Old Florida Quotes & Sayings

I had a terrible premonition. His flight was to Miami. The old news footage flashed through my mind of Air Florida Flight 90 to Miami that went down in a freezing rain. It showed pieces of the wings and smashed fuselage floating in a huge hole in the ice next to the Fourteenth Street Bridge. A helicopter trying to lift a survivor from the black water. Rescuers watching helplessly from the shore. I tried to call him, but the network was down. I'd seen this fearsome power of the past before, how it can rise up without warning and strike the living with unerring timing. Later Lorenzo called from Miami and said it was a rough flight but they made it. I was happy that for once my intuition was wrong. — J. J. Jorgens

The crucial task of old age is balance: keeping just well enough, just brave enough, just gay and interested and starkly honest enough to remain a sentient human being. — Florida Scott-Maxwell

The decade is over, time to begin forgiving
old sins. Thirteen years since your death
on a Florida interstate - and again
a dream of an old wrong. — Judith Ortiz Cofer

Demons never die quietly, and a week ago the storm was a proper demon, sweeping through the Caribbean after her long ocean crossing from Africa, a category five when she finally came ashore at San Juan before moving on to Santo Domingo and then Cuba and Florida. But now she's grown very old, as her kind measures age, and these are her death throes. So she holds tightly to this night, hanging on with the desperate fury of any dying thing, any dying thing that might once have thought itself invincible. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Too much of what led up to the crisis in the old bubble days - the conspicuous consumption, the latter-day Gatsbyism - was fueled by a need to fill a huge emotional and psychological void left by the absence of meaningful work. When people cease to find meaning in work, when work is boring, alienating, and dehumanizing, the only option becomes the urge to consume - to buy happiness off the shelf, a phenomenon we now know cannot suffice in the long term. — Richard Florida

You called?" Sounding casual is difficult when it feels like you're heart's river-dancing in your rib cage.
"Yes. I just wondered where you were. You didn't answer your cell. Is everything okay?" She sighs, but I can't tell if it's in relief or parental aggravation.
"Everything's fine. My battery is dead, but Galen bought me a charger to keep over here, so it's charging."
"How sweet of him," she says, knowing good and well she instructed him to do so. "Well, just wanted to check in. Should I wait up for you? I don't appreciate you missing curfew the last few nights. Technically, staying over there until four in the morning is a coed sleepover, which I don't allow, or had you forgotten? Your trip to Florida with Galen's family was a special circumstance."
"I stayed the night at Chloe's all the time with JJ there." JJ is Chloe's eight-year-old brother. Not a great comeback, but it will have to do. — Anna Banks

A second Homeland Security official has been arrested, a 49-year-old guy named Frank Figueroa, he was caught exposing and fondling himself to a teenage girl in a shopping mall in Florida. Do you realize? If Osama bin Laden was a 14-year old girl, we would have had him by now ... Who is going to start protecting us from the Department of Homeland Security? ... It kind of makes you long for the good old wholesome days of the Clinton administration. — Jay Leno

State Road 60 is one of those great old Florida drives. From Tampa on the west coast to Vero Beach on the east, rolling through Mulberry and Bartow and Yeehaw Junction. Phosphate mines and orange groves and cows loitering near water holes in vast open flats dotted with sabal palms, stretching for miles, making the sky big. Here and there were the kind of occasional, isolated farmhouses that made people subconsciously think: Do they get Internet? In the middle of one overgrown field stood a single concrete wall, several stories high, covered with grime and mildew, the ancient ruins of a drive-in theater. The top of the wall was the last thing to catch a warm glow from the setting sun. — Tim Dorsey

It's not going to surprise me if our kids end up running on the beach in Florida when they're 100 years old on regrown body parts with a much higher quality of life than we can begin to imagine. — Juan Enriquez

I was never good at scratching, but I was good at collecting old records. Florida was a great place for that, because it's where people go to die. — Diplo

My first role was in the George Gershwin musical 'Crazy for You' at the Orlando Repertory Theatre when I was 11 - I grew up in Florida - and I wasn't old enough to be in it, but they let me anyway. I was just this little shrimp in a leotard. — Aubrey Peeples

Why should Dickie want to come back to subways and taxis and starched collars and a nine-to- five job? Or even a chauffeured car and vacations in Florida and Maine? It wasn't as much fun as sailing a boat in old clothes and being answerable to nobody for the way — Patricia Highsmith

We'll never know. In the summer of 1971, against the advice of his mother, Howard Myers took a vacation to Florida. The combination of the heat and his medical condition combined to give him a massive heart attack which killed him. He was forty-one years old. There — Howard L. Myers

I believe Marco Rubio is going to win Florida, I think Ted Cruz is going to win his Alamo in Texas. I think old rules apply. John Kasich's going to win Ohio as well. — Hugh Hewitt

Trailer Park Eden CJ Roberts Seventeen year old disabled twins, Parker and Kylee James, barely surviving with their abusive father and unstable existence in Century, Florida, know they can only rely on each other. But as choices are made, and the consequences that are sure to follow, their reliance on each other only becomes more complicated. Stronger. Dangerous. — Alessandra Torre

The dark night of the soul for me was one night in Florida, when I had been on the road for about four years and I realized that everybody around me was on my payroll, that my old friends hadn't been in touch with me and my family didn't know where to get me. I was a very unhappy guy and it was because I was really alone. — Barry Manilow

Now, I have to tell you, this reminds me of a story. Actually, it's an old baseball story. You see, one day, old Lucifer down there from his headquarters called St. Peter in Heaven, said they wanted to challenge him to a baseball game. And St. Peter said, "Sure, let's play. But to be fair, I have to tell you all the great ones are up here. We've got Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Satchel Paige, Roberto Clemente. We've got all the best players, and our manager is the legendary Connie Mack. You won't have a chance." Well, old Lucifer says, "That doesn't matter, we'll win anyway." And St. Peter says, "How do you expect to do that?" "Well," he says, "simple, we've got all the umpires." Luncheon for Representative Connie Mack Miami, Florida June 29, 1988 — Malcolm Kushner

Marshall also called upon the left-leaning Florida senator Claude Pepper to exert his influence in the case. Invoking patriotism, Marshall reminded the senator that the War Department had recently confirmed stories of American servicemen who had been tortured by the Japanese in Philippine prison camps and argued that the lynching of a fifteen-year-old boy would taint America's international reputation: "the type of material that radio Tokio [sic] is constantly on the alert for and will use effectively in attempting to offset our very legitimate protest in respect to the handling of American citizens who unfortunately are prisoners of war." Claude Pepper refused to get involved. — Gilbert King

One way or the other , the case coming before a federal judge in Miami July 2 challenging Florida's 6-year-old constitutional ban on same-sex marriages could be the next shoe to drop. — Anonymous

My kitchen linoleum is so black and shiny that I waltz while I wait for the kettle to boil. This pleasure is for the old who live alone. — Florida Scott-Maxwell

Florida was a living tomb, she used to tell anyone who'd listen, an old-age home in the shape of a state, God's little waiting room, as she was fond of quoting. — Joy Fielding

A man is an increasingly hard thing to find. We live in a society of boys - twenty-, thirty-, forty-, fifty-, and sixty-year-old boys. Many guys today seem to have the goal of maintaining a junior-high mentality all the way through life. The ultimate in life seems to be to retire, still a boy. I suggest there is virtually no difference between the shuffle board courts of St. Petersburg, Florida, and the parties at Daytona Beach. The proof of my suggestion is that those playing shuffleboard would be at Daytona Beach if they were fifty ears younger. They've not developed into men at all; they've just gotten older. — David A. Dewitt

Sure, I've gotten old. I've had two bypass surgeries, a hip replacement, new knees ... I've fought prostate cancer and diabetes. I'm half blind, can't hear anything quieter than a jet engine, and take 40 different medications that make me dizzy, winded, and subject to blackouts. I have bouts with dementia, poor circulation, hardly feel my hands or feet anymore, can't remember if I'm 85 or 92, but ... thank God, I still have my Florida driver's license! — Red Buttons

I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter. I thought that this electric typewriter was about the most fascinating toy in the world - I liked the little bell and the sounds and the feel of the keys and especially the erase key. — Gabrielle Zevin

The "Florida effect" involves two stages of priming. First, the set of words primes thoughts of old age, though the word old is never mentioned; second, these thoughts prime a behavior, walking slowly, which is associated with old age. All this happens without any awareness. — Daniel Kahneman

I knew I was the second-best tennis player in the state of Florida and No. 8 in the United States of America when I was 12 years old and I couldn't tell you what I was in baseball, but I liked my chances in tennis of getting a scholarship to college. — Jim Courier

But Erin let it slide. The child was only four years old; she had a whole lifetime to learn about sadness. Today was for Dalmatians, ice cream and new dolls. — Carl Hiaasen

When I go to Florida for Christmas I always take my nieces and nephews out on excursions, ... I become like a big kid again. We go on all the big rides at the theme parks or I stick them in go-karts where their feet can't quite reach the pedals. I think that if you can continue to have the child at heart you may grow old physically but you will stay young mentally. — John Barrowman

Plenty of things in the universe are old, my dear. That's like saying Florida is a metaphor for hell because they're both hot - though your grandfather would agree wholeheartedly with that, I suppose. — Sammy Nickalls

No matter how old a mother is she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. — Florida Scott-Maxwell

We who are old know that age is more than a disability. It is an intense and varied experience, almost beyond our capacity at times, but something to be carried high. — Florida Scott-Maxwell

Before I liked to write, I liked to type. I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter. — Gabrielle Zevin

I love baseball. I'll probably end up one of those old farts who go to spring training in Florida every year and drive from game to game all day. — Steve Earle

I think in the old days, the nexus of weirdness ran through Southern California, and to a degree New York City. I think it's changed so that every bizarre story in the country now has a Florida connection. I don't know why, except it must be some inversion of magnetic poles or something. — Carl Hiaasen

A Miami judge issued Florida's first gay marriage license yesterday, which makes it the 36th state to legally perform gay marriages. Of course, most Florida residents are too old to understand what that means. They'll say, 'Well, I think all marriages should be gay, and merry.' — Jimmy Fallon

A lot of people stop short. They don't actually die but they say, 'Right I'm old, and I'm going to retire,' and then they dwindle into nothing. They go off to Florida and become jolly boring. — Mary Wesley

I remember my father had a sermon he used to preach when we were in Florida, in which he gave a reference to the Southern Cross-about the stars, the colors, in the Southern Cross, which thrilled me very much. I must have been around 5 years old ... Now, it turns out that the Southern Cross itself does have one red star, together with three blue ones. — William Wilson Morgan

Florida's full of old people-they don't call it God's waiting room for nothing-but precious few of em grew up here. — Stephen King