Old World Quotes

“It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“We know that there are many animals on this continent not found in the Old World. These must have been carried from here to the ark, and then brought back afterwards. Were the peccary, armadillo, ant-eater, sloth, agouti, vampire-bat, marmoset, howling and prehensile-tailed monkey, the raccoon and muskrat carried by the angels from America to Asia? How did they get there? Did the polar bear leave his field of ice and journey toward the tropics? How did he know where the ark was? Did the kangaroo swim or jump from Australia to Asia? Did the giraffe, hippopotamus, antelope and orang-outang journey from Africa in search of the ark? Can absurdities go farther than this?”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“And now that I think back, I realize the real gap between us lay in the fact that I, who was so proud of coming from the swift-winged world of science, was laughing at an old world where it was possible seriously to believe that men die young of the bad habit of failing to go out on a dangerous river to gaze at the earth when it turns overnight into silver.”
― John Hersey, A Single Pebble

“Love is enough. Its society's views and old-world thinking that broke everything.”
― Sajni Patel, First Love, Take Two

“It was a brave old world.”
― Mark A. Rayner, The Fridgularity

“I like parents, old-school, old-world parents. So real. Just think of all they've seen in their lives. They were born in another world and now they can watch it on Google maps. So much change for a single soul to see.”
― Laleh Khadivi, A Good Country

“It’s just one of the old-world fears, carrying over.”
“What’s that?”
“The fear of the cellar.”
― Josh Malerman

“For, work as you will, there is no chance of a new and better world until the old be utterly destroyed.”
― George Gissing, The Nether World

“The old-world quality in everything that she now saw had all the charm of strangeness.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Things used to be so much easier.”
― Jordan Hoechlin

“As they pedalled us down the long suburban road to the Chinese town a line of French armoured cars went by, each with its jutting gun and silent officer motionless like a figurehead under the stars and the black, smooth, concave sky––trouble again probably with a private army, the Binh Xuyen, who ran the Grand Monde and the gambling halls of Cholon. This was a land of rebellious barons. It was like Europe in the Middle Ages. But what were the Americans doing here? Columbus had not yet discovered their country.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“They were our enemies. Yet in those young men of Italy I'd seen something centuries old. An American is only as old as his years. A long line of something was hidden behind the bright eyes of those Italians. And then and there I decided to learn something of the modern world. There was something abroad which we Americans couldn't or wouldn't understand. But unless we made some attempt to realize that everyone in the world isn't American, and that not everything American is good, we'll all perish together, and in this twentieth century....”
― John Horne Burns, The Gallery

“It's rather like Happy Families, isn't it?Mrs Legal, the lawyer's wife, Miss Dose, the doctor's daughter, etc. ... So sweet and funny and old-world. You just can't think of anything nasty happening here, can you?”
― Agatha Christie

“Before me a scholarly man, of European culture, head of a literary department in one of the great universities of the West. He speaks of it with bitterness, as do almost all his colleagues. Culture is not what it was and he has not the slightest regard for mass culture. He comes from New York and, deep down, he despises California, his colleagues and the decline of standards. He gets 60-80,000 dollars a year and does not have many students or friends. He has lots of ideas, is sincere, proud and awkward. His secret is his python. I see him plunge his gloved hand into its glass case and stroke the reptile's head, which shoots out a voracious tongue and uncoils itself, still famished though it has just devoured a rat. We discuss the diet of snakes. A tortoise slumbers by the fireside in the glow of an artificial wood fire. It is Sunday in Santa Monica. Towards four, the sun drives away the mists of the Pacific. But the snake knows neither night nor day; he is immortal and poisonous and, in the words of the poet, he dreams on the hills of the sky. Which is something his master does not do, he whose reptilian brain identifies with the snake's, and who stares long and hard into his face, even though ordinarily he is incapable of looking people straight in the eye. A perverse couple, the somnambulism of the intellectual mingling with the inner night of the reptile.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Once, when I was a kid, I had impressed my mother, intuitively dipping a whole raw pepper into ssamjang paste at a barbecue restaurant in Seoul. The bitterness and spice of the vegetable perfectly married with the savory, salty taste of the sauce, itself made from fermented peppers and soybeans. It was a poetic combination, to reunite something in its raw form with its twice-dead cousin. "This is a very old taste," my mother had said.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“The human brain and the past paradigm that has been so prevalent on Earth has set up many systems of behavior meant to continue to support enough cooperation to allow for survival…and just enough fear to continue perpetuating the idea that there is something to survive from.
Indeed, in order to have a friend, there must be a foe. In order for one to feel rich, others have to be poor. And in this paradigm of striking contrasts, it is important for you to decide on the specific identifications which make one person one thing and another person the other.”
― Gwen Juvenal, Our New Story: Guides in the Garden Volume 1