Suddenly Thirty Quotes & Sayings

In a moment a world will lose its focus and become a different place. They say that blind people have been struck by their affliction without warning, and that Helen Keller found language and light in a word. For me, I suddenly knew, viscerally at least, a number of things about my town that I'd only ever suspected. The dog was a girl. The dog was a native girl. I dug her out of the snow with more care than I'd ever lifted a porcupine or a snapping rat, and feeling that she was still somewhat warm, that her wrappings of rags had protected her from the cold of a Manitoba winter, I placed my jacket around her and covered her head with my hat. Then I set a pace back to the farm that left a taste of blood in my mouth, freezing my lungs by running at minus thirty. — Barry Pomeroy

Though I work in New York City, in an office about a mile from the World Trade Center, I was not in New York City when the planes struck. I was on a plane above the Atlantic Ocean, heading back to New York from a family reunion and celebration in Europe. I had said good-bye to my husband in London; he was staying for a wedding of a business friend. I couldn't wait to see my kids and my parents, who would be waiting for me at a Little League game in our town, about thirty-five miles from New York City. An hour and a half into the flight, I suddenly had the feeling that the plane was making a slow turn. Nobody else seemed to notice. I sat nervously, hoping I was imagining it. But then a stewardess made an announcement. "There has been a catastrophic event affecting all of North American airspace," she said. "We are returning — Lauren Tarshis

The cold reality of it had struck her, as if, perched on the crest of a roller coaster, the rest of the ride was suddenly, irreversibly clear. On the way up, the vista had been infinite, the time to look about sometimes agonizingly long; now there was only the certain and dispassionate knowledge that there was one set of rails on which to travel, the ending immutable and about to begin. It didn't matter that the rest of the trip might take twenty, even thirty years to complete; the angle of the ride had changed. — Erica Bauermeister

It's your world, but I make my way in it. At fifteen, no, I couldn't stand up to you. The age of illusions, when we know nothing, we hope for everything; we're wandering in a mist ... And the half of the world that's never had any use for us, suddenly is besieging us. You need us, you adore us, you're suffering for us. You want everything--except to know what we think. You look deep in our eyes--and put your hand up our dress. You call us, "Pretty thing." That confuses us. The most beautiful woman, the highest ranked, lives half dazzled by constant attention, half stifled by obvious contempt. We think all we're good for is pleasing you--till one day, long acquaintance with you dispels the last mist. In a clear light, we suddenly see you as you are--and generally we start preferring ourselves. At thirty, I could finally say no--or really say yes. That's when you begin backing away from us. Now I'm full-grown. I pursue my happiness the same as any man. — Pierre-Augustin Caron De Beaumarchais

When you're younger you just take it as a given that things will fall into place on their own. Relationships, family, careers, the whole deal. They might not come as you picture them, but they come in some form. You just never figure that they might not come at all. And then you hit thirty and ... shit! You suddenly realize that they're not necessarily coming and you panic. — Jonathan Tropper

You live that long, things start happening to you. You get too impressed with yourself. Ends up, you think you're God. Suddenly the little people, thirty, maybe forty years old, well, they don't really matter anymore. You've seen whole societies rise and fall, and you start to feel you're standing outside it all, and none of it really matters to you. And maybe you'll start snuffing those little people, just like picking daisies, if they get under your feet. — Richard K. Morgan

Leveling off at 42,000 feet, I had thirty percent of my fuel, so I turned on rocket chamber three and immediately reached .96 Mach. I noticed that the faster I got, the smoother the ride. Suddenly the Mach needle began to fluctuate. It went up to .965 Mach - then tipped right off the scale ... We were flying supersonic. And it was a smooth as a baby's bottom; Grandma could be sitting up there sipping lemonade. — Chuck Yeager

One month. Thirty days. I could bury myself in my art and forget the feel of his lips sliding across mine. I could forget the scent of his cologne, the way my body reacted when he touched me.

I sighed. Thirty days suddenly seemed like an eternity. — E.M. Denning

You look thirty. You act ... well, never mind. You're carrying on like you think you're seventy." Was I? I guess it was no secret I'd been unpleasantly startled to find myself suddenly hitting the big 4-0. You'd have thought the previous thirty-nine years were sufficient warning. I glanced at his profile. "Okay. Maybe I'm a little hung up on the age thing. You have to admit gay culture is youth-oriented. — Josh Lanyon

I guess it was no secret I'd been unpleasantly startled to find myself suddenly hitting the big 4-0. You'd have thought the previous thirty-nine years were sufficient warning. — Josh Lanyon

Imagine that you are a doctor and you suddenly learn that you'll see twenty patients on a Friday afternoon instead of twenty-five, while getting paid the same. Would you respond by spending more time with each patient? Or would you simply leave at six-thirty instead of seven-thirty and have dinner with your kids? — Malcolm Gladwell

For suddenly above him far and faint his song was taken up, and a voice answering called to him. Maedhros it was that sang amid his torment. But Fingon climbed to the foot of the precipice where his kinsman hung; and then he could go no farther, and he wept when he saw the cruel device of Morgoth. Maedhros therefore, being in anguish without hope, begged Fingon to shoot him with his bow; and Fingon strung an arrow, and bent his bow. And seeing no better hope he cried to Manwe, saying: 'O King to whom birds are dear, speed now this feathered shaft, and recall some pity for the Noldor in their need!' ... Now, even as Fingon bent his bow, there flew down from the high airs Thorondor, King of Eagles, mightiest of all birds that have ever been, whose outstretched wings spanned thirty fathoms; and staying Fingon's hand he took him up, and bore him to the face of the rock where Maethros hung. — J.R.R. Tolkien

No, life is not over at thirty-one! Prince Andrei suddenly decided finally and decisively. — Leo Tolstoy

In 1793 such a force as no one had any conception of made its appearance. War had again suddenly become an affair of the people, and that of a people numbering thirty millions, every one of whom regarded himself as a citizen of the State ... By this participation of the people in the war ... a whole Nation with its natural weight came into the scale. — Carl Von Clausewitz

My name is Mr Bread." He began writing his name neatly on the board. "But you can call me Peter."
Suddenly there was quiet, as thirty little brains whirred.
"Pita Bread!" proclaimed a ginger-haired boy from the back. — David Walliams

We both laugh. I like the sound of my mother's laugh. I wish she'd found these pills when I was a kid, that I wasn't learning the sound of my mother's laughter at the age of thirty-seven and at the price of a traumatic brain injury. I look over at her pillbox. It suddenly occurs to me that she took many more pills than should be prescribed solely for depression. What else could she be taking medication for? I wonder. — Lisa Genova

And then suddenly I hear his footsteps approaching. He's behind me, thirty feet away, at a guess.
No wonder I couldn't see him.
I should turn. Right now I should turn. This is the moment that it would be natural to swivel round
and greet him. Call out a hello; wave my phone in the air.
But my feet are rooted to the spot. I can't bring myself to move. Because as soon as I do, it will be
time to be polite and matter-of-fact and back to normal. And I can't bear that. I want to stay here. In
the place where we can say anything to each other. In the magic spell.
Sam pauses, right behind me. There's an unbearable fragile beat as I wait for him to shatter the quiet. But it's as though he feels the same way. He says nothing. All I can hear is the gentle sound
of his breathing. Slowly, his arms wrap round me from behind. I close my eyes and lean back
against his chest, feeling unreal. — Sophie Kinsella

People under thirty haven't yet stopped believing that something wonderful can suddenly happen. — Peter Hoeg

Suddenly both parties have become theologians, the one side quoting the Pentateuch to justify slavery, the other side quoting the gospel to condemn it: ... the people of the thirty-three United States, who are eminently and essentially political, cannot discuss a political matter without quoting the old and New Testa- ments!97 — Mark A. Noll

Thirty years ago, my sister, Gale (so named because a gale hit Boston Harbor the night she was born), some friends and I stole a boat in the middle of the night and sailed it out of the Santa Barbara harbor. Suddenly we were becalmed and the current began pushing us toward the breakwall. With no running lights and no power, we were dead in the water. Out of that darkness a steel hull appeared: it was the local Coast Guard cutter. My father, stern-faced and displeased, stood in the bow. — Gretel Ehrlich

It has suddenly occurred to me to write out word for word all that has happened to me during this last year, simply from an inward impulse, because I am so impressed by all that has happened. I shall simply record the incidents, doing my utmost to exclude everything extraneous, especially all literary graces. The professional writer writes for thirty years, and is quite unable to say at the end why he has been writing for all that time. I am not a professional writer and don't want to be, and to drag forth into the literary market-place the inmost secrets of my soul and an artistic description of my feelings I should regard as indecent and contemptible. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

One particular aspect of Siddhartha's revelation of the outside world has always struck me. Quite possibly he lived his first thirty years without any knowledge of number. How must he have felt, then, to see crowds of people mingling in the streets? Before that day he would not have believed that so many people existed in all the world. And what wonder it must have been to discover flocks of birds, and piles of stones, leaves on trees and blades of grass! To suddenly realise that, his whole life long, he had been kept at arm's length from multiplicity. — Daniel Tammet

She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing. — George Orwell

I gave a speech once," he said suddenly and apparently unconnectedly. "You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number." "Er, five," said the mattress. "Wrong," said Marvin. "You see?" The mattress was much impressed by this and realized that it was in the presence of a not unremarkable mind. It willomied along its entire length sending excited little ripples through its shallow algae-covered pool. — Douglas Adams

Another badass Gurkha in recent memory was Sergeant Dipprasad Pun of the Royal Gurkha Rifles. In 2010, while serving as the lone on-duty guard patrolling a small one-room outpost on the edge of the Afghan province of Helmand, Pun was suddenly ambushed by somewhere between fifteen and thirty Taliban warriors armed with RPGs and assault rifles. During his Ultimate Mega Gurkha Freakout Limit Break Mode, the five-foot-seven-inch sergeant fired off four hundred rounds of machine gun ammunition (every bullet he had), chucked seventeen grenades, detonated a remote mine, and then took an enemy soldier down by chucking a twenty-pound machine gun tripod into the dude's face. — Ben Thompson

Suddenly, I was thirty, very unhappy entertaining people in their forties, and here came a group of people in their teens and twenties who had similar anti-authority problems and similar dreams and wishes, hopes for mankind. So I gravitated toward them. — George Carlin

The idea of the peace movement and of people who spent their entire lives trying to have a more egalitarian, just society, suddenly became swamped by the record industry, by the new rock and roll culture, and by the idea of not trusting anyone over thirty. — David Amram

After Tom leaves for work, I take Evie to the park, we play on the swings and the little wooden rocking horses, and when I put her back into her buggy she falls asleep almost immediately, which is my cue to go shopping. We cut through the back streets towards the big Sainsbury's. It's a bit of a roundabout way of getting there, but it's quiet, with very little traffic, and in any case we get to pass number thirty-four Cranham Road. It gives me a little frisson even now, walking past that house - butterflies suddenly swarm in my stomach, and a smile comes to my lips and colour to my cheeks. I remember hurrying up the front steps, hoping none of the neighbours would see me letting myself in, getting myself ready in the bathroom, putting on perfume, the kind of underwear you put on just to be taken off. Then I'd get a text message and he'd be at the door, and we'd have an hour or two in the bedroom upstairs. — Paula Hawkins

How do you get right with the idea, at the age of thirty-one, that the career you've pursued with every fiber of your being has come suddenly to an end? — Marcus Luttrell

At thirty-three the Whammer still enjoyed exceptional eyesight. He saw the ball spin off Roy's fingertips and it reminded him of a white pigeon he had kept as a boy, that he would send into flight by flipping it into the air. The ball flew at him and he was conscious of its bird-form and white flapping wings, until it suddenly disappeared from view. He heard a noise like the bang of a firecracker at his feet and Sam had the ball in his mitt. Unable to believe his ears he heard Mercy intone a reluctant strike. — Bernard Malamud

The alcohol danced down his throat like a contented snake on the way to a magic ball... The lights seemed suddenly brighter... He felt an immediate sense of danger... Electricity... Fear... Excitement... The glass left his lips he needed another. He needed ten, twenty, thirty more...
He needed rivers, seas, oceans...
He swore under his breath. Somewhere a woman laughed and a man shouted... He looked at the stage. Temptresses dancing... Strange Northern music.... Whores... laws... violence... — James A. Newman

Thirty- eight years old and he was finished. He sipped at the coffee and remembered where he had gone wrong
or right. He'd simply gotten tired
of the insurance game, of the small offices and high glass partitions, the clients; he'd simply gotten tired of cheating on his wife, of squeezing secretaries in the elevator and in the halls;
he'd gotten tired of Christmas parties and New Year's parties and birthdays, and payments on new cars and furniture payments
light, gas, water
the whole bleeding complex of necessities.
He'd gotten tired and quit, that's all. The divorce came soon enough and the drinking came soon enough, and suddenly he was out of it. He had nothing, and he found out that having nothing was difficult too. It was another type of burden. If only there were some gentler road in between. It seemed a man only had two choices
get in on the hustle or be a bum. — Charles Bukowski

Thirty years later I again stood on that slope. I was a married
man, had children, a house, a place in the world, and a head full of ideas and plans, and suddenly I was again the child who had kindled a fire full of secret significance and sat down on a stone without knowing whether it was I or I was it. I thought suddenly of my life in Zurich, and it seemed alien to me, like news from some remote world and time. This was frightening, for the world of my childhood in which I had just become absorbed was eternal, and I had been wrenched away from it and had fallen into a time that continued to roll onward, moving farther and farther away. The pull of that other world was so strong that I had to tear myself violently from the spot in order not to lose hold of my future. — C. G. Jung

I have lived at Cold Mountain
These thirty long years.
Yesterday I called on friends and family:
More than half had gone to the Yellow Springs.
Slowly consumed, like fire down a candle;
Forever flowing, like a passing river.
Now, morning, I face my lone shadow:
Suddenly my eyes are bleared with tears. — Gary Snyder

I stood there and watched thirty-five children disappear in almost as many different directions and was suddenly horrified by what I'd done. What if someone got lost or hurt? Suppose they didn't come back on time? What would I do then? — Katherine Paterson

Thirty years will pass before I remember
that moment when suddenly I knew each man
has one brother who dies when he sleeps
and sleeps when he rises to face this life,
and that together they are only one man
sharing a heart that always labours, hands
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it? — Philip Levine

Since the moment when, at the sight of his beloved and dying brother, Levin for the first time looked at the questions of life and death in the light of the new convictions, as he called them, which between the ages of twenty and thirty-four had imperceptibly replaced the beliefs of his childhood and youth, he had been less horrified by death than by life without the least knowledge of whence it came, what it is for, why, and what it is, Organisms, their destruction, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, development - the terms that had superseded these beliefs - were very useful for mental purposes; but they gave no guidance for life, and Levin suddenly felt like a person who has exchanged a thick fur coat for a muslin garment and who, being out in the frost for the first time, becomes clearly convinced, not by arguments, but with the whole of his being, that he is as good as naked and that he must inevitably perish miserably. — Leo Tolstoy

Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us. — Vaclav Havel

What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss - absolute bliss - as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle into every finger and toe? ... — Katherine Mansfield

He'd just poured himself a hot cup of coffee, his mouth already watering as he brought the mug to his
lips.
"Oh, thanks, sweetie." And like that, the cup was gone.
He glared down at the female who dared take his coffee. The life-giving elixir was his! Then he noticed
she was fully dressed.
"You're leaving?" Damn. And he really did have plans for that adorable little ass.
"Oh, yeah." She sipped the coffee and grimaced. "Geez. Battery acid." It suddenly occurred to
him ... She was perky. Who was perky at five-thirty in the morning?
Good Lord!Morning people were perky at five-thirty in the morning! — Shelly Laurenston

I realised suddenly that I was thirty-four and not making a very good job of it. — Michael Marshall Smith

On December 31st of 1958 Lila had her first episode of dissolving margins, The term isn't mine, she always used it. She said that on those occasions the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared. That night, on the terrace where we were celebrating the arrival of 1959, when she was abruptly struck by that sensation, she was frightened and kept it to herself, still unable to name it. It was only years later, one night in November 1980
we were thirty-six, were married, had children
that she recounted in detail what had happened to her then, what still sometimes happened to her, and she used that term for the first time. — Elena Ferrante

I hate people who sneak into first class to use the bathroom. I'm sitting there, in 4F, sipping Cristal and admiring my new line of jewelry for QVC, and suddenly, busting through the curtain and rushing toward the bathroom is some doughy soccer mom holding her crotch and yelling, "Emergency, emergency!" No, it's not!!! Opening the main hatch and pushing you out at thirty thousand feet for disturbing me is an emergency. — Joan Rivers

Anyway, in the interim since I turned writer - a good thirty years - I have hobnobbed with all varieties of man, from the highest to the lowest. I have know intimately saints and seers as well as those whom we disdainfully refer to as "the dregs of humanity." I don't know to which group I am more indebted. But I do know this - if we were suddenly faced with an overwhelming calamity, if I had to choose just one man with whom I would share the rest of my life in the midst of chaos and destruction, I would pick that unknown Mexican peon whom my friend Doner brought one day to clear the weeds in our garden. I no longer remember his name, for he was truly without name. — Henry Miller