"Octogenarian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... put his hand up to his left ear and said "Hey?" This seemed to bring Mr. Spratt to his senses. He started violently, stared hard for a moment at the octogenarian, and then strode off down Main street, shaking his head as much as to say, "There must be something the matter with me. Nobody ever speaks to him unless he ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... and fifty miles from Calcutta, the flourishing coal-mining district of Asansol brings me again to the East India Railway and semi-European society and accommodation. Instead of doughy chuppatties, throat-blistering curry, and octogenarian chicken, I this morning breakfast off a welcome bottle of Bass's ale, baker's ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... interesting relic in the whole collection was the spry octogenarian who acted as guide and showed us through the place—for he was one of the few living links between the Old West and the New. As a boy-convert to Mormonism he came across the desert with the second expedition that fled westward from Gentile persecution after Brigham Young had blazed the trail. He ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... found the Ambassador quite overcome by the terrible news. He seemed stricken with grief at the thought of his aged Sovereign, who had already lost so many of his nearest and dearest, and of the Dual Empire, robbed of its most skillful pilot, and with no one to steer it now but an octogenarian leaning on a youth of twenty-six. M. Cambon had come to the Embassy at the same time, and we left together discussing the results, still impossible to foresee clearly, that this fatality might have for ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... exclaimed the octogenarian, as if it was a matter of the most vital importance to him; 'great run, sir; no, sir, ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... contemporaries. Surely when a schoolboy at Eton he must somewhere have discovered the elixir of life, or have been bathed by some beneficent fairy in the well of perpetual youth. Gladly would many a man of fifty exchange physique with this hale and hearty octogenarian. Only in one respect does he show any trace of advancing years. His hearing is not quite so good as it was, but still it is far better than that of Cardinal Manning, who became very deaf in his closing years. Otherwise ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... One octogenarian—a carpenter's apprentice—heatedly informed me, through Schmick, that he had a child two weeks old that would die before morning if deprived of proper food and nourishment. Somewhat impressed by this pitiful lament, I enquired how his wife was getting along. ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... that Boaz and Ruth might not have long to wait. Tob, who was not learned in the Torah, did not know that the prohibition against the Moabites had reference only to males. Therefore, he declined to marry Ruth. (64) So she was taken to wife (65) by the octogenarian (66) Boaz. Ruth herself was forty years old (67) at the time of her second marriage, and it was against all expectations that her union with Boaz should be blessed with offspring, a son Obed the pious. (68) Ruth lived to see the glory ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... impregnate ovum and the ovum immediately before impregnation, or again between the impregnate ovum, and both the ovum before impregnation and the spermatozoon which impregnated it. Nor, if we admit personal identity between the ovum and the octogenarian, is there any sufficient reason why we should not admit it between the impregnate ovum and the two factors of which it is composed, which two factors are but offshoots from two distinct personalities, of which they are as much part as the apple ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... no member of the society has been more valued than the late octogenarian, Mr. John Rivett, J.P., who died Sept 4, 1906. For nearly 70 years he was a generous supporter of the cause; he represented the district at no less than 13 Conferences, in various parts of the country, and at the Leeds Conference, in 1882, he spoke for an hour and a quarter in advocacy ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... man," said an old, decrepit, hollow-eyed octogenarian, leaning on his staff, "make the best of your youth. I, too, once had a Fillide! I was handsomer than you then! Alas! if we could ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Epicurus and the others. I am not taking high figures, either, as you will see if you reflect upon the number of octogenarian Stoics, Epicureans, and Platonists who confess that they have not yet completely mastered their own systems. Or, if they did not confess it, at any rate Chrysippus, Aristotle, and Plato would for them; still more ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... Vaudreuil, Governor of Montreal, who, with other persons of rank and distinction thought it a religious duty to assist at the ceremony. All the priests and religieuses of the colony were present in the church of Montreal, and M. de Olier, himself an octogenarian, officiated. The body was interred under the entrance of the chapel of the Infant Jesus, commonly called the Sisters' chapel, the mother in life becoming the mother also in death, as her sepulture was truly a taking possession of the future burial-place of the Congregation, ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... grunt. His mouth was drawn to the right, and his once round, good-natured-looking face, with tanned skin and bright eyes, had been twisted into a frightful mask of anguish. At fifty years of age, the unhappy man was utterly done for. His unkempt beard was as white as that of an octogenarian, and his knotty limbs, preyed upon by toil, were henceforth dead. Only his eyes remained alive, and they travelled around the room, going from one to another. By his side, eager to do what she could for ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... French military genius. The idea of "following Hannibal over the mountains" filled our young philosopher with an enthusiasm beyond his years. He took part in the victories of Parma and Guastalla, and he was probably with Villars at Turin when that indomitable octogenarian died in June 1734. The War of the Polish Succession presently sank into a mere armistice, and until 1736 we dimly perceive Vauvenargues sharing the idle and boring life of the officer who, too poor to retire to Paris, vegetates in ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... and the fire, in looking at the outside of his books, now rarely opened, and in watching the bright faces around him. He was made to understand what a grand festival was to be held at Cairnforth, and the earl took especial pains to arrange that the feeble octogenarian should be brought to the Castle without fatigue, and enabled to appear both at the tenants' feast in the kitchen, and the more formal banquet of friends and neighbors in the hall—the grand old dining-room—which was arranged exactly as it had been on ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... "I'm not afraid, or I shouldn't have brought you girls up here. I don't mind admitting I have one friend, a wise old octogenarian, rich as Croesus, whom I wouldn't trust up here alone! He'd steal a gem as quickly as ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... the Emperor Constantine the Great, his mother Helena, when almost an octogenarian, undertook a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Her pious zeal was particularly directed to the search of the holy sepulchre, and of the cross on which Jesus Christ had suffered; and, according to her own judgment: at ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... Old Age—that surely is fate hitting us below the belt! For with advancing years the love of adventure leaves us; the "Love of a Lifetime" becomes to us of more real consequence than our pet armchair—but the love of a good dinner, that, at least, can make the everyday of an octogenarian well worth living. Young people little realise the awful prophecy implied in that irritating remark—"Don't gobble!" There is another one, almost equally irritating to youth—"Go and change your socks!" ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... Max when he leaves school," remarked Caesar languidly, "he'll let me manage him in my own way till he is an octogenarian." ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... Imperial Britain. Its appeal was to the young, the recruit in the battle of life, who in a year or two would qualify for a vote and, except for blind passion and prejudice, not know what the deuce to do with it. The octogenarian Earl of Watford was President; Colonel Winwood was one of a long list of Vice-Presidents; Miss Winwood was on the Council; a General Hankin, a fussy, incompetent person past his prime, was ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... behind him, and that the woman had lived her life out since then, gave him an oppressive sense of age and loss. He bethought himself of something he had read about "sitting by the hearth and remembering the faces of women without desire," and felt himself an octogenarian. ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... House, York Harbor, Maine, July 10, 1889. "My Dear General Keifer,—Your letter came to me just as I was leaving Washington. . . . I keep fairly well and vigorous for an old fellow so near to the octogenarian line. Accept my thanks for your kind remembrance and good wishes. You want to know about Colonel John DeCourcey, who commanded the [16th] regiment of Ohio Infantry for some time during our late war. I have not much to tell you of him, except that I made his acquaintance ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... that age increased the pleasure of conversation. It is certainly true that in age we do find our tongues, if we have any. They are unloosed, and when the young or the middle-aged sit silent, the octogenarian is a fountain of conversation. In age one set of pleasures is gone ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... pheasant, my lord?' He instantly replied, 'Pheasant,' thus completing his ninth dish of meat at that meal." A few weeks later the Speaker, in conversation with Palmerston, expressed a hope that he was taking care of his health, to which the octogenarian Premier replied: "Oh yes—indeed I am. I very often take a cab at night, and if you have both windows open it is almost as good as walking home." "Almost as good!" exclaimed the valetudinarian Speaker. "A ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... she remarked presently to her companion, "that Mr. So and so, the octogenarian, is dead. Now, what on earth is an ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... pathetic, and on the face of it accurately truthful, account of the close of his life in Mr. Forster's admirable and most graphic life of him, I never knew Landor. For the more than octogenarian old man whom I knew at Florence was clearly not the Landor whom England had known and admired for so many and such honoured years. Of all the painful story of the regrettable circumstances which caused him to seek his last home in Florence it would be mere impertinence in me to speak, ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... ramble over the trellis and the old wall, and from the window I see many other vines showing their lustrous leaves against tiled roofs of every shade, from bright-red to black. In the next garden is my friend the aumonier, an octogenarian priest, who is still nearly as sprightly of body as he is of mind. He lives alone, surrounded by books, in the collection of which he has shown the broad judgment, and impartiality of the genuine lover of literature. There is a delicious disorder in his den, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... confess that mountains and men that do not smoke suit me better. Still I can stand both, and I started out with the hope that the great Appalachian range held something new and interesting for me. Yet I knew it was a risky thing for an octogenarian to go a-gypsying, and with younger men. Old blood has lost some of its red corpuscles, and does not warm up easily over the things that moved one so deeply when one was younger. More than that, what did I need ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... have finished theirs. If you are twenty-five or thirty, or forty or fifty, it is not too late to begin. Isaac Walton at ninety years of age wrote his valuable book; Benjamin Franklin, almost an octogenarian, went into philosophic discoveries; Fontenelle's mind blossomed even in the Winter of old age; Arnauld made valuable translations at eighty years of age; Christopher Wren added to the astronomical and religious knowledge of the world ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... excitement—his splendid constitution, sustained and strengthened as it was by his wholesome enjoyment of out-of-door life, and his habitual indulgence in bathing and pedes-trianism, gave him every reasonable hope of reaching the age of an octogenarian. ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... me to the last difficulty which confronts the collector with no previous knowledge of shanties. As a mere matter of dates, any sailors now remaining from sailing ship days must necessarily be very old men. I have found that their octogenarian memories are not always to be trusted. On one occasion an old man sang quite glibly a tune which was in reality a pasticcio of three separate shanties all known to me. I have seen similar results in print, since the collector arrived too late upon the scene to be able to detect ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry
... is not controlled by reason or checked by other interests, we have the miser. In a less degree, we all share with the miser his hoarding instinct. We all like to collect money just as the squirrel likes to gather nuts. The octogenarian continues to collect money with unabated zeal, even though he be childless. He is probably not aware that he is collecting merely for the ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... Hankin, shoemaker. A man of strong contrasts was Tom; an octogenarian when I first knew him, and an atheist, as he proudly boasted, "all his life." My last interview with him took place a few days before his death, when he knew that he was hovering on the brink of the grave; and it was then that Hankin offered me his complete argument ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... to his enforced retirement? Far from it. With all the querulous impatience of an octogenarian, full of whims, sick in soul and body, suspicious, irritable, dying inch by inch, a prey to insomnia, his neuralgic pains, his swollen veins, in short, a crabbed old man, awaiting the call—behold now our great Otto von Bismarck, and mark well ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... and the crowd broke into a cheer that echoed strangely on the night-air. It had hardly died away when a quavering, high-pitched voice started 'God Save the King,' and with a sturdy indifference to pitch the rest followed, the octogenarian who had begun it sounding clear above the others as he half-whistled and half-sang the anthem ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... believe there was no exemption for those to whom he stood in any personal relation. He remembered how, soon after he went to Eton, he had received almost with incredulity the news of the death of his god-father, Lord Stackley, an octogenarian.... He took from the table his album, knowing that on one of the earliest pages was inscribed his boyish sense of that bereavement. Yes, here the passage was, written in a large ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... veteran, old man, seer, patriarch, graybeard; grandfather, grandsire; grandam; gaffer, gammer; crone; pantaloon; sexagenarian, octogenarian, nonagenarian, centenarian; old stager; dotard &c. 501. preadamite[obs3], Methuselah, Nestor, old Parr; elders; forefathers &c. (paternity) 166. Phr. "superfluous lags the veteran ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... fairies the other day to a nearly Octogenarian female neighbour, I asked, had she ever seen one in her youthful days. Her answer was in the negative; "but," quoth she, "I've heard my grandmother tell a story, that Midridge (near Auckland) was a great place for fairies when she ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... Seventy-eight years is a long time to live in this world. I have had my share of life and of the good pertaining to it, and shall have no right to complain when my pipe is broken and its ashes scattered.' Such was the philosophy of an almost Octogenarian smoker." ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... our months. If the conditions of life are the same there as here, the existence of the Mercurians must be four times as short as our own. A youth of twenty, awaking to the promise of the life he is just beginning in this world, is an octogenarian in Mercury. There the fair sex would indeed be justified in bewailing the transitory nature of life, and might regret the years that pass too quickly away. Perhaps, however, they are ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... that each ovum when impregnate should be considered not as descended from its ancestors, but as being a continuation of the personality of every ovum in the chain of its ancestry, which every ovum IT ACTUALLY IS quite as truly as the octogenarian IS the same identity with the ovum from which he has been developed. This process cannot stop short of the primordial cell, which again will probably turn out to be but a brief resting-place. We therefore prove each ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... Steevens, who was very kind to us, as children. My mother, who is an octogenarian, remembers him well, and says he always took a nosegay, tied to the top of his cane, every day to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 73, March 22, 1851 • Various
... which had received its inclination at the stirring period of the world when he entered into active life, was military. But to show his persevering industry in his practice as a lawyer, and his power of enduring fatigue, even when almost an octogenarian, the following letter, written by ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... and hoists the French colours over a quite extensive compound. A Chinaman, a waif from the plantation, keeps a restaurant in the rear quarters of the village; and the mission is well represented by the sisters' school and Brother Michel's church. Father Orens, a wonderful octogenarian, his frame scarce bowed, the fire of his eye undimmed, has lived, and trembled, and suffered in this place since 1843. Again and again, when Moipu had made coco-brandy, he has been driven from his house into the woods. "A mouse that dwelt in a cat's ear" ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... election, and meantime the candidates would improve the time by making their arrangements and canvassing their supporters so as to control the votes of the College at that future Conclave. Therefore Francesco Piccolomini, Cardinal of Siena (nephew of Pius II), a feeble octogenarian, tormented by an ulcer, which, in conjunction with an incompetent physician, was to cut his life even shorter than they hoped, was placed upon the throne of St. Peter, and assumed with the Pontificate the name ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... "Otello" this comic opera of the youthful octogenarian disclosed the importance which Boito had assumed in the development of Verdi. That development is one of the miracles of music. In manner Verdi represents a full century of operatic writing. He began when, in Italy at least, the libretto was a mere ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... certain facts about Mr. Cazalette. He was an octogenarian. He was uncannily active. He had an almost imp-like desire to live—and to dance when he ought to have been wrapped in blankets and saying his last prayers. And a few minutes later, when we were seated round our host's table, I discovered another fact—Mr. Cazalette was one of those ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... octogenarian, though you be a nonagenarian, all the thoughts and acts of your life are in your mind, whether you recall them now or not, just as Macaulay's history is in two volumes, although the volumes may be closed, and you can not see a word of them, and will not ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... decided by the victory of the English under the Duke of Cumberland, at Culloden (1746), which was attended by an atrocious slaughter of the wounded. Culloden was the last battle fought in behalf of the Stuarts. Nearly eighty Jacobite conspirators, one of whom was an octogenarian, Lord Lovat, were executed as traitors. These Jacobites were the last persons who were beheaded in England. The Pretender wandered in the Highlands and Western Islands for five months, under different disguises. He was concealed and aided by a Scottish ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... of the Port at New Haven and the appointment of an octogenarian whose chief qualification was his Republicanism brought to a head all the bitter animosity of Federalist New England. The hostility to Jefferson in this region was no ordinary political opposition, ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson |
