good goddamn even when you get there. Think of us. Crotchety and ignorant. Lonesome. Independent. Set in all our ways. How you going to change now at this age of life?

I can't say, Raymond said. But I'm going to. That's what I know.”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong

“Shall I confess it, Mr. Hartright? I sadly want a reform in the construction of children. Nature's only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise.”
― Wilkie Collins

“That girl's still here," old M . said, as if he were reading her thoughts.
"Yes, I know."
"She's been here a month. I told Hat she could come here for Christmas and now she says she can't afford to go home. Doesn't want to, I expect, for she says it's all ruins and Russians and her mother's dead and I don't know what. Boo-hoo and all that, when I mention it. Can't get much out of her."
Maud wondered how he got anything, since he and Who's-it spoke different languages. "Well, why not let her stay?" she suggested.
"Stay! Stay here? My dear Maud, think what she eats. This place isn't an orphanage..."
Old M. rumbled on, and when he had finished she said calmly, "You'd have to pay her, of course. She has a permit to work in England and she wants to stay, and I think..."
"Pay her! Do you think I'm made of money?"
"No. But I think you can afford to pay Who's-it, and you must remember that she'd be a wonderful bargain. She works far harder than the others. She'd be like two housemaids for the price of one."
It was hard for old M. to resist a wonderful bargain, and perhaps like Oliver he had noticed the hot bath-water and the other improvements Who's-it had brought about...”
― Elizabeth Fair, A Winter Away

“Kant wrote a treatise on The Vital Powers. I should prefer to write a dirge for them. The superabundant display of vitality, which takes the form of knocking, hammering, and tumbling things about, has proved a daily torment to me all my life long. There are people, it is true—nay, a great many people—who smile at such things, because they are not sensitive to noise; but they are just the very people who are also not sensitive to argument, or thought, or poetry, or art, in a word, to any kind of intellectual influence. The reason of it is that the tissue of their brains is of a very rough and coarse quality. On the other hand, noise is a torture to intellectual people. In the biographies of almost all great writers, or wherever else their personal utterances are recorded, I find complaints about it; in the case of Kant, for instance, Goethe, Lichtenberg, Jean Paul; and if it should happen that any writer has omitted to express himself on the matter, it is only for want of an opportunity.”
― Schopenhauer Arthur