Old Men Quotes

“I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.”
― George McGovern

“I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.”
― William Butler Yeats

“Ignore him," Heather begged. "I do. Constantly." Jean-Luc studied the coach, then turned to Heather with a wary look. "Every man in this town wants you." She laughed. "Yea, right. The old guys from the nursing home go into cardiac arrest whenever I walk by." His gaze drifted over her. "I can believe that.”
― Kerrelyn Sparks, The Undead Next Door

“When we age we shed many skins: ego, arrognace, dominance, self-opionated, unreliable, pessimism, rudeness, selfish, uncaring ... Wow, it's good to be old!”
― Stephen Richards

“You're a mean old man, Your Grace."
"And that is the way it should be." Roial informed. "Mean young men are trivial, and kindly old men boring. Here, let me get us something to drink.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Elantris

“What are you seeking in the Devil’s Book—treasure?” she asks, even though she knows what the Mesmerizer seeks.

“What kind of old man in his nineties would fawn over treasures?” the Mesmerizer chuckles.”
― Misba, The Oldest Dance

“No old Men (excepting Dr. Wallis) love Mathematicks.”
― Isaac Newton

“When the old men kill themselves, the cities are dying.”
― Robert Ludlum, The Matlock Paper

“All these old men want it to be like it was when they were young. But it'll never be like that again, and they'll never be young again, no matter what they do.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“You are the only man I ever respected,' she said. 'But you haven't aged well. You have stayed young. Men who stay young don't age well.”
― Romain Gary, Au-delà de cette limite votre ticket n'est plus valable

“You know, an old man like me can teach a young boy like you all the good things in life. But it takes a young boy like you to teach an old man like me to appreciate all the good things in life. I guess that’s what life’s all about.”
― Wilson Rawls, Summer of the Monkeys

“I don't know what you do about sex and I don't want to know, but this is not the way to go about it. You're what – fifty-two? Do you think a young girl finds any pleasure in going to bed with a man of that age? Do you think she finds it good to watch you in the middle of your...? Do you ever think about that?"

He is silent.

"Don't expect sympathy from me, David, and don't expect sympathy from anyone else either. No sympathy, no mercy, not in this day and age. Everyone's hand will be against you, and why not? Really, how could you?"

The old tone has entered, the tone of the last years of their married life: passionate recrimination. Even Rosalind must be aware of that. Yet perhaps she has a point. Perhaps it is the right of the young to be protected from the sight of their elders in the throes of passion. That is what whores are for, after all: to put up with the ecstasies of the unlovely.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“It made her feel sorry for her husband: she was discovering how vulnerable to flattery a conceited old man could be.”
― Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea

“I’ve always assumed the old men were just there, fixed, like lamps, but in love with their moths.”
― Tom Cardamone, Pacific Rimming

“Even his voice had accrued a certain rancour as though the detritus of words long left unsaid inside the cave of his mouth had become rusty and scattered in tiny bits on the top of his tongue whenever he opened his mouth to speak.”
― Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen

“Or even knows they need attendin to. But I never done it to benefit myself. Shot that thing. Like I kept peace for seven year sake of a man I never knowed nor seen his face and like I seen them fellers never had no business there and if I couldn’t run em off I could anyway let em know they was one man would let on that he knowed what they was up to. But I knowed if they could build it they could build it back and I done it anyway. Ever man loves peace and a old man best of all.”
― Cormac McCarthy

“There is something about geriatric men which attracts them to dangerous ladders.”
― Oliver Darkshire, Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller

“Our only hope has always been that the hate-filled old white guys die off and young people are more progressive.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“The leaf-light flickered on the paper-thin skin of the old men's wrists, the shadows alternating with fading sunlight. They moved in a soft whisper.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“Bleak pushed the chair around a corner so the light of the dying sun stained their faces a healthy red, and added, "Look, life gives us everything. Then it takes it away. Youth, love, happiness, friends. Darkness gets it all in the end. We didn't have enough sense to know you can will it-life-to others. Your looks, your youth. Pass it on. Give it away. It's lent to us for only a while. Use it, let go without crying. It's a very fancy relay race, heading God knows where. Except now, in your last lap of the race, you find no one waiting for you on the track ahead. Nobody for you to hand the stick to.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“It amazed her, the length at which old men could talk. She wondered if it wasn't the sound of his own voice, rather than the words themselves, that pleased him. He had small dull eyes and the only time they lit up was when he was speaking.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“Old men sign war and assign young men to bear arms and die. Is that how the youths become leaders of tomorrow? The aged are really eating their young.”
― Vincent Okay Nwachukwu, Weighty 'n' Worthy African Proverbs - Volume 1

“It may well be that what gives to the wind along that Wessex coast its indescribable mixture of vague sorrow and wild obscure joy comes from its passing, on its unpredictable path, the floating hair of so many love-lorn maidens and the wild-tossed beards of so many desolate old men.”
― John Cowper Powys, The Brazen Head

“I've been in more wars for England than I can remember . . . haven't I paid enough? Risked it all for them, time after time. . . . Why must they torment an old man?”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“The idea that old men become peaceful or philosophical--what shit. One learns to endure, that is all.

[Édouard Manet]”
― Maureen Gibbon, The Lost Notebook of Édouard Manet

“He worried that when he would speak of the past, he would sound and look old, as all ancient storytelling men did.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Our Country Friends

“They say that youths are leaders of tomorrow, and tomorrow is ever coming but never arriving. Old men are leaders of today and today is ever-present. Will the youths ever lead? When?”
― Vincent Okay Nwachukwu

“Years do not make sages; they only make old men”
― Madame Swetchine

“Now I am sitting in the Botanic Gardens. Though the puddles are frozen in the shade, you could sit out for ever so long in the sun without feeling cold. No one there but children with their nurses, and old men with pale, dreamy eyes thinking of nothing, perhaps wondering vaguely if they will hold on to see another spring. I am on a bench overlooking the Kelvin, and have been watching the seagulls. Whole flocks have come up inland from the Clyde. There are rooks too, very noisy and restless, deceived perhaps by the sunshine into thinking the winter is over.”
― Catherine Carswell, The Camomile

“So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, si-lent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow