Old Tongue Sayings

#1. In the old tongue which had once been his world's lingua franca, most words, like khef and ka, had many meanings. The word char, however - char as in Charlie the Choo-Choo - had only one. Char meant death.

Stephen King

#2. I do what he says and I close my eyes and open my mouth and the next thing I know he's got his twenty-eight-year-old tongue in my thirteen-year-old mouth and all I can think is that I don't think the hero is supposed to be doing this.

Andrea Portes

#3. There is an old Arabic proverb, 'When the king puts the poet on his payroll, he cuts off the tongue of the poet', so throughout the ages, people in power have liked to control music, they used to throw songwriters in jail throughout history, and were assassinated.

Pete Seeger

#4. My goodness, you're 60 already, already
Time is a thief
But still, you're only as old as your tongue
And a little bit older than your teeth
Have a wonderful birthday

John Walter Bratton

#5. It 'appens to be true. An' if'n yew want ter stay moi friend, yew'd best 'old yer turpitudinous twaddle of a tongue an' listen fer once.

Peter St. John

#6. You got men who can't hold peace and women who can't control their tongues. The rich seduce the poor, and the old seduce the young.

Bob Dylan

#7. If you gave me
half a moon of a chance
i would
kiss the incisors
out of your mouth, clean
and hold them in my
own, like chippings
from an old mug
then
pray my tongue into
a bowl of holy water
and ask god to never
leave you thirsty.

Warsan Shire

#8. There's an old saying amongst players in football talking about your general manger and coaches, they speak with a forked tongue.

Joe Namath

#9. Jean-Louis had never had a day's illness in his life. He was tall and as gnarled as an oak. The sun had baked his skin until it had the colour and toughness and stillness of a tree. With advancing years, he had lost his tongue. He now never spoke, considering such an activity pointless.

Emile Zola

#10. Bigotry and intolerance, silenced by argument, endeavors to silence by persecution, in old days by fire and sword, in modern days by the tongue.

Charles Simmons

#11. I am essence of Rose Solitude
my cheeks are laced with cognac
my hips sealed with five satin nails
I carry dreams and romance of new fools and old
flames
between the musk of fat
and the side pocket of my mink tongue.

Jayne Cortez

#12. But I am old and you are young, And I speak a barbarous tongue.

W.B.Yeats

#13. How old are you Cam?" "Old as my tongue, bit older than my teeth," he says with a shrug and looks away from me.

Lesley Jones

#14. She could taste the terror she'd felt when she'd first seen the Ravener. The taste was sharp and coppery on her tongue like old pennies.

Cassandra Clare

#15. Have we ridden forth to victory, only to stand at last amazed by an old liar with honey on his forked tongue? So would the trapped wolf speak to the hounds, if he could.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#16. Wasing the where of needing, she read, forming the unfamiliar words. The lofty tongue was used for old documents dating to the time of the Origin, and occasionally for government ceremony.

Brandon Sanderson

#17. It's as empty as a merchant's soul. Sorry, Kheldar, it's just an old expression." "That's all right, Beldin," Silk forgave him grandly. "These little slips of the tongue are common in the very elderly.

David Eddings

#18. If I'd been ten years old again I'd have stuck my tongue out at Caroline. At sixteen, I ought to be above such behavior.
I wasn't.

Alyxandra Harvey

#19. The mongrel tongue of Slaver's Bay, an ugly blend of Old Ghiscari and High Valyrian.

Anonymous

#20. A flush of anger crimsoned the old lady's pale face. It looked dead no longer. "Hold your tongue," she said. "You are rude." And Miss Gladwyn did hold her tongue, but nothing else, for she was laughing all over.

George MacDonald

#21. I had to hold my tongue from since, when I got here til when I was about 22 years old. I ain't holding my tongue no more. So it's best that I don't get no manager, don't get no promoter cos' they're the people tryna tell me what do.

Roy Jones Jr.

#22. Papers there were in the chest, and parchments, and stiff untanned skins, written in English and Latin and the old Cumric tongue: Morgan was born, Morgan was married, Morgan became a knight, Morgan was hanged. Here lay the history of the house, shameful and glorious.

John Steinbeck

#23. There is probably no moment more appalling than that in which the tongue comes suddenly upon the ragged edge of a space from which the old familiar filling has disappeared.

Robert Benchley

#24. You're very old, aren't you?"
"Just as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.

Philippa Pearce

#25. Oh, don't give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit/No, don't you give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit/For my head will fly, my tongue will lie, my eyes will fry and I may die/Won't you pour me one more of that sinful Old Janx Spirit).

Anonymous

#26. Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.

Czeslaw Milosz

#27. He was tongue-tied in the presence of a fourteen-month-old baby. All the things he thought of saying, like 'Who's Daddy's little boy, then?' sounded horribly false, as though he'd got them from a book. There was nothing to say, nor, in this soft pastel room, anything that needed to be said.

Terry Pratchett

#28. The land of fairy, where nobody gets old and godly and grave, where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue

W.B.Yeats

#29. That other saying, I'm a part of all that I have met, I think that would have to begin with my wonderful parents back in Atlanta when I was a youngster five years old I was tongue tied.

Ernie Harwell

#30. Aamah would sometimes remind them that the story of an old disputte should be retold only when no aftertaste of bitterness remains upon the tongue.

Catherine M. Wilson

#31. The world is always a new plaything to children, while to the old it seems falling to pieces from sheer dryness. Everything loses its value with time, but it is not the fault of the fruit, but of the mouth and the tongue.

Kate Douglas Wiggin

#32. Fire burns blue and hot.
Its fair light blinds me not.
Smell of smoke is satisfying, tastes nourishing to my tongue.
I think fire ageless, never old, and yet no longer young.
Morning coals are cool: daylight leaves me blind.
I love the fire most because of what it leaves behind.

Penny Reid

#33. Marya watched from the upper floor as once again the birds gathered in the great oak tree, sniping and snapping for the last autumn nuts, stolen from squirrels and hidden in bark-cracks, which every winged creature knows are the most bitter of all nuts, like old sorrows sitting heavy on the tongue.

Catherynne M Valente

#34. I'm a 'tweener,' man! I couldn't march with Dr. King and them. And I'm too old to be a hip-hopper. But I've been granted honorary status in each generation ... I see my tongue as a bridge over which ideas can travel back and forth.

Michael Eric Dyson

#35. You remember that my great vision came to me when I was only nine years old, and you have seen that I was not much good for anything until after I had performed the horse dance near the mouth of the Tongue River during my eighteenth summer.

Black Elk

#36. I avoid talking before the youth of the age as I would dancing before them: for if one's tongue don't move in the steps of the day, and thinks to please by its old graces, it is only an object of ridicule.

Horace Walpole

#37. Even his voice had accrued a certain rancour as though the detritus of words long left unsaid inside the cave of his mouth had become rusty and scattered in tiny bits on the top of his tongue whenever he opened his mouth to speak.

Chigozie Obioma

#38. This isn't really death,' Tyler says. 'We'll be legend. We won't grow old.' I tongue the barrel into my cheek and say, Tyler, you're thinking of vampires.

Chuck Palahniuk

#39. Old England is our home, and Englishmen are we; Our tongue is known in every clime, our flag in every sea.

Mary Howitt

#40. How old are you?" asked Door. Richard was pleased she had asked; he would never have dared.
"As old as my tongue," said Hunter, primly, "and a little older than my teeth.

Neil Gaiman

#41. The girl's pretty little-girl face had deformed, lips stretching wide, becoming like the mouth of a flukeworm, a ragged pink hole encircled with teeth going all the way down her gullet. Her tongue was black, and her breath stank of old meat.

Joe Hill

#42. You were like an ulcer on the inside of my cheek that my tongue could not stop touching.
loving you was like watching a stranger clean a week old wound; i felt sick, but i wanted more.

Warsan Shire

#43. She is not old, she is not young, The Woman with the Serpent's Tongue. The haggard cheek, the hungering eye, The poisoned words that wildly fly, The famished face, the fevered hand, Who slights the worthiest in the land, Sneers at the just, contemns the brave, And blackens goodness in its grave ...

William Watson

#44. Shadow smiled. "And how old would that be?" "Old as my tongue," said Wednesday. "And a few months older than my teeth.

Neil Gaiman