Elder Quotes

“But...If my life on Earth must end, let it end with a promise.
Let it end with hope.”
― Beth Revis, Across the Universe

“...So, I do what any reasonable person would do when faced with a crying girl.
I get the frex out of there.”
― Beth Revis, Across the Universe

“THE FOUR HEAVENLY FOUNTAINS


Laugh, I tell you
And you will turn back
The hands of time.

Smile, I tell you
And you will reflect
The face of the divine.

Sing, I tell you
And all the angels will sing with you!

Cry, I tell you
And the reflections found in your pool of tears -
Will remind you of the lessons of today and yesterday
To guide you through the fears of tomorrow.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“And I look at Harley, and the billions of stars are in his eyes, and he's drinking them up, pouring them into his soul.”
― Beth Revis, Across the Universe

“I might have the whole world now, but it's not enough if I don't get to share it with her.”
― Beth Revis, Shades of Earth

“Youngsters want to change world. Elders want to enjoy their works.
The entrepreneur sells anything needed by both to win their desires.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“Amy pulls away and looks into my face. Her pale skin is blotchy red, her eyes are veined and shadowed, and a shiny line of snot trickles from her nose to the top of her lip.

She wipes her face and with her arm, smearing tears and mucus.She never looked more BEAUTIFUL to me.”
― Beth Revis

“If you assume that the new - and simply because it's new - is always to be better than the old, chances are you've never known anything valuable.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“When I finally get out of bed, the only thing I want to do is go straight to Amy and demand her forgiveness. Maybe we can at least go back to what we had before our fight, even if all we had was an awkward friendship punctuated by significant silences.”
― Beth Revis, A Million Suns

“A young child is a leader to an elderly person once his purpose has a faithful, sincere and trustworthy influence on people. Leadership is not restricted to position and age; it is self-made and influencial. Everyone has this self-leadership quality.”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“The dark sky.
A hundred million stars.
More stars than I’ve ever seen before. My eyes let me see farther, but they don’t show me the one thing I want to see. I would trade all the stars in the universe if I could just have him back again.

Wind whistles through the trees nearby. Birdsong weaves in and out of the sound.

The hybrids emerge from the communication building, heads tilted to the sky.

And then we see the end.
Godspeed’s engine was nuclear; who knows what fueled the biological weapons. But they explode together. In space, they don’t make the familiar mushroom cloud. They don’t make the boom! of an exploding bomb.

There is, against the dark sky, a brief flash of light. It is filled with colors, like a nebula or the aurora borealis, bursting like a popped bubble.

Nothing else—no sound of an explosion, no tremors in the earth, no smell of smoke. Not here, on the surface of the planet.
Nothing else to signify Elder’s death.
Just light.
And then it’s gone.

And then he’s gone.”
― Beth Revis, Shades of Earth

“Death devours not only those who have been cooked by old age; it also feasts on those who are half-cooked and even those who are raw.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Use and Misuse of Children

“Generally it appears the case that, when faced with all life's problems, the baby, he wants to cry about everything, the child wants to question everything, the teenager wants to rebel against everything, the young adult wants to solve everything, the middle-aged adult wants to protect everything, and the elder wants to accept everything.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Death would not surprise us as often as it does, if we let go of the misbelief that newborns are less mortal than the elderly.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“It's like this,' began the elder. 'All these sentences of hard labour in Siberian prisons, and formerly with flogging, too, do not reform anyone and, what's more, scarcely deter even one criminal, and, far from diminishing, the number of crimes are steadily increasing. You have to admit that. It therefore follows that society is not in the least protected, for though a harmful member is cut off automatically and exiled to some remote spot just to get rid of him, another criminal takes his place at once, and often, two, perhaps. If anything does protect society even today and indeed reforms the criminal himself and brings about his regeneration, it is, again, only the law of Christ, which reveals itself in the awareness of one's own consciousness. Only by recognizing his own guilt as a son of a Christian society, that is, of the Church, does the criminal recognize his guilt towards society itself, that is, towards the Church. The criminal today, therefore, is capable of recognizing his guilt only towards the Church, and not towards the State.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“You hold all the power in this situation, Pim. One little word and all my fucking secrets are yours.”
― Pepper Winters, Dollars

“Loneliness tortures many if not most of the elderly more intensely and more frequently than it torments many if not most of us who will never be or have not yet been pushed or pulled into old age.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Use and Misuse of Children

“When we are young we squander time as though it were unlimited; When we grow older, then like beggars we wish for crumbs of remembrance...”
― Nanette L. Avery

“I gaze out, to the stars. I remember the first time I saw real stars, through the hatch window. They were beautiful then, but now, seeing them here, all around me, beautiful feels like an inadequate word. I see the stars as a part of the universe, and having spent my life behind walls, suddenly having none fills me with both awe and terror. Emotion courses through my veins, choking me. I feel so insignificant, a tiny speck surrounded by a million stars.
A million suns.
Centuries away is Sol. Circling around it is Sol-Earth, the planet Amy came from. And one of these other stars is the Centauri binary system, where the new planet spins, waiting for us.
And here we are, in the middle, surrounded by a sea of stars.
Any of them could hold a planet. Any of them could hold a home.
But all of them are out of reach.”
― Beth Revis, A Million Suns

“That—this—is Orion’s secret. It’s not that the ship isn’t working, that we’re never going to make it.
It’s that the ship has already arrived.
We’re already here! There—there—is the planet that will be our home!
It floats, so bright that it hurts my eyes. Giant green landmasses spread out across blue water, with swirls and wisps of clouds twirling over top. At the edge of the planet, where it turns away from the suns and starts to darken, I can see bright flashes of light—bursts of whiteness in the darkness—and I think: Is that lightning? In the center, where the light of the suns makes the planet seem to glow from within, I can see, very distinctly, a continent. A continent. On one edge, it’s cracked and broken like an egg, dark lines snaking deep into the landmass. Rivers. Lots of them. Maybe something too big to be rivers if I can see it from here. Fingers of land stretch out into the sea, and dots of islands are just out of their grasp. That area will be cool all the time, I think. Boats can go along the rivers, up and down. We can swim in the water.
Because already, I can see myself living there. Being there.
On a planet that looks up at a million suns every night, and at two every day.

I want to scream, shout with joy. But the air is so thin now.
Too thin.
I’ve spent too long looking at Orion’s secret.

The boop... boop... boop... fades away. There’s nothing to warn about now.
Because there’s no air left.

My sight is rimmed with black. My head pulses with my heartbeat, which sounds as loud to me as the alarm once did. I turn from the planet—my planet—and start pulling, hand over hand, against the tether, toward the hatch. The ship bobs in and out of my vision as my whole body jerks. I’m panicked now and fighting to stay awake. I try to suck in air, but there’s nothing there to suck. I’m drowning in nothing.”
― Beth Revis, A Million Suns

“I have to start loving what comes next and stop hating I won't be a part of it.”
― Linda Robinson, Chantepleure

“Well, it's true for every elder sibling, We have this supremely potent weapon" parents "on our side in such matters. In fact, such are the times when our maturity works wonders in hitching parents to our side over these younger siblings.”
― Parul Wadhwa, The Masquerade

“As an unavoidable result of the inevitable loss of some physical and/or some mental abilities, many a man who has been alive for many years has become a boy again.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Use and Misuse of Children

“Aging is dreaded the most by people whose income is entirely dependent on their looks.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Getting older seems to but does not make us even more mortal.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“My grandpa, unlike Jarod Kintz, was an Elder. Now that he's dead and gone, he's a ghost French wizard. And no one knows what French wizards are good at…”
― Will Advise, Nothing is here...

“People live up to 75, the other is just a gift.”
― Deyth Banger

“Be her and be yourself, simultaneously. Be outrageous. Being pious is easy and pleasant, go ahead and make yourself hated.”
― Evgenij Vodolazkin

“The 'man' from 'Sarman' relates to heredity, or a particular family. It also refers to the receptacle of an heirloom. The 'Sar' of 'Sarman' is defined as 'head.' In this sense, the 'head' is meant both literally as a part of the body, and in the meaning of elder one or master. Therefore, we may tentatively conclude that 'Sarman' means 'The Sovereign Receptacle of the Sacred.' Or, an alternative reading would be 'Those Whose Heads are Priceless.”
― Laurence Galian, The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis

“One reason Humans remain young so long, compar'd to other Creatures, is that the young are useful in many ways, among them in providing daily, by way of the evil Creatures and Slaughter they love, a Denial of Mortality clamorous enough to allow their Elders release, if only for moments at a time, from Its Claims upon the Attention.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon