Oldies Quotes

Even at the time—twenty years old—I said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at an office desk ten hours a day. There is no particular daring in this vow, but I have not broken it and shall not do so. The wisdom of my grandfathers sat in my head: we are born for the pleasure of work, fighting, love, we are born for that and nothing else. (Guy de Maupassant)

I have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.' That's T.S. Eliot, in case you were wondering. An oldie but a goodie. When it came to existential exhaustion, the man was one smart cookie.

Apparently there aren’t enough golden oldies to fill out a whole station, because this is the fourth time we’ve heard this song since we left Chicago. Why would you go through the desert on a horse with no name? Why wouldn’t you name the fucking horse at some point?

Consider a single piece glowing in your family’s stove. See it, children? That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fern or reed that lived one million years ago, or maybe two million, or maybe one hundred million. Can you imagine one hundred million years? Every summer for the whole life of that plant, its leaves caught what light they could and transformed the sun’s energy into itself. Into bark, twigs, stems. Because plants eat light, in much the way we eat food. But then the plant died and fell, probably into water, and decayed into peat, and the peat was folded inside the earth for years upon years—eons in which something like a month or a decade or even your whole life was just a puff of air, a snap of two fingers. And eventually the peat dried and became like stone, and someone dug it up, and the coal man brought it to your house, and maybe you yourself carried it to the stove, and now that sunlight—sunlight one hundred million years old—is heating your home tonight . . .

Talbot's eyes widened as he recognised Daniel. The four lost boys got out of the car and stood behind their alpha. "So he's back?" Talbot asked. "Yep." I couldn't stop smiling a bit and thinking of that song from the oldies station my Grandpa Kramer used to listen to. My boyfriend's back and you're gonna be in trouble...

Cat's friends seemed like very sweet girls," Dad says. "They were the bomb," I say fervently, and he looks back at me with raised eyebrows. "'The bomb' is a good thing? Like 'sick'? "Duh," I reply, and Dad lets out a sigh. "Thirteen-year-olds should come with subtitles," he says, turning onto our street.

Do you like eighties music, Nurse Willowes?” “Can we discuss the oldies another time?” “What? What? The oldies? I’ve already had a man kicking in my ribs, and now you pull out my heart.” “Hey!

I begin to shed my Martha-like anxiety about many things. Washable slipcovers, faded and old—I hardly see them; I don’t worry about the impression they make on other people. I am shedding pride.

I've heard of sweatin' to the oldies, but this was like drowning in the moldies." - Cher

The doo-wop stalker love song on a Cincinnati oldies station--you broke up with me because I was an obnoxious jerk and now you're dating him, so I drive by your house and stare in your window every night, thereby proving that I'm an even bigger creep than you thought

But if you believe that your best years are behind you, you've guaranteed they are; I'm going to dance into that good night, with the oldies turned up loud.

Live boldly. Or be an oldie. Your call. As for me, well, I may have at times lived good, or even badly. But never ever not boldly.

I grow old...I grow old... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk along the beach. I have the heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think they will sing to me.

What the Motorcycle Said Br-r-r-am-m-m, rackerty-am-m, OM, AM: All-r-r-room, r-r-ram, ala-bas-ter- Am, the world’s my oyster. I hate plastic, wear it black and slick, hate hardhats, wear one on my head, That’s what the motorcycle said. Passed phonies in Fords, knockede down billboards, landed On the other side of The Gap, and Whee, bypassed history. When I was born (The Past), baby knew best. They shook when I bawled, took Freud’s path, threw away their wrath. R-r-rackety-am-m. Am. War, rhyme, soap, meat, marriage, the Phantom Jet are sh*t, and like that. Hate pompousness, punishment, patience, am into Love, hate middle-class moneymakers, live on Dad, that’s what the motorcycle said. Br-r-r-am-m-m. It’s Nowsville, man. Passed Oldies, Uglies, Straighties, Honkies. I’ll never be mean, tired, or unsexy. Passed cigarette suckers, souses, mother-fuckers, losers, went back to Nature and found how to get VD, stoned. Passed a cow, too fast to hear her moo, “I rolled our leaves of grass into one ball. I am the grassy All.” Br-r-r-am-m-m, rackety-am-m, OM, Am: All-gr-r-rin, oooohgah, gl-l-utton- Am, the world’s my smilebutton.

The oldies radio station plays pop songs that I remember from the early 2000s, and I stare at the yellow glow of the streetlights, wondering if I, too, am an oldie.

The oldies radio station plays pop songs that I remember from the early 2000s,

Blessed is the society that has oldies.

He made slighting remarks about the committee’s enforcement, and, well, rules is rules as the rules say someplace, or at least as all the oldies say they say.

The ordinary price paid for a new play was less than seven pounds; Oldys, on what authority is not known, says that Shakespeare received only five pounds for “Hamlet.

The Peggot aunts must have seized the equipment because the music was oldies, Michael Jackson and Prince.

The dark place with the lousy color TV that unshaven and unemployed men spend the day watching game shows on? Where the piss in the men’s room smells two thousand years old and there’s always a sodden Camel butt unraveling in the toilet bowl? Where the beer is thirty cents a glass and you cut it with salt and the jukebox is loaded with seventy country oldies?

Кажется, Альфред Хичкок... сказал однажды: "Бомба с включённым таймером, спрятанная под кроватью, где молодожёны занимаются любовью, много страшнее бомбы, взорвавшейся и разметавшей этих молодожёнов по асфальту". Ожидание страшней всего. Предчувствие ужасней события. Ночь перед казнью острее гильотины.

America has no now. We're reluctant to acknowledge the present. It's too embarrassing. Instead, we reach into the past. Our culture is composed of sequels, reruns, remakes, revivals, reissues, re-releases, recreations, reenactments, adaptations, anniversaries, memorabilia, oldies radio, and nostalgia record collections. World War II has been refought so many times, the Germans and Japanese are now drawing residuals.

Sometimes I take her food from the Iranian restaurant she and Ollie liked—the Sunny Acres kitchen staff is happy to warm it up—and sometimes I bring her a DVD or two. She likes the oldies, like with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. I always bring her something, and she’s always happy to see me. On her good days she does see me. On her bad ones, she’s apt to call me Olivia. Or Charlotte. That’s my aunt. I also have an uncle.

Dude,” Austin said as we exited the freeway, “in fifty years, all of the old folks’ homes are going to be filled with seniors listening to Justin Bieber on the oldies station and talking about how movies used to be in two-D.

All women learn from the follies of their youth, just as each young woman could learn a different lesson from the same problem it is up to all the LumberJanes to seek guidance in their counselors, their peers, and their elders.

Hang on, here's the Beatles, there's an oldie you might like from about fifty years ago,' she says, 'All You Need Is Love.' I'm confused. 'Don't persons need food and stuff?' 'Yeah, but all that's no good if you don't have somebody to love as well'...

Shadow tuned the radio to an oldies station, and listened to songs that were current before he was born. Bob Dylan sang about a hard rain that was going to fall, and Shadow wondered if that rain had fallen yet, or if it was something that was still going to happen.

Many of the first 2,000 or so nights of my life ended in civil disobedience: crying, begging, bargaining, until—on night 2,193, the night I turned six years old—I discovered direct action. The authorities weren’t interested in calls for reform, and I wasn’t born yesterday.

Darn! what a beautiful night! Heading towards Pandara Road-Gulati Restaurant, with open windows of my baby sedan and this broad chest guy with big brown eyes. He hums the oldies well and his Issey Miyake is making me lose the grip over my senses. One more thing is distracting me, he ain't wearing anything inside but a transparent white, V necked, cotton short Kurta. I can see the hair winking out and his collar bones!! Not only men get excited by transparent dresses but women as well. His broad shoulders and chest is my weakness and he knows it. This man is not doing good to me! It's a crime to seduce in this way, when you are not touched, when you are distracted by the aroma of his skin, when you know, he is well aware of the intentions.. when you can't do anything except getting seduced by the corner stretching smile of a man with animal instinct.. I certainly am missing myself to be tied up to the bedpost,choked and groaning his name!

Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love. We oldies yearn daily and hourly for conversation and a renewed domesticity, for company at the movies or while visiting a museum, for someone close by in the car when coming home at night.

Поди пойми, где добро, где зло. А раз так, то и делать ничего не надо. Всё равно что-то да случится. Как есть случится!

Спешка - это всегда плохо. Если спешишь, что-нибудь обязательно пойдёт не так.

A Day Away We often think that our affairs, great or small, must be tended continuously and in detail, or our world will disintegrate, and we will lose our places in the universe. That is not true, or if it is true, then our situations were so temporary that they would have collapsed anyway. Once a year or so I give myself a day away. On the eve of my day of absence, I begin to unwrap the bonds which hold me in harness. I inform housemates, my family and close friends that I will not be reachable for twenty-four hours; then I disengage the telephone. I turn the radio dial to an all-music station, preferably one which plays the soothing golden oldies. I sit for at least an hour in a very hot tub; then I lay out my clothes in preparation for my morning escape, and knowing that nothing will disturb me, I sleep the sleep of the just. On the morning I wake naturally, for I will have set no clock, nor informed my body timepiece when it should alarm. I dress in comfortable shoes and casual clothes and leave my house going no place. If I am living in a city, I wander streets, window-shop, or gaze at buildings. I enter and leave public parks, libraries, the lobbies of skyscrapers, and movie houses. I stay in no place for very long. On the getaway day I try for amnesia. I do not want to know my name, where I live, or how many dire responsibilities rest on my shoulders. I detest encountering even the closest friend, for then I am reminded of who I am, and the circumstances of my life, which I want to forget for a while. Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Jobs, lovers, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence. Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us. We need hours of aimless wandering or spates of time sitting on park benches, observing the mysterious world of ants and the canopy of treetops. If we step away for a time, we are not, as many may think and some will accuse, being irresponsible, but rather we are preparing ourselves to more ably perform our duties and discharge our obligations. When I return home, I am always surprised to find some questions I sought to evade had been answered and some entanglements I had hoped to flee had become unraveled in my absence. A day away acts as a spring tonic. It can dispel rancor, transform indecision, and renew the spirit.

neighbour. He is a retired major and now runs the local Neighbourhood Watch group, Lower Toddle branch. It is a collection of oldies who have joined forces to keep an eye out for burglars, but Mr Parker uses it as an excuse to spy on everyone. One person he has got his eye on particularly is Ben. The nosy neighbour had been convinced the boy and his granny had stolen the Crown Jewels, but nobody had believed him. Now Mr Parker is out for revenge!

Go faster,” I urged Steven, poking him in the shoulder. “Let’s pass that kid on the bike.” Steven shrugged me off. “Never touch the driver,” he said. “And take your dirty feet off my dashboard.” I wiggled my toes back and forth. They looked pretty clean to me. “It’s not your dashboard. It’s gonna be my car soon, you know.” “If you ever get your license,” he scoffed. “People like you shouldn’t even be allowed to drive.” “Hey, look,” I said, pointing out the window. “That guy in a wheelchair just lapped us!” Steven ignored me, and so I started to fiddle with the radio. One of my favorite things about going to the beach was the radio stations. I was as familiar with them as I was with the ones back home, and listening to Q94 made me just really know inside that I was there, at the beach. I found my favorite station, the one that played everything from pop to oldies to hip-hop. Tom Petty was singing “Free Fallin’.” I sang right along with him. “She’s a good girl, crazy ‘bout Elvis. Loves horses and her boyfriend too.” Steven reached over to switch stations, and I slapped his hand away. “Belly, your voice makes me want to run this car into the ocean.” He pretended to swerve right. I sang even louder, which woke up my mother, and she started to sing too. We both had terrible voices, and Steven shook his head in his disgusted Steven way. He hated being outnumbered.

And as we take up our positions on the stage, we call upon the nine Muses for assistance, Calliope, who helps with the epic ballads, Euterpe, who helps with the sad songs, Erato, who helps with the confessional songs, Clio, who helps with the oldies, Melpomene, who helps with the super-tragic stuff, Polyhymnia, who helps with the religious songs, Terpsichore, who helps with the dance numbers, Thalia, who helps with the funny songs, And Urania, who helps when it gets spacey and psychedelic.

My grandfather...The last thing he said to my mother was "Your mother loves you"...Years later it occurred to me that when someone says what my grandfather did, what they mean, what would be far more accurate, is "She is trying to love you as best she can." This might be okay with you, or it might now be what you need at all...and now I am forty years old...I don't have a daughter and I don't know if I ever will. But if I do, we will not carry this sadness forward. I'm tired of holding it.

I once read the most widely understood word in the whole world is ‘OK’, followed by ‘Coke’, as in cola. I think they should do the survey again, this time checking for ‘Game Over’. Game Over is my favorite thing about playing video games. Actually, I should qualify that. It’s the split second before Game Over that’s my favorite thing. Streetfighter II - an oldie but goldie - with Leo controlling Ryu. Ryu’s his best character because he’s a good all-rounder - great defensive moves, pretty quick, and once he’s on an offensive roll, he’s unstoppable. Theo’s controlling Blanka. Blanka’s faster than Ryu, but he’s really only good on attack. The way to win with Blanka is to get in the other player’s face and just never let up. Flying kick, leg-sweep, spin attack, head-bite. Daze them into submission. Both players are down to the end of their energy bars. One more hit and they’re down, so they’re both being cagey. They’re hanging back at opposite ends of the screen, waiting for the other guy to make the first move. Leo takes the initiative. He sends off a fireball to force Theo into blocking, then jumps in with a flying kick to knock Blanka’s green head off. But as he’s moving through the air he hears a soft tapping. Theo’s tapping the punch button on his control pad. He’s charging up an electricity defense so when Ryu’s foot makes contact with Blanka’s head it’s going to be Ryu who gets KO’d with 10,000 volts charging through his system. This is the split second before Game Over. Leo’s heard the noise. He knows he’s fucked. He has time to blurt ‘I’m toast’ before Ryu is lit up and thrown backwards across the screen, flashing like a Christmas tree, a charred skeleton. Toast. The split second is the moment you comprehend you’re just about to die. Different people react to it in different ways. Some swear and rage. Some sigh or gasp. Some scream. I’ve heard a lot of screams over the twelve years I’ve been addicted to video games. I’m sure that this moment provides a rare insight into the way people react just before they really do die. The game taps into something pure and beyond affectations. As Leo hears the tapping he blurts, ‘I’m toast.’ He says it quickly, with resignation and understanding. If he were driving down the M1 and saw a car spinning into his path I think he’d in react the same way. Personally, I’m a rager. I fling my joypad across the floor, eyes clenched shut, head thrown back, a torrent of abuse pouring from my lips. A couple of years ago I had a game called Alien 3. It had a great feature. When you ran out of lives you’d get a photo-realistic picture of the Alien with saliva dripping from its jaws, and a digitized voice would bleat, ‘Game over, man!’ I really used to love that.

Something was happening down there in the vaults, down there where Rich Tozier kept his own personal collection of Golden Oldies. Doors were opening. Only they’re not records down there, are they? Down there you’re not Rich “Records” Tozier, hot-shot KLAD deejay and the Man of a Thousand Voices, are you? And those things that are opening... they aren’t exactly doors, are they? He tried to shake these thoughts off. Thing to remember is that I’m okay. I’m okay, you’re okay, Rich Tozier’s okay. Could use a cigarette, is all. He had quit four years ago but he could use one now, all right.

If we go, how long will it be before you find the local hole in Sidewinder? a voice inside him asked. The dark place with the lousy color TV that unshaven and unemployed men spend the day watching game shows on? Where the piss in the men’s room smells two thousand years old and there’s always a sodden Camel butt unraveling in the toilet bowl? Where the beer is thirty cents a glass and you cut it with salt and the jukebox is loaded with seventy country oldies? How long? Oh Christ, he was so afraid it wouldn’t be long at all. “I can’t win,” he said, very softly. That was it. It was like trying to play solitaire with one of the aces missing from the deck.

Roland: This is as light as a feather, yet no man can hold it for long. Blaine: (without hesitation) ONE'S BREATH. Yet he did hesitate, Eddie thought suddenly. Jake and Susannah were watching Roland with agonized concentration, fists clenched, willing him to ask Blaine the right riddle, the stumper, the one with the Get the Fuck Out of Jail Free card hidden inside it; Eddie couldn't look at them-Suze, in particular-and keep his concentration. He lowered his gaze to his own hands, which were also clenched, and forced them to open on his lap. It was surprisingly hard to do. From the aisle he heard Roland continuing to trot out the golden oldies of his youth.

Can you imagine one hundred million years? Every summer for the whole life of that plant, its leaves caught what light they could and transformed the sun’s energy into itself. Into bark, twigs, stems. Because plants eat light, in much the way we eat food. But then the plant died and fell, probably into water, and decayed into peat, and the peat was folded inside the earth for years upon years—eons in which something like a month or a decade or even your whole life was just a puff of air, a snap of two fingers. And eventually the peat dried and became like stone, and someone dug it up, and the coal man brought it to your house, and maybe you yourself carried it to the stove, and now that sunlight—sunlight one hundred million years old—is heating your home tonight …

Жестокость – изнанка обиды. Ненависть – изнанка слабости. Жалость – изнанка взгляда в зеркало. Агрессия – тыл гордыни. Теперь возьмем всё это – плюс многое другое – разделим на бумажные жребии, бросим в шляпу, встряхнем, хорошенько перемешаем и начнем тянуть билетики в другом порядке. Думаете, что-то изменится? Ничего подобного. От перемены мест слагаемых, даже если слагаются не числа, а чувства… Банальность – изнанка мудрости.

The Major's laughter boomed out again. "And I never kept a diary in my life!" he cried. "Why there's enough cream in this situation to make a dishful of meringues. You and I, you know, the students of Tilling! The serious-minded students who do a hard day's work when all the pretty ladies have gone to bed. Often and often has old--I mean has that fine woman, Miss Mapp, told me that I work too hard at night! Recommended me to get earlier to bed, and do my work between six and eight in the morning! Six and eight in the morning! That's a queer time of day to recommend an old campaigner to be awake at! Often she's talked to you, too, I bet my hat, about sitting up late and exhausting the nervous faculties." Major Flint choked and laughed and inhaled tobacco smoke till he got purple in the face. "And you sitting up one side of the street," he gasped, "pretending to be interested in Roman roads, and me on the other pulling a long face over my diaries, and neither of us with a Roman road or a diary to our names. Let's have an end to such unsociable arrangements, old friend; you lining your Roman roads and the bottle to lay the dust over to me one night, and I'll bring my diaries and my peg over to you the next. Never drink alone--one of my maxims in life--if you can find someone to drink with you. And there were you within a few yards of me all the time sitting by your old solitary self, and there was I sitting by my old solitary self, and we each thought the other a serious-minded old buffer, busy on his life-work. I'm blessed if I ever heard of two such pompous old frauds as you and I, Captain! What a sight of hypocrisy there is in the world, to be sure! No offence--mind: I'm as bad as you, and you're as bad as me, and we're both as bad as each other. But no more solitary confinement of an evening for Benjamin Flint, as long as you're agreeable.

* Get one of those marvellous pink rabbit hand blenders. Like the ones I've seen on the late-night shopping channel.

The good oldies are great!

HE HAS MANAGED TO BECOME NEITHER A WIZENED ORACLE NOR AN OLDIES ACT, AND HIS BEST SONGS CONVEY THE APPEALING SENSATION OF LISTENING TO A GUY WHO IS STILL TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT HE'S DOING.

Food used to be so good. I used to love food. I haven't eaten food since I was thirteen years old...I haven't had a real piece of bread in thirty years. If I knew what was going to happen, I would have saved some rolls when I was a kid.

Поэзия – жена, хозяйка моего дома. Техническая поэзия – опытная проститутка. Чердачная поэзия – случайная попутчица. Хочется, а на лучшую не хватает средств.

Ларгитас не в силах видеть непознаваемое. Это вызов. Пощечина. Хищник, вторгшийся на чужую территорию. Непознаваемое надо скрутить в три погибели, силой превратить в непознанное – и вцепиться в него клыками и когтями познания. Это – залог существования. Инстинкт самосохранения. Иначе твое собственное право на жизнь подвергается сомнению.

Ограничения, думала Регина. Мама часто повторяет это слово. Вся ее работа – в этом слове. Ограничения оформляют счастье, говорит мама. [...] Ограничения, думала Анна-Мария. Странная в частностях, нелепая на первый взгляд, раздражающая и ненавистная, система ограничений заменяет обществу то, что у человека называется «волей к жизни». Банально? Да. Но отними у общества эту волю, убей ее вместе с большинством солдат ее армии – ограничений! – и самая могучая империя встанет на путь гибели. Тирания и утопия в этом смысле близнецы.

Never underestimate a septuagenarian with time on his hands.

Isaiah’s cell buzzed. He checked the number and hesitated. Some people were like the oldies you hear on the radio, evoking another time, another place, and who you were back then. The sound of Dodson’s voice and the rhythm of his speech stirred up a stew of memories burned black at the bottom of his heart. The last time they’d spoken was at Mozique’s funeral but it took a day or two before the burnt taste was out of his mouth. “Who

Maybe it’s “The best revenge is spending your life in a cottage by the ocean with a world-champion kisser who takes the phrase ‘with my body, I thee worship’ literally.” That might not be it either. How about “The best revenge is flying kites on the beach with your chubby toddlers.” Or “The best revenge is dancing to oldies in the kitchen with your goofy friends.” Or maybe “The best revenge is to love like crazy.” Gosh, what is that darned saying? “The best revenge is…” “The best revenge is…” Oh, well … I forget.

They dance the Hoochie Coochie when work is done. They dance by the light of the Moon. Buffalo Girls are plenty smart.

Сумно, що була потрiбна кривава вiйна, розв'язана росiйскою владою, щоб закордоннi видавцi зацiкавилися творчiстю українських авторiв.

I walked out of a chic downtown Manhattan restaurant not long ago, with friends, before we’d ordered, because the music was so loud we were reduced to making hand signals. Four gestures I remember making (the extent of my sign language) were: “thumbs down,” “knife across throat,” “this is bullshit,” and “let’s get out of here.” The cacophony, increasingly, is the point. It’s a way to keep out the oldies, of which now, I suppose, we were. When I’m trapped in a restaurant that’s playing shitty songs at defenestrating volume, I think longingly of the house rules at St. John, Fergus Henderson’s restaurant in London: “No art. No music.” To crib a line from the poet William Matthews, the jukebox plays Marcel Marceau.

In the car Marten was rattling on as if he had way too many batteries, so B.D. listened closely to the undercurrent of the radio on a golden oldies station and it was like hearing all of your used-up emotions.

My cheeks are still scalding. They've been hot for the last fifteen minutes. I scramble to change the station. The next preset is another rock station. That won't do. There. The oldies station is sure to be free of Miles's voice. He laughs. "You're cute when you're nervous." "I'm

The magical encounter with the Beethoven quartet, the Bach suite, the Brahms symphony, in which your whole being is gripped by melodic and harmonic ideas and taken on a journey through the imaginary space of music - that experience which lies at the heart of our civilisation and which is an incomparable source of joy and consolation to all those who know it - is no longer a universal resource. It has become a private eccentricity, something that a dwindling body of oldies cling to, but which is regarded by many of the young as irrelevant. Increasingly young ears cannot reach out to this enchanted world, and therefore turn away from it. The loss is theirs, but you cannot explain that to them, any more than you can explain the beauty of colours to someone who is congenitally blind.

Кюре отсутствовал. Не было и депутатов Палаты. Зато политики-лилипуты суетились, строясь в очередь. Записные болтуны, сами не знают, чего хотят: Республику или порцию бланманже. Один протолкался к гробу, снял шляпу, сурово нахмурил брови.

Between the tables of oldies and hipsters, were a handful of young women. I cataloged them out of habit more than anything, until my gaze fell on a blonde across the room. If I’m honest, I kept looking. She wasn’t a stunner but it’s not

A loose generalization would have it that creation and destruction go hand in hand. But my destruction takes the form of trying to make an old story work, for instance having almost to destroy the old story to tell it anew. The Odyssey is an oldie. Which I try to tell on dry land, so to speak, in The Studhorse Man. You see, the old stories, instead of illuminating the world, sometimes stop us from seeing it. It's like a pair of glasses that don't quite fit any longer.

Oldie took another swing and I sidestepped, my feet carrying me into the kitchen. I brought the eskrima stick overhand and cracked him on the head as I let out a little giggle. I couldn’t help it, really. Day after day it was study, study, study, practice, practice, maybe watch a little TV, wonder why I’m not as good at fighting as Mom, and then one day you wake up and there are two men in the house. And I’m beating them both senseless without giving it my full effort. What does it say about me that I haven’t seen a living human being other than Mom in twelve years and my first instinct is to knock them unconscious? I’d worry more about it, but Mom’s been gone for over a week – coincidence that these guys show up now? Mom comes home every day after work. Set your watch by her: with only an occasional exception, she was home at 5:34. But I haven’t seen her in a week. I thought about leaving, but what if it’s a test? There was an alarm, after all; she could have been monitoring, and then I’d fail the test – and that would be bad. We’ll define “bad” later. After

The first shot would have gotten me in the face if I hadn’t already been moving. I dodged behind the couch as the shot rang out. Then another and another. They were loud but not deafening. The microwave in the kitchen took the first two; the next three hit the sofa and I heard the muffled impacts as stuffing flew through the air. I was crawling my ass off, heading for the door. I dodged under the coffee table, the one Oldie had hit on his way in, rolled onto my back and put my feet and hands on the underside of the glass. I

Oldie took another swing and I sidestepped, my feet carrying me into the kitchen. I brought the eskrima stick overhand and cracked him on the head as I let out a little giggle. I couldn’t help it, really. Day after day it was study, study, study, practice, practice, maybe watch a little TV, wonder why I’m not as good at fighting as

Воспоминания? Убрать! Привычки? Отсоединить – и в сторону. Убеждения? Отставить. Взгляды? Долой. Привязанности? Ну их. Симпатии-антипатии? Вон. Далее по списку? Прочь. Что останется? Ну ведь что-то должно остаться, даже если ничего и нет-то? Сидит иногда человек в кабинете психира, готовится к операции и терзается: что отыщется внутри, если ободрать все, лепесток за лепестком? Кто прячется в черной сердцевине? Душа – или тварь? Обе с крыльями – не сразу отличишь. Пусть уж тварь, лишь бы не дырка от бублика. Обидно ведь не то, что дырка, а то, что бублик. Воспоминания, привычки, убеждения, от начала до конца – бублик. Жалкий круг теста с редким бисером мака…

Иногда кажется, что предел мечтаний большинства – замочная скважина, в которую они станут подглядывать без разрешения, пуская слюни. Там, в замочной скважине – десятки способов разбогатеть, сотни возможностей прославиться, тысячи шансов отомстить. Бедные дети! – глупые, жадные, любимые… Ваша зависть взаимна.

Where did we get the idea that older folks need to be given a “kid-free” environment with other “golden oldies,” and that men’s groups and women’s groups are more meaningful than the communion of saints?

And 14% of southern newlyweds marry someone of another race—a larger share than in the north-east or Midwest, according to the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank. Black and white southerners vote differently (93% of blacks voted Democratic in 2012; 72% of whites, Republican). They also worship separately, for the most part. But the workplace is much more integrated. “It’s not that racism doesn’t exist, it’s just now we can discuss it,” says Aysha Cooper, who runs a day-care centre for the elderly in Snellville, Georgia. Ms Cooper finds that oldies brought up under Jim Crow now mix happily over games and meals. “There are no racial barriers in my centre,” she declares.

Even the jukebox plays nothing but oldies, mostly

Признать свое поражение до схватки – талант, не свойственный юности. <...> Сдаться, не боясь потерять лицо… Это ли юность?

Seven Layer Cookie Bars This is a recipe that my best friend Rose’s Mom used to make as a treat.  It’s an oldie but goodie. Ingredients 1/2 cup unsalted butter 2 cups Graham crackers 1 can (14 ounces) sweetened condensed milk 6 ounces butterscotch chips 6 ounces chocolate chips 3 1/2 ounces flaked coconut 1 cup chopped pecans

You can get just so much from the good things. You can linger too long in your dreams. Say goodbye to the oldies but goodies. Cuz the good ol' days weren't always good. Tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems!

The disc jockey played “Blue Hawaii” as a golden oldie, and I wondered where Bubba was—not my own brother, but the vampire now known only as Bubba.

He was an oldies fan, like me, and we agreed that half of what was played on the radio now was nowhere near as good as the music that had come out between the ’80s and the early 2000s.

What do I say to them? “Sorry you had to watch me make out with your enemy’s daughter and that it was broadcast to like fifty people who are also our competitors”? I go with an oldie but goodie. “Hey,” I say.

By contrast, not a single respondent at the fixed end of the worldview distribution identified either rap or hip-hop as his or her favorite, to say nothing of K-pop or EDM. Instead, the fixed especially love country, oldies, and old country. Country music turned out to be a very polarizing genre. A significant number of the fluid said that they like all music except country.

It was not just weariness, it was the plummeting roller coaster of depression. It was the result of routine overwork.

One night at the Old Vicarage that winter, we listened to Ivor Novello's "Perchance to Dream" on the wireless. It was only a few years old then, and its small, haunting, fragile hit-song 'We'll Gather Lilacs' was still a tune that one heard constantly, on the wireless, from orchestras in restaurants, being whistled in the street. To this day I have only to hear the first notes, in some programme of 'Golden Oldies', to go straight back to that time. What an arid place this world would be without nostalgia.

When I go on these tragic calls, I'll usually either sit in silence or find some upbeat music on the radio to distract me from the void. It can be anything: Pop music. Oldies. Katy Perry.

Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge represents a transition, in the metaphysics of the region, there to be felt even by travelers unwary as Zoyd. When the busful of northbound hippies first caught sight of it, just at sundown as the fog was pouring in, the towers and cables ascending into pale gold otherworldly billows, you heard a lot of ''Wow,'' and ''Beautiful,'' though Zoyd only found it beautiful the way a firearm is, because of the bad dream unreleased inside it, in this case the brute simplicity of height, the finality of what swept below relentlessly out to sea. They rose into the strange gold smothering, visibility down to half a car length. . . . Trees. Zoyd must have dozed off. He woke to rain coming down in sheets, the smell of redwood trees in the rain through the open bus windows, tunnels of unbelievably tall straight red trees whose tops could not be seen pressing in to either side. . . . The storm lashed the night, dead trees on slow log trucks reared up in the high-beams shaggy and glistening, the highway was interrupted by flooding creeks and minor slides that often obliged the bus to creep around inches from the edge of Totality. Aislemates struck up conversations, joints appeared and were lit, guitars came down from overhead racks and harmonicas out of fringe bags, and soon there was a concert that went on all night, a retrospective of the times they'd come through more or less as a generation, the singing of rock and roll, folk, Motown, fifties oldies, and at last, for about an hour just before the watery green sunrise, one guitar and one harmonica, playing the blues.

Did you hear about the egg that wasn’t sure if God existed?’ Violet asked chirpily. ‘He was egg-nostic.

Matt laughs, flipping on the radio to an oldies station. He performs every song he knows loudly and in a way meant to piss me off. Jokes on him; it has the opposite effect.

Wasn’t it indeed a time to plant a new society for the oldies? Take them out of their glass cabinets. They’re not only feel-good ornaments. Sad old hug machines. They aren’t the moth-balled walking-dead. Take them out of their pre-coffins. Cultivate everything that would add value to their lives. Believe in agency.

After a moment of fiddling with the tuning dial she found a radio station playing ’90s oldies.

Anything older than me is an oldie and anything younger than me is a baby. I don’t make the rules.

People always seem too busy to pass the time of day any more, but us invisible oldies … well, we see a lot more than people give us credit for.

As soon as I’m in my pickup, I turn on the radio to an oldies station. John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” comes on and I feel the emotion of it spread over me like icing on a hot cake. I live this song. I am this song. I need to find a man who understands that and wants the same things I do.

The truly great songs, the ones that age and golden-oldies radio stations cannot wither, are about our romantic feelings. And this is not because songwriters have anything to add to the subject; it’s just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself.

For many of the people in my immediate vicinity, it was clear that the Beatles (to say nothing of McCartney’s solo career) ceased to be a going concern once the Summer of Love commenced. Anything in the set list that was even mildly psychedelic—“The Fool on the Hill,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”—went over like Timothy Leary at the 1968 Republican National Convention. Apparently, there are still people for whom Sgt. Pepper is a radical—perhaps too radical—musical experiment. This wasn’t a classic-rock-radio crowd, it was an oldies-radio crowd. I, too, was hoping to hear my favorite Beatles hits. But I also secretly wished that McCartney would play “Temporary Secretary,” one of the battiest tracks from one of his battiest solo albums, 1980’s McCartney II. I believe that “Temporary Secretary” is a legitimately great song, even if it is totally bonkers. “Temporary Secretary” sounds like a businessman discussing his staffing practices while also imitating a car alarm. It’s genius! But the main reason I wanted to hear “Temporary Secretary” is because I knew that it would confound all of the boomers in the house who stopped following Paul McCartney’s career after he wrote “Michelle.

Hey, all and sundry, let’s put her in a clandestine before the teacher comes!’ The NIGHT TRAIN like long memorials dashing toward me a white line in the front red in the back on the up first of seven uppers. Soaring, gravity-defying OFFICE BUILDINGS dominate the skyline. Older buildings wedged among the new. All are protected by huge glass and steel shields. As we get closer congested roads and freeways begin to disappear below ground into a series of subterranean tunnels. The oldie highways have become titanic, voluminous arcades. An elevator opens with a hiss steps out into a flavorless passageway.

she makes a sound with her throat like she’s annoyed or going to throw up and then changes it over to a 1990s rock oldies channel.

Kdepak, nadarmo jsem si dřív myslel, že ovládat dvě zbraně naráz je stejné jako spát se dvěma ženami najednou. Ne. Je to mnohem težší. A napoprvé to snad ani vůbec nejde.

It started up from the skies. Hello…wait, don't run away. I won't touch you…don't run away. I just want to talk to you. I won't do you no harm—I just want to know about your different lives on this here people farm. I heard you have your families living in cages tall and cold. And some live there past the day of old—is this true? Please let me talk to you. I just want to know about the rooms behind your minds. Do I see a vacuum there or am I going blind, or is it remains of vibrations from echoes long ago, age-old whisper things like Love the world and let your fancy flow…the way you want to let me talk to you.

And now," Myriah went on, as if she and Gabbie were putting on a show. "We will perform that oldy but goody, Blue Suede Shoes by Mr. Elvis Presley." Claudia was even more impressed. Apparently, Myriah and Gabbie knew an entire rock and roll song and she didn't. Furthermore, for years, Claudia had thought that the singer's name was Elbow Presley.

Golden Oldies Showers!

Misty again today. A freakish mist lies over the land. My clothes are out on the clothesline, and they have been there for two days and they've started to get that wet-too-long smell. Now, if I were a nineteenth-century poet, I would say that the freakish mist lay 'o'er' the land. And that's one of those words, 'o'er,' that makes a modern reader feel ill. So what I do, to make the old poems feel true again - the good old poems - is very simple. This is another little tip for you, so get ready. I just pronounce 'o'er' as 'over,' but I do it very fast, so you're gliding o'er the V, not really adding another syllable. Because that's what it was, I think: it was a crude, printed representation of a subtle spoken elision that might well have had some of the vocal ghost of the V left in it. There are rare times when it's absolutely necessary to say 'o'er' without any V - as when, say, Macaulay rhymes it with 'yore.' But a lot of the time you can fudge it. This trick will also work for ''tis' and 'ne'er' - the other painful bits of poetic diction. When I'm reading a poem to myself, I just mentally change all the instances of ''tis' to 'it's.' And I give 'ne'er' the 'o'er' treatment - I just barely graze my teeth with my lower lip, while thinking V. It's like waving the vermouth bottle over the glass of gin. Try it, it may work for you. After all, we don't want some mere convention of spelling to block our connection with the oldies. We want to hear them now as if they're being said now. And that tailcoated diction can really get in the way. It's bad. Not to mention the exclamation points everywhere. Lo! Great God! Just ignore them. If you say the poem aloud, they disappear.

Yes, the girl sneezing pink froth and the woman fisting her eyes each time another oldie crackles from the ceiling look worse than I do. See them. And find, please, a dentist for the man clutching two molars in a bloody paper towel. And a CPA or lawyer - summon one for the man squeezing the folder of gray paper to his chest and squeaking grievously. But I have an appointment. I arrived two hours ago, on time, a little early in fact, and someone must help me find the Ferris wheel I hear looping in my attic and the Tilt-A-Whirl lopsidedly unfolding and refolding in the basement. Through the walls, I hear the oompah-pahing of a carousel, and in dark windows and the gleaming facades of black appliances I glimpse ascending and descending carved horses, real tigers, elephants, and waltzing poodles. Whitewashed clowns ghost across a TV humbling itself before beer, soap, laundry, and my armpits, muffling the human cannonball's applause and the dumbfounded wow when orange torches enter a human face and emerge unquenched. The circus is not my fault or responsibility. Someone must write that down. Someone must sell me a ticket.