Old Fifties Quotes & Sayings

I didn't know I had a heart, but it won't stop bleeding. — Kashif Ross

Many were starting to use computerized synthesizers & drum machines to produce an entirely new style of music. It was being punted by the critics that the guitar was old hat; I was reminded of the way my father & his clarinets were written off in the late Fifties. — Pete Townshend

Free, free! what a glorious ring to the word. Free! the bitter heart-struggle was over. Free! the soul could go out to heaven and to God with no chains to clog its flight or pull it down. Free! the earth wore a brighter look, and the very stars seemed to sing with joy. Yes, free! free by the laws of man and the smile of God-and Heaven bless them who made me so! — Elizabeth Keckley

The one good thing to be said about announcing yourself as a writer in the colonial Canadian fifties is that nobody told me I couldn't do it because I was a girl. They simply found the entire proposition ridiculous. Writers were dead and English, or else extremely elderly and American; they were not sixteen years old and Canadian. — Margaret Atwood

Cal had told her all girls had it, it was natural as breathing,, it was a sign they were growing up, and they had it until they were in their fifties. At the time, Jean Louise was so overcome with despair at the prospect of being too old to enjoy anything when it would finally be over, she refrained from pursuing the subject. — Harper Lee

Generally, older people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies are running most countries and are CEOs of corporations. Which isn't to say there aren't entrepreneurs, but if the young were better in every respect, there'd be no reason for the old. Our life span reflects our particular life strategy. — Cynthia Kenyon

There are a lot of things I'm proud of, but the proudest have yet to come. — Barry Harris

When I was a teenager, I looked at over-fifties with pity and unease: they walked too slow, they talked too slow, they watched TV instead of going out to movies and concerts, their idea of a great party was hotpot with the neighbors and tucked into bed after the eleven o'clock news. But - like most other fifty-, sixty-, and seventysomethings who are in relative good health - I didn't mind it so much when my turn came. Because the brain doesn't age, although its ideas about the world may harden and there's a greater tendency to run off at the mouth about how things were in the good old days. — Stephen King

I believe we must do things in our lives for the right reasons, because we enjoy doing them, with no expectation of getting something back in return. Otherwise, we are constantly being disappointed." She moved her turquoise bracelet back and forth on her wrist. "So I had two sons, John and Richard, because I wanted to, not because I thought they would rescue me in old age. I got out of all social organizations and clubs in my fifties so I could spend time with my grandchildren, not because they would give something back to Jack and me later on, but because that was what I wanted to do
and I have loved doing it. Believe me, these have been selfish decisions. — Terry Tempest Williams

He will always know as we know now that in the heat of battle he did not fail when mateship and duty called. — Julia Gillard

The reason that I'm here is that Patrick and I are partners and when crazy stuff comes our way we'll sit down and brainstorm and think around it just like we do when we're thinking about a scene. So, while the masters might not understand my being here, or at least they didn't at first, but they do now because we really are a partnership. If he's on set I'm on set. — Todd Farmer

Let me control the textbooks, and I will control the state. — Adolf Hitler

Of course, there is a little more to it than that. We of the frailer sex have to have some wild hope, something to go to
otherwise a million years of slavery has conditioned us to huddle by the hearth, stony as it is, and pound some more millet, and get pounded in turn by way of thanks, and commune with the moon. I speak as one of my generation, that came of age just as the Fifties ended
I was nineteen when Lee Harvey Oswald shot them dead
and then by twenty I was married to your father and working too hard to support him really to notice that a revolution was going on, and all the old barriers were down. — John Updike

Sometimes she wore Levi's with white-suede fringe sewn down the legs and a feathered Indian headdress, sometimes old fifties' taffeta dresses covered with poetry written in glitter, or dresses made of kids' sheets printed with pink piglets or Disney characters. — Francesca Lia Block

When I was in my early twenties, parts would be written for women in their fifties, and I would get them. And now I'm in my early thirties, and I'm like, 'Why did that 24-year-old get that part?' I was that 24-year-old once. I can't be upset about it; it's the way things are. — Anne Hathaway

He was old-fashioned looking, Grace decided. Not just the suit, which made him look as though he should be taking the air in one of those fifties movies on the French Riviera, but as if he was the second male lead in one of those same films. Not matinee-idol handsome enough to get the girl, but good enough to be the best friend of the one who got the girl. Or the arch nemesis of the one who got the girl who had his comeuppance ten minutes before the credits began to roll. — Sarra Manning

Wouldn't it be cool to be single in a bygone area? I take a girl to a drive-in movie, we go have a cheeseburger and a malt at the diner, and then we make out under the stars in my old-timey convertible. Granted, this might have been tough in the fifties given my brown skin tone and racial tensions at the time, but in my fantasy, racial harmony is also part of the deal. — Aziz Ansari

Nobody ever said that growing old would be easy. Just having to hold the newspaper out in your forties and then hair growing out of unusual parts of your body in your fifties. It's tough on the ego. — Geoffrey Rush

His students were usually struck first by his appearance: he wore old tweed jackets until they fell apart, kept well into his fifties overcoats that he had inherited from Albert, and, with his ruddy complexion and hearty manner, reminded many students of a grocer or a butcher. But the voice soon captivated them. Little — Alan Jacobs

Kenny, in his late fifties, noticed that senior citizens get free coffee at a local cafe. He asked, "How old do you have to be to be a senior citizen?" The waiter looked at him for a few seconds and without saying a word, poured him a cup of coffee. — Ed Fischer

and thread, and even bandages, because he knew those at the clinic would not be sterile. The hospital was one of those communist-built structures of steel and glass, slapped up in the fifties, that could have been designed by a four-year-old. The workmanship was so shoddy that the cement abutments and window ledges were already crumbling. Probably not — Trevor Scott

I wondered again if I might not actually be dead-if this was some terrible version of death, which I had momentarily mistaken for a continuation of life. — Elizabeth Kostova

The woman who looks back at me from my bathroom mirror is sliding toward her mid-fifties. She'd better be careful- she's getting old.
I myself am about thirty. I've been thirty for about twenty-three years now. — Cheryl Peck

When I used to go to the Manhattan Chess Club back in the fifties, I met a lot of old-timers there who knew Capablanca, because he used to come around to the Manhattan club in the forties - before he died in the early forties. They spoke about Capablanca with awe. I have never seen people speak about any chess player like that, before or since. — Bobby Fischer