Quotes & Sayings About The Good Old Days

There are new words now that excuse everybody. Give me the good old days of heroes and villains, the people you can bravo or hiss. There was a truth to them that all the slick credulity of today cannot touch. — Bette Davis

You count the days and watch the years go by. You tell yourself, and you believe it, that you'd rather just die. You'd rather stare death boldly in the face and say you're ready because whatever is waiting on the other side has to be better than growing old in a six-by-ten cage with no one to talk to. You consider yourself half-dead at best. Please take the other half.
You've watched dozens leave and not return, and you accept the fact that one day they'll come for you. You're nothing but a rat in their lab, a disposable body to be used as proof that their experiment is working. An eye for an eye, each killing must be avenged. You kill enough and you're convinced that killing is good.
You count the days, and then there are none left. You ask yourself on your last morning if you are really ready. You search for courage, but the bravery is fading. When it's over, no one really wants to die. — John Grisham

I really don't think in the past. I sit down with many friends at dinner, and they like to talk about the good old days. I'm respectful of the good old days, but I find myself spending very little time reminiscing. I'm really looking forward. — Donald Bren

What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it. — Aubrey Beardsley

I'm the oldest 26-year-old I know. A lot of experience has been crammed into a short amount of time. Some days I feel a good 65, 70. Like I want to lie down. — Yancy Butler

You mean when we discovered the secret lair under the hangar where I'd been kept comatose for eight years of my life, then turned into a cyborg by some mystery surgeon before being given away to a family who didn't really want me? Yeah, Thorne, those were the good old days. — Marissa Meyer

I think dating courtesies are common courtesies that should be practiced in most all civilized encounters. I pine for the days of good, old-fashioned manners. — Karen Marie Moning

When people talk about the good old days, I say to people, 'It's not the days that are old, it's you that's old.' I hate the good old days. What is important is that today is good. — Karl Lagerfeld

She told me once she envied the women who lived back in the good old days who only had to worry about Indians and mountain lions killing their husbands. Something about those things being beyond a wife's control. — Tawni O'Dell

The way prices are rising, the good old days are last week. — Les Dawson

Why are you so afraid of the word 'Fascism,' Doremus? Just a word - just a word! And might not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours - not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini - like Napoleon or Bismarck in the good old days - and have 'em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous again. 'Nother words, have a doctor who won't take any back-chat, but really boss the patient and make him get well whether he likes it or not! — Sinclair Lewis

Maybe universal nostalgia doesn't exist. Maybe each of us carries our own personal version of the better times. It's at about twnety-two years that we all begin to think of our childhood as the good ol' days and everything afterwards exists as a slow-motion face plant. The fall continues, through marriage, through career building, through parenthood, through old age, until we finally touch nose to ground. At twenty-two years old, I've just started, but I think I can already smell my own grave. — Caleb J. Ross

This is so much like the old days. And, again, I have mixed feelings. In some ways it's good and comfortable to be fitting straight back in like I've never been away, but, on the other hand, I'm getting this constrictive feeling as well. It's the same places - like the bars and pubs on Friday night - the same people, the same conversations, the same arguments and the same attitudes. Five years away and not much seems to have changed. I can't decide if this is good or bad. — Iain Banks

When you think of the good old days, think one word: dentistry. — P. J. O'Rourke

I'm suspicious that what's behind the academic call for doing away with athletic scholarships is a nostalgia for the good old days, which leaves out everyone but white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, ... world's biggest cocktail party. — Scott MacDonald

As it ferments, kraut whispers alchemical secrets. In two days, it will smell as agreeable as an old pillow still warm from night's use. In five days it will smell like a horse run to foam. The odor will then lessen as the vegetable begins its tart transformation. It will be good to eat in two weeks, but at five weeks it will reach the zenith of its power, its taste a violin bow drawn across the tongue. After six weeks it will err slowly toward slime. Like hams and men, it gets better with age only to a point. — Eli Brown

In the good old days when I was a senator, I was my own man. — Joe Biden

Just like the good old days: marching together into the unknown, searching for missing magical weapons and risking painful death. I'd missed my buddies! — Rick Riordan

The good old days are now. — Tom Clancy

The spring came suddenly; the rains stopped, the days grew noticeably longer, and the afternoon light felt powdery, as if it might blow away. — Jane Mendelsohn

Swords were brought out, guns oiled and made ready, and everything was in a bustle when the old Lexington dropped her anchor on January 26, 1847, in Monterey Bay, after a voyage of one hundred and ninety-eight days from New York. Everything on shore looked bright and beautiful, the hills covered with grass and flowers, the live oaks so serene and homelike, and the low adobe houses, with red-tiled roofs and whitened walls, contrasted well with the dark pine trees behind, making a decidedly good impression upon us who had come so far to spy out the land. Nothing could be more peaceful in its looks than Monterey in January, 1847. — William T. Sherman

The expression 'there is nothing like the good old days' does not mean that fewer bad things happened before, but fortunately, that people tend to forget about them. — Ernesto Sabato

I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them. — Ed Helms

In the old days, a con man would be good looking, suave, well dressed, well spoken and presented themselves real well. Those days are gone because it's not necessary. The people committing these crimes are doing them from hundreds of miles away. — Frank Abagnale

I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure
the web
of society needed reform,not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended. — Richard Louv

As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline - the illusion of the good old days. — Steven Pinker

Though a new cloth makes you look new, when you see the old cloths, you remember the old life — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

This is a love story. It's about the good old days, when men were men and women were women and books were books. — Jonathan Galassi

And yet, it was still a performance. Odin and I both knew it. It was a kind of play, a dream of how things might have been if he and I had been capable of trusting each other for a change. And so we hunted, and sang, and laughed, and told heavily edited stories of the good old days, while each of us watched the other and wondered when the knife would fall. — Joanne Harris

A good dog never dies. He always stays. He walks besides you on crisp autumn days when frost is on the fields and winter's drawing near. His head is within our hand in his old way. — Mary Carolyn Davies

In the old days he had clutched life with such violence that the juice of it ran out between his fingers and was lost, but now he would touch it delicately, thankful for the good and accepting the ills with patience. — Elizabeth Goudge

The dream is over. I gotta get down to reality. The good old days is garbage. — John Lennon

I have heard of Texas pioneers living without bread or anything made from the cereals for months without suffering, using the breast-meat of wild turkeys for bread. Of this kind, they had plenty in the good old days when life, though considered less safe, was fussed over the less. — John Muir

God was awfully good to me during the good days. I cherish the old days, but I don't miss them. — Don Ameche

And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would vanish. We would need no personal names of the old sort in the sidereal future, nothing being fixed. We would be designated by other nouns. Days and nights would belong to the museums. The earth a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery. The seas powdering our bones like quartz, making sand, grinding our peace for us by the aeon. Well, that would be good - a melancholy good. — Saul Bellow

We are always yapping about the 'Good Old Days' and how we look back and enjoy it, but I tell you there is a lot of hooey to it. There is a whole lot of all our past lives that wasn't so hot. — Will Rogers

Eric Leeds said, "This is a guy who has done some exceedingly generous and thoughtful things for me and other people but then a day later he could turn around and say something so off the wall and so ridiculously stupid and you'd say how do I reconcile these behaviors? People would wonder is he a bad guy who has good days or a good guy who has bad days? I think it's because he has the emotional maturity of a five-year-old. And he never understood the value of doing something thoughtful for somebody on its own merits. He really didn't understand the consequences of him doing something nice for somebody any more than he gave importance to the consequences of him doing something really nasty to somebody. The child doesn't know that yet. You teach your child what works and what doesn't and establish how relationships work. Well, Prince never got that and, to this day, he never has. — Toure

In old days when the struggle between good and evil was more bitter and open than it is now. That struggle goes on all around us all the time, like two armies fighting. And sometimes one of them seems to be winning and sometimes the other, but neither has ever triumphed altogether. No ever will for there is something of each in every man. — Susan Cooper

It is painful to watch children trying to show off for parents who are engrossed in their cell phones. Children are nostalgic for the 'good old days' when parents used to read to them without the cell phone by their side or watch football games or Disney movies without having the BlackBerry handy. — Sherry Turkle

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

Emil was already familiar with those people who always say, "Goodness, everything was better in the old days." And he no longer listened when people told him that in the old days the air was cleaner or that cows had bigger heads. Because it usually wasn't true. Those people simply wanted to be dissatisfied, because otherwise they would have to be satisfied. — Erich Kastner

But consider whether you may not get more help from the customary method[1] than from that which is now commonly called a "breviary," though in the good old days, when real Latin was spoken, it was called a "summary."[2] — Seneca.

On Christmas morning when the beach is calling and the family's gathering and the presents are a mystery (or definitely feels book-shaped anyway), and after the splendour and celebration of Christmas Eve, we don't want Christmas Day to be an anticlimax. We've gifted our Oxfam goats or geese and bought our CWS calendars, and what we'd like, on Christmas Day, what we really want, is for things to be - perfect. Just like the old days. Something new, but also something familiar.
And that's what's so wonderful about the Christmas story, and why preachers penning their reflections approach with trepidation but also with joy: at Christmas, the news is all good. — Bronwyn Angela White

In every age "the good old days" were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them. — Brooks Atkinson

Hey, remember when you didn't know that you wanted Otter to spray his man babies all over your face and we didn't have to talk about our feelings all the time?"
"Yeah, those were the good old days. — T.J. Klune

He thinks great folly, child,' said Aslan. This world is bursting with life for these few days because the song with which I called it into life still hangs in the air and rumbles in the ground. It will not be so for long. But I cannot tell that to this old sinner, and I cannot comfort him either; he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings. Oh, Adam's son, how cleverly you defend yourself against all that might do you good! — C.S. Lewis

The art of cursing people seems to have lost its tang since the old days when a good malediction took four deep breaths to deliverand sent the outfielders scurrying toward the fence to field. — Robert Benchley

Wow. When he started looking back on the war with Kronos as the good old days - that was sad. — Rick Riordan

Everything had changed suddenly
the tone, the moral climate; you didn't know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute
life or truth or beauty
of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good. — Boris Pasternak

Alas! those good old days are gone, when a murderer could wipe the stain from his name and soothe his trouble to sleep simply by getting out his blocks and mortar and building an addition to a church. — Mark Twain

before long we'll be pining for the good old days, when, no matter how often people failed to uphold the standards of integrity, those standards actually meant something. — Anonymous

I am a writer, a professional journalist with serious credentials in Crime, Craziness, and Politics. I have mingled with dangerous criminals and attended many trials ... from Hell's Angels, Black Panthers and Chicano street fighters to Roxanne Pulitzer and even Richard Nixon, back in the good old days before he was run out of the White House for fraud, perjury, graft, and criminal negligence. — Hunter S. Thompson

I jump from one thing to the next but try and strike a balance. But it's not nostalgic in the sense of 'those were the good old days and now we're not there'. I don't think like that. Not my way. — Ian MacKaye

The experts or the cynics say, "Oh, those were the good old days, that's when drivers were really drivers. They didn't have all these aids." You know what? What we had, we did the best with and when we got more we provided what was needed. — Mario Andretti

and I shall keep a pony-chaise to jog about the country in, just as I used to in the good old days, before I got restless, and — Kenneth Grahame

The Ruhar hit us on Columbus Day. There we were, innocently drifting along the cosmos on our little blue marble, like the native Americans in 1492. Over the horizon come ships of a technologically advanced, aggressive culture, and BAM! There go the good old days, when humans only got killed by each other. — Craig Alanson

Those were the good old days when educated Americans read foreign literature in translation, even works written in non-Western languages. — Minae Mizumura

The main thing is to get what little happiness there is out of life in this wartorn world because 'these are the good old days' now. — Clare Boothe Luce

Sometimes we look back and 10 years from now we think, 'Boy, those were great old days.' Well, you know, we're living in the good old days. — Joel Osteen

I don't do nostalgia. The phrase 'the good old days' never passes my lips. — Nicholas Haslam

Sam was struck by how good Mary looked. Weight loss. Probably from overwork. Or maybe she didn't enjoy living on the kinds of canned food that, in the old pre-FAYZ days, people had donated to food drives. — Michael Grant

Daughter to that good Earl, once President Of England's Council, and her Treasury, Who lived in both, unstained with gold or fee, And left them both, more in himself content, Till sad the breaking of that Parliament Broke him, as that dishonest victory At Chaeronea, fatal to liberty, Killed with report that old man eloquent. Though later born than to have known the days Wherein your father flourished, yet by you, Madam, methinks I see him living yet; So well your words his noble virtues praise, That all both judge you to relate them true, And to possess them, honoured Margaret. — John Milton

And so, as quietly as he had lived, he slipped out of town, leaving only a note behind:
Well, that's that. I'm off, and if you don't believe I'm leaving, just count the days I'm gone. When you hear the phone not ringing, it'll be me that's not calling. Goodbye, old girl, and good luck.
Yours truly,
Earl Adcock
P.S. I'm not deaf. — Fannie Flagg

I wish they'd had electric guitars in cotton fields back in the good old days. A whole lot of things would've been straightened out. — Jimi Hendrix

As your product evolves, adding new features becomes as easy as it was in the good old days of greenfield development. — Scott Millett

I've thrown away lots of my old diaries - you never know who might get their hands on them. But I have kept a few notes on the good old days. — Steffi Graf

The good old days, when each idea had an owner, are gone forever. — Paulo Coelho

It always has been and always will be the same. The old folk of our grandfathers' young days sang a song bearing exactly the same burden; and the young folk of to-day will drone out precisely similar nonsense for the aggravation of the next generation. "Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago," has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday. Take up the literature of 1835, and you will find the poets and novelists asking for the same impossible gift as did the German Minnesingers long before them and the old Norse Saga writers long before that. And for the same thing sighed the early prophets and the philosophers of ancient Greece. From all accounts, the world has been getting worse and worse ever since it was created. All I can say is that it must have been a remarkably delightful place when it was first opened to the public, for it is very pleasant even now if you only keep as much as possible in the sunshine and take the rain good-temperedly. — Jerome K. Jerome

Like normal people, leftists now have to get up in the morning and earn a living, seeing as the fascists have come down so hard on social welfare fraud, and this is the cruel reality. The good old days are gone, and increasingly, leftists are to be found working in ordinary, proper jobs. — Michael Leunig

Don't worry about your studies. When you want to do them well you will do them superbly. But for the moment the main thing is to get what little happiness there is in this wartorn world because "these are only good old days" now. — Clare Boothe Luce

But I knew - in the old days, if a song was a good song, I don't care if it was 'Yellow Submarine' or, you know, or 'The Times They Are a-Changin' or 'Don't Be Cruel', you knew it, you know? You heard that song, and you were talking about it, and you knew it. — Don McLean

On harsh, frigid January days, when the winds are relentless and the snow piles up around us, I often think of our small feathered friends back on the Third Line. I wonder if the old feeder is still standing in the orchard and if anyone thinks to put out a few crumbs and some bacon drippings for our beautiful, hungry, winter birds. In the stark, white landscape they provided a welcome splash of colour and their songs gave us hope through the long, silent winter. — Arlene Stafford-Wilson

Life is an ordeal, albeit an exciting one, but I wouldn't trade it for the good old days of poverty and obscurity. — Jim Carrey

If anyone thinks they'd rather be in a different part of history, they're probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You'd probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman. — Elon Musk

I don't know what your Company is feeling as of today about the work of Dr. Alice Hamilton on benzol [benzene] poisoning. I know that back in the old days some of your boys used to think that she was a plain nuisance and just picking on you for luck. But I have a hunch that as you have learned more about the subject, men like your good self have grown to realize the debt that society owes her for her crusade. I am pretty sure that she has saved the lives of a great many girls in can-making plants and I would hate to think that you didn't agree with me. — Bradley Dewey

Your days are short here; this is the last of your springs. And now in the serenity and quiet of this lovely place, touch the depths of truth, feel the hem of Heaven. You will go away with old, good friends. And don't forget when you leave why you came. — Adlai E. Stevenson

We can never skip growing old. As we grow older, we understand old things and things of old times better! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I can promise you this: If you really, sincerely, genuinely want God back, He hasn't moved. He's still there, just like always, ready to bear-hug you again, just like in the old days. — Craig Groeschel

And luckily, therefore the good old days return. The traditional art of driving counts again, and it is all about good tactics, skills and reflexes instead of simple power. — Jacky Ickx

Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days. — Doug Larson

The wide receiver had a real taste for crime, and he indulged it with an erratic kind of vigor that made him an albatross for Madden and a natural soulmate for my old friend, Al Davis, who remains the ultimate Raider. They were serious people, and John Madden was definitely one of them, for good or ill. Living with the Oakland Raiders in those days was not much different than living with the Hell's Angels. I — Hunter S. Thompson

Whatever happened to the good old days when books just got along, cozied up together on bookshelves, hanging out, waiting to be read? — Karen Marie Moning

The boy was the sun in Coriane's sky. On hard days, he split the darkness. On good days, he lit the world. When Tibe went away to the front, for weeks at a time now that the war ran hot again, Cal kept her safe. Only a few months old and better than any shield in the kingdom. — Victoria Aveyard

Now look here, old friend," I said. "I know your bally heart is broken and all that, and at some future time I shall be delighted to hear all about it, but - "
"I didn't come to talk about that."
"No? Good egg!"
"The past," said young Bingo, "is dead. Let us say no more about it."
"Right-o!"
"I have been wounded to the very depths of my soul, but don't speak about it."
"I won't."
"Ignore it. Forget it."
"Absolutely!"
I hadn't seen him so dashed reasonable for days. — P.G. Wodehouse

Rome is burning, Jesus says. Drop your fiddle, change your life and come to Me. Let go of the good days that never were - a regimented church you never attended, traditional virtues you never practiced, legalistic obedience you never honored, and a sterile orthodoxy you never accepted. The old era is done. The decisive inbreak of God has happened. — Brennan Manning

He thinks I'm having trouble expressing my feelings, which is why he suggested I write in a journal - to get it out, he said, like in the old days when physicians used to bleed their patients in order to drain the mysterious poisons. Which almost always ended up killing them in spite of the doctors' good intentions, I might point out. — Cynthia Hand

The world turns, and life changes, the good old days are fantasies-just screened memories. — Howard Chaykin

Don't long for "the good old days." This is not wise. — Anonymous

We have good days and bad days. You told me, once, to just remember to breathe. As long as you can do that, you're doing something Good, you said. Getting rid of the old, and letting in the new. And, therefore, moving forward. Making progress. That's all you have to do to move forward, sometimes, you said, just breathe. So don't worry, Etta, if nothing else, I am still breathing. — Emma Hooper

This world is bursting with life for these few days because the song with which I called it into life still hangs in the air and rumbles in the ground. It will not be so for long. But I cannot tell that to this old sinner, and I cannot comfort him either; he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings. Oh Adam's sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good! But I will give him the only gift he is still able to receive. — C.S. Lewis

The only good thing about the good old days is they're gone. — Dick Gregory

What happened to the good old days when rich white men just bought their way into office? — Jennifer Crusie

The day of parochialism in sports is over. The world is too small for what people like to call 'the good old days.' Fans want the best, wherever they come from. — Mario Andretti

wounded by the son of Venus; and for Mrs Plornish there was no such music at the Opera as the small internal flutterings and chirpings wherein he would discharge himself of these ditties, like a weak, little, broken barrel-organ, ground by a baby. On his 'days out,' those flecks of light in his flat vista of pollard old men,' it was at once Mrs Plornish's delight and sorrow, when he was strong with meat, and had taken his full halfpenny-worth of porter, to say, 'Sing us a song, Father.' Then he would give them Chloe, and if he were in pretty good spirits, Phyllis also - Strephon he had hardly been up to since he went into retirement - and then would Mrs Plornish declare she did — Charles Dickens

These days, right now, these are the good old days. I've always approached it that way. That's why I'm still working. I'm not the guy who is ready to sit by the pool. — Richard D. Zanuck

The good old horse-and-buggy days: then you lived until you died and not until you were run over. — Will Rogers

The majestic architecture, the cultivated manners, the simplicity of life, the disregard for one's fellow man, the plagues, the rampant corruption, the unmitigated racism, and the uncontrollable violence--all the things our grandparents called 'the good old days'... — Chris Elliott

We need only to close our eyes and we are back on the Third Line, walking up the lane, through the yard and entering the bright, warm kitchen. We are home again. — Arlene Stafford-Wilson

When there's so much left to do, why spend your time focusing on things you've already done, counting trophies or telling stories about the good old days? — Dave Grohl

I apologize because of the terrible mess the planet is in. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any 'Good Old Days,' there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, 'Don't look at me. I just got here myself.' — Kurt Vonnegut