“you've probably noticed that after the first half-century practically everybody gets leaky, they can't keep it in ... hence the cruelty of long drawn-out meals and drinking sessions ... ships and apartment houses are the same ... everything starts to leak ... sphincters, bladders, drain pipes, bowels ... the half-century is merciless for ladies and gentlemen ... worse for dogs and cats! ... with them it comes sooner! ... five ... six years ...”

“Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong.”

“Everybody has noticed the way cats stop and loiter in a half-open door. Hasn't everyone said to a cat: For heavens sake why don't you come in? With opportunity half-open in front of them, there are men who have a similar tendency to remain undecided between two solutions, at the risk of being crushed by fate abruptly closing the opportunity. The overprudent, cats as they are, and because they are cats, sometimes run more danger than the bold”

“Half a century goes by in what seems like a year. Don't waste an hour in boredom, son, or wishing for tomorrow.”

“You've no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years.”

“Glasgow is still full of churches built in the last century. Half of them have been turned into warehouses.”