Quotes & Sayings About Olden Days

We'll make it a blowout like in the olden days."
"When dinosaurs roamed the earth?" Teddy asked.
"Exactly," Dad said. "When dinosaurs roamed the earth and your mom and I were young. — Gayle Forman

Today a pitcher gets fined if the umpire thinks he threw at a batter. In the olden days, the umpire didn't have to take any courses in mind reading. The pitcher told you he was going to throw at you. — Leo Durocher

In the olden days, a memoir was something written by Churchill and people like that, because they had a grand experience and considered it useful for future generations. And then it became what it became - a public purging in which other people have the chance to judge you and then forgive you, perhaps learning something from your sorry example. — Aleksandar Hemon

Elsa learned all about LPs and CDs that afternoon. That was when she worked out why old people seem to have so much free time, because in the olden days until Spotify came along they must have used up almost all their time just changing the track. She — Fredrik Backman

All this home-computer gaming, Nintendo 64, PlayStation, now this Xbox thing, maybe I just want the boys to see what blowing aliens away was like in the olden days. — Thomas Pynchon

My parents kept a small cabin the mountains. It was a simple thing, just four walls, and very dark inside. A heavy felt curtain blotted out whatever light made it through the canopy of huge pines and down into the cabin's only window. There was a queen-size bed in there, an armchair, and a wood-burning stove. It wasn't an old cabin. I think my parents built it in the seventies from a kit. In a few spots the wood beams were branded with the word HOME-RITE. But the spirit of the place me think of simpler times, olden days, yore, or whenever it was that people rarely spoke except to say there was a store coming or the berries were poisonous or whatnot, the bare essentials. It was deadly quiet up there. You could hear your own heart beating if you listened. I loved it, or at least I thought I ought to love it - I've never been very clear on that distinction. — Ottessa Moshfegh

It is understandable that there has been a good deal of joking about purely learned works of this type. Their actual value for the future of scholarship and for the people as a whole cannot be demonstrated. Nevertheless, scholarship, as was true for art in the olden days, must indeed have far-flung grazing grounds, and in pursuit of a subject which interests no one but himself a scholar can accumulate knowledge which provides colleagues with information as valuable as that stored in a dictionary or an archive. — Hermann Hesse

In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking but now, God knows, anything goes. — Cole Porter

In the olden days in England, you could be hung for stealing a sheep or a loaf of bread. However, if a sheep stole a loaf of bread and gave it to you, you would only be tried for receiving, a crime punishable by forty lashes with the cat or the dog, whichever was handy. If you stole a dog and were caught, you were punished with twelve rabbit punches, although it was hard to find rabbits big enough or strong enough to punch you. — Mike Harding

You know, before we all started having health care, in the olden days our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor, they would say I'll paint your house. I mean, that's the old days of what people would do to get health care with your doctors. Doctors are very sympathetic people. I'm not backing down from that system. — Sue Lowden

In the olden days, people thought time was a constant. It could not be slowed or sped up. Time was time, and no man could move it. Then Einstein said, Bullshit. — Shannon Lee Alexander

I couldn't exactly blame Jane Austen for being a romantic. What the hell else was there to do back then for fun? — Kristin Walker

I don't mean to be like some old guy from the olden days who says, "I walked thirty miles to school every morning, so you kids should too." That's a statement born of envy and resentment. What I'm saying is something quite different. What I'm saying is that by having very little, I had it good. Children need a sense of pulling their own weight, of contributing to the family in some way, and some sense of the family's interdependence. They take pride in knowing that they're contributing. They learn responsibility and discipline through meaningful work. The values developed within a family that operates on those principles then extend to the society at large. By not being quite so indulged and "protected" from reality by overflowing abundance, children see the bonds that connect them to others. — Sidney Poitier

In the olden days I always got the impression that TVR built a car, put it on sale, and then found out how it handled. Usually when one of their customers wrote to the factory complaining about how dead he was. — Jeremy Clarkson

The urge to climb will never be explained. In olden days, perhaps it was a wish to reach the stars. Today, anyone so minded can buy a seat on a plane and feel himself master of the skies. Even so, he will not have rock under his feet, or air upon his face; nor will he know the silence that comes only on the hills. — Daphne Du Maurier

Why does death engender fear? Because death meant change, a change greater then we have ever known, and because death was indeed a mirror that made us see ourselves as never before. A mirror that we should cover, as people in olden days covered mirrors when someone died, for fear of an evil. For with all our care and pain for those who had gone, it was ourselves too we felt the agony for. Perhaps ourselves above all. — David Clement-Davies

Call it empathy. That means putting yourself in the place of the other person and seeing their point of view. I suppose it's because in the very olden days, when humans had to fight fir themselves every day, they needed to find people who would fight with them too, and together we lived - yes, and prospered. Humans need other humans - it's as simple as that. — Terry Pratchett

The fairy tale that really scared me was Bluebeard. That's the one where he just kills one after another of these woman, these wives, that he lures up to the castle. I just think about fairy tales as stories women told their children to warn them? To keep them safe, to make sure they married up, all the things that would have safeguarded them in the olden days. — Meryl Streep

An indescribable sadness emanated from the white splendour of the staircase and balustrade; the blood-red, now almost black splendour of the carpets. The huge palms in their huge pots looked like they had recently arrived from the cemetery. Their dark green leaves also looked blackish, like wizened, perished weapons from olden days. — Joseph Roth

In the olden days, when wishing still worked, there lived a king whose daughters were all beautiful, but the youngest daughter was so lovely that even the sun ... was struck with wonder. — Jacob Grimm

Little Wing is like one of these beautiful girls that come around sometimes ... you play your gig; it's the same thing as the olden days, and these beautiful girls come around.. you do actually fall in love with them because that's the only love you can have. It's not always the physical thing of "Oh, there's one over there ... ", it's not one of those scenes. They actually tell you something. They release different things inside themselves ... "Little Wing" was a very sweet girl that came around that gave me her whole life and more if I wanted it ... — Jimi Hendrix

He always held that panic was the best means of survival; back in the olden days, his theory went, people faced with hungry saber-toothed tigers could be divided very simply into those who panicked and those who stood there saying "What a magnificent brute!" and "Here, pussy. — Terry Pratchett

Olden days cannot be reversed even with the strongest incantation, but fresh days could be invoked to be fruitful in order to stop old fruitless years — Michael Bassey Johnson

In olden days people were worse than us but knew much more than us. — Vladimir Odoevsky

In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing. — Leonard Bernstein

Historical Re-creation, he thought glumly, as they picked their way across, under, over or through the boulders and insect-buzzing heaps of splintered timber, with streamlets running everywhere. Only we do it with people dressing up and running around with blunt weapons, and people selling hot dogs, and the girls all miserable because they can only dress up as wenches, wenching being the only job available to women in the olden days. — Terry Pratchett

In the olden days, a couple could be in every movie together, but it's just not like that anymore. — Blake Lively

One of the popular fallacies in connection with commerce is that in modern days a money-saving device has been introduced called credit and that, before this device was known, all purchases were paid for in cash, in other words in coins. A careful investigation shows that the precise reverse is true. In olden days coins played a far smaller part in commerce than they do to-day. Indeed so small was the quantity of coins, that they did not even suffice for the needs of the [Medieval English] Royal household and estates which regularly used tokens of various kinds for the purpose of making small payments. So unimportant indeed was the coinage that sometimes Kings did not hesitate to call it all in for re-minting and re-issue and still commerce went on just the same. — David Graeber

Either I can be like some traveler of the olden days, who was faced with a stupendous spectacle, all, or almost all, of which eluded him, or worse still, filled him with scorn and disgust; or I can be a modern traveler, chasing after the vestiges of a vanished reality ... A few hundred years hence, in this same place another traveler, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see. — Claude Levi-Strauss

Witches never existed, except in people's minds. All there was in the olden days was women and some men who believed in herbal cures and in folklore and in the wish to fly. Witches? We're all witches in one way or another. Witches was the invention of mankind, son. We're all witches beneath the skin. — Ian Rankin

I wouldn't mind meeting some of the people I've attempted to portray from the olden, olden days. They probably would all have really terrible skin and horrible bad breath, and I'd have to give them an Altoid. — Geoffrey Rush

At the age of fifteen he had bought off a twopenny stall in the market a duo-decimo book of recipes, gossip, and homilies, printed in 1605. His stepmother, able to read figures, had screamed at the sight of it when he had proudly brought it home. 1605 was 'the olden days', meaning Henry VIII, the executioner's axe, and the Great Plague. She thrust the book into the kitchen fire with the tongs, yelling that it must be seething with lethal germs. A limited, though live, sense of history. And history was the reason why she would never go to London. She saw it as dominated by the Bloody Tower, Fleet Street full of demon barbers, as well as dangerous escalators everywhere. — Anthony Burgess

Listen to the trees as they sway in the wind.
Their leaves are telling secrets. Their bark sings songs of olden days as it grows around the trunks. And their roots give names to all things.
Their language has been lost.
But not the gestures. — Vera Nazarian

Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the rabbi who asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days whereas nowadays nobody ever sees him. The rabbi replied: "Nowadays there is no longer anybody who can bow low enough."
This answer hits the nail on the head. We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche. — C. G. Jung

In the olden days, I believe Mozart also improvised on piano, but somehow in the last 200 years, the whole training of Western classical music - they don't read between the lines, they just read the lines. — Ravi Shankar

I really worked very hard to bring my voice back because I used to have a good voice, and to try to do my exercises that I remember from Yale and all the things in the olden days, clearing your sinuses and all that. — Meryl Streep

In the olden days it was easy to make a television work.You plugged an aerial cable into the back, then bashed the top with your fist until, eventually, Hughie Green stopped jumping up and down. — Jeremy Clarkson

This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others. Those who were there in the olden days, they told stories to the children so that the children would know, so that the children could tell stories to their children. And so on, and so on. — Yaa Gyasi

I have not yet learned to use our television DVR. One of the points of marriage is that you split labor. In the olden days that meant one hunted and one gathered; now it means one knows where the tea-towels are kept and the other knows how to program the DVR, for why should we both have to know? — Elizabeth Alexander

I've given up email. Well, almost. At the weekend I set up one of those auto-reply messages, informing my correspondents that I would no longer be checking my emails, and that instead they might like to call or write, as we used to in the olden days. — Tom Hodgkinson

In the olden days, of course, cigarette companies would pay to have their product advertised in movies and to have actors smoke cigarettes.[Ronald Reagan used to do it.] — Joe Eszterhas

And while in the olden days, disgruntled readers suffered pretty much in silence, now there's Amazon. The last thing you want are myriad scathing reviews that potential readers find helpful. — Lisa Cron

The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry. But we live in a complex world where you're going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change. — Michael Bloomberg

That was when she worked out why old people seem to have so much free time, because in the olden days until Spotify came along they must have used up almost all their time just changing the track. — Fredrik Backman

There is a story of a spiritual seeker who one day came to his master and asked, "In the olden days it is said that there were people who walked and talked with God. Why doesn't this happen anymore?" The master replied, "Because nowadays no one will stoop so low. — Robert A. Johnson

I gave him a compliment! All right, I told him he probably would've made, like, a really expensive slave in the, like, in the olden-timey days. — Sarah Silverman

Ancient art has a specific inner content. At one time, art possessed the same purpose that books do in our day, namely: to preserve and transmit knowledge. In olden days, people did not write books, they incorporated their knowledge into works of art. We would find a great many ideas in the works of ancient art passed down to us, if only we knew how to read them. — G.I. Gurdjieff

The olden days had never looked this freezing in photos. — Kim Kane

Jared felt vaguely unsettled that she'd noticed. He wasn't used to adults scrutinizing his behavior. He hadn't meant to take take so many booksbut they were the kind he liked, about made-up olden days when the world made sense, about death and love and honor. — Sarah Rees Brennan

Back in the really olden days, dinner was seldom a ceremonial event for U.S. families. Only the very wealthy had a separate dining room. For most, meals were informal, a kind of rolling refueling; often only the men sat down. — Nancy Gibbs