The Old Devils Quotes

“They went outside and stood where a sign used to say Taxi and now said Taxi/Tacsi for the benefit of Welsh people who had never seen a letter X before.”
― Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils

“. . . he had forgotten, if he had ever begun to understand, how small a part people played in others' lives and how little they knew about them, even if they saw them every day.”
― Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils

“Everybody had been in their twenties then; well, round about thirty. Now, from round about seventy, all those years of maturity or the prime of life or whatever you called it looked like an interval between two bouts of vomiting.”
― Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils

“In it {a film Peter saw} a sadistic sergeant broke the spirit of soldier in a military prison by beating him up at systematically random intervals, from more than a day down to a quarter of an hour, so that the victim never knew when the next attack was coming, never felt safe. Life with Muriel, it seemed to Peter, had over the last seven or eight years turned into a decreasingly bearable version of that.”
― Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils

“Age comes to us all.”
― Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils

“She wore no jewellery, just her wedding ring.”
― Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils

“No indeed, poems were not made out of intentions.”
― Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils

“Malcolm said nothing to that. He swayed from side to side in his chair as a way of suggesting that life held many such small puzzles.”
― Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils

“Any man in the company of two woman is outnumbered four to one however amiable they may be. By definition."
'So when its just you and me I outnumber you two to one, is that right?'
"Affirmative.”
― Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils

“{Victor} was no exception to a rule of Alun's that men over fifty who took care of themselves were not to be trusted.”
― Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils