Quotes & Sayings About Thirties

I made a lot of changes in my life between my twenties and thirties, and it all sort of revolves around how I think people with nerdier brains tend to problem-solve and approach things differently then "norms." — Chris Hardwick

And what a man he is. Tall, but not too tall. Five o'clock shadow. Late twenties, early thirties. Piercing blue eyes. Short, brown hair that juts forward, matching his angular face. He's wearing an untucked, button-down white shirt and dark-grey slacks. He looks disheveled in the best way possible. — Samantha Riley

Said: "We all spend our twenties and thirties trying so hard to be perfect, because we're so worried about what people will think of us. Then we get into our forties and fifties, and we finally start to be free, because we decide that we don't give a damn what anyone thinks of us. But you won't be completely free until you reach your sixties and seventies, when you finally realize this liberating truth - nobody was ever thinking about you, anyhow." They aren't. They weren't. They never were. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Looking back on it now, I'd say one's thirties are a cruel age. At this point, I think of them as a time I whiled away unaware of the tide that can suddenly pull you out, beyond the shallows, into the sea of hardship, and even death. — Takashi Hiraide

I think it actually started in my late thirties. I started changing psychologically, and it was difficult to translate that into my writing. — Mary Gaitskill

Sometimes one gets the idea that life thinks it's still living in Paris in the thirties. — Tom Robbins

The Feynman Dilemma
A diner says to a waiter, "What's this fly doing in my soup?" And the waiter says, "It looks like the backstroke." Yet if the same scene is viewed while plunging into a black hole at the speed of light, it will look like a Mickey Mouse lunch pail from the thirties, except that Mickey's head has been replaced by a Lincoln penny — Steve Martin

When you're in your twenties, someone once wrote, you live to please other people. When you're in your thirties, you get tired of trying to please others, so you get miffed with them for making you worry about it. When you're in your forties, you realize nobody was thinking about you anyway. — John Ortberg Jr.

We all lose our innocence soon enough; it's inescapable. Most of us aren't emotionally or intellectually ready for it until our thirties or even later, however, so when one loses it prematurely, in childhood and adolescence, through divorce or the sudden early death of a parent, it can leave one fixated on that loss for a lifetime. Because it's premature, it feels unnatural, violent and unnecessary, a permanent, gratuitous wounding, and it leaves one angry at the world, — Russell Banks

She walks into my life legs first, a long drink of water in the desert of my thirties. Her shoes are red; her eyes are green. She's an Italian flag in occupied territory, and I fall for her like Paris. She mixes my metaphors like a martini and serves up my heart tartare. They all do. Every time. They have to. It's that kind of story. — Catherynne M Valente

Appeared to be in her early thirties. She wore blue scrubs — Dan Brown

When you're a woman in your thirties, and maybe you don't really know what you want to do with your life, but it seems like everyone else does, and your best friend gets married, and it forces you to look at yourself. I don't know if I described that in a very funny way. — Kristen Wiig

My family wasn't terribly affluent and looked upon money very carefully as something that had to be saved, not spent. My father built the ducting that took air into the copper mines and made about 6 d a yard in the Thirties, which was good money back then. — Wilbur Smith

I have wanted to "make books" since around the sixth grade, and I published my first book when I was in my late thirties. My point is that the time in between was not wasted - submarine service, marriage, college, bringing up three kids, starting a school for them, and so forth. This kind of life experience is not distracting you from your appointed task of writing. It is, rather, the roundabout blessing of giving you something to say. — Douglas Wilson

In the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language. — Ellen Glasgow

Many people are despairing of the possibility of finding love. And some of the people who are despairing the most are in their thirties and forties and looking just great. — Marianne Williamson

There are no available men in their thirties in New York. Giuliani had them removed along with the homeless. — Cynthia Nixon

She was a woman in her thirties with sun-damaged skin and an opt-out approach to fashion. — Susan Juby

I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel. — M.J. Rose

In my thirties I was doing it, in my forties I was organizing it and now, unfortunately, I can only talk about it. — Cynthia Payne

As we reach midlife in the middle thirties or early forties, we are not prepared for the idea that time can run out on us, or for the startling truth that if we don't hurry to pursue our own definition of a meaningful existence, life can become a repetition of trivial maintenance duties. — Gail Sheehy

The conservative idea is not that government has no role. You might have argued that in the thirties when conservatives opposed the New Deal. — Charles Krauthammer

My twenties were my practice. My thirties were when I really hit my stride with GoPro and did all the heavy lifting to build the business. — Nick Woodman

Many of the big decisions over progression, promotion and future career trajectory are taken when people are in their late twenties and thirties, putting women at a huge disadvantage because this is the very time they are most likely to be having a break to have children. — Cherie Blair

Downtown Toronto is a very good place to talk about the neutrality of modernist architecture. I'm sure this kind of box-building was interesting in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, but I think it's absolutely ridiculous to build like this in 2013. — Stefan Sagmeister

Grown-ups aren't supposed to talk about "best friends," but he was among my closest and certainly my most constant friend from then until we were well into our thirties, when he inexplicably disappeared on me. I don't mean he fled the country or changed his identity or got abducted; the last I heard he was still living in Baltimore. He just stopped returning my calls. It took me almost a year of leaving messages on his answering machine to get the hint. It took me much longer to understand that I was never going to know what had happened. — Tim Kreider

In my real movie-going days, which were the thirties, you didn't stand in line. You strolled down the street and sallied into the theater at any hour of the day or night. — Orson Welles

... your midthirties...is the age that women usually start to feel confident. Having finally left behind the...awfulness of your twenties...your thirties are the point where the good stuff kicks in...How odd, then, that as your face and body finally begin to display the signs (lines, softening, gray hairs) that you've entered the zone of kick-ass eminence and intolerance of dullards, there should be pressure for you to...totally remove them. Give the impression that, actually, you are still a bit gullible and incompetent, and totally open to being screwed over by someone a bit cleverer and older than you... Lines and grayness are nature's way of telling you not to fuck with someone--the equivalent of the yellow-and-black banding on a wasp...Lines are your weapons against the idiots. Lines are your 'KEEP AWAY FROM THE WISE INTOLERANT WOMAN' sign. — Caitlin Moran

When you're in your early 20s your love life seems to explode every 20 minutes or so. By the time you've reached your thirties, it is every five or ten years. — Patrick Marber

It was an odd coincidence that my career took off the same decade as having babies. I often wished it had been different, that I had my big career bump in my thirties and my babies in my forties or vice versa. — Jane Kaczmarek

In the sunny flats, kudzu from last year had climbed to wrap trees and telephone poles in dry, brown leaves. Whole buildings looked as if they had been bagged. Introduced from Japan in the thirties to help control erosion that had damaged eighty-five percent of the tillable land, kudzu has consumed entire fields, and no one has found a good way to stop it. Kudzu and water hyacinth, another Japanese import, have run through Dixie showing less restraint than Sherman. — William Least Heat-Moon

secret codicils would allow the German Army to illegally rearm and train on Russian territory throughout the twenties and thirties. Tens of thousands of German "work commandos" would come to Russia in 1923 and begin experimenting in the new, still theoretical technique of the blitzkrieg, the idea that small, high-quality, mobile forces backed by airpower could overcome a country before it could react. — Tom Reiss

Thirties. Go to therapy. Clean up all of the sh-t. Clean up all of the toxins and the noise. Understand who you are. Educate yourself on the self. — Jennifer Aniston

Maybe my husband's hot brother-in-law would rehearse his underground band with The Beach Boys in the garage. Come to think of it, I think my entire thirties were based on episodes of Full House. Not exactly realistic. — Karina Halle

L.A. was just an inspiring kind of place to be. It felt like going to Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. Everybody's there. Everybody's hanging around. Everybody's talking about music. — Joe Perry

I'm now in my mid-thirties, so I look in the mirror and my face is changing, and I have a different relationship all of a sudden with myself. Your face changes, things change - that's just kind of what happens. It's hard, though, in this industry, because I think so much importance is put on how you look, and I'm not brave enough to be like, "You know what? I'm just going to let it happen. Whatever. I'm so cool with every line on my face." — Kristen Stewart

I was reading about animals a while back and there was this motherfucking scientist in France back in the thirties or forties or whenever the motherfuck it was and he was trying to get apes to draw these pictures, to make art pictures like the kinds of pictures in serious motherfucking paintings that you see in museums and shit. So the scientist keeps showing the apes these paintings and giving them charcoal pencils to draw with and then one day one of the apes finally draws something but it's not the art pictures that it draws. What it draws is the bars of its own motherfucking cage. Its own motherfucking cage! Man, that's the truth, ain't it? — Cheryl Strayed

I wrote my first book when I was in my late thirties. — Malcolm Gladwell

Also, I had read a book called She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, written by a professor who had gone through transgender surgery, but it took this person well into his thirties to come to terms with the absolute necessity of having to do it. — Mercedes Ruehl

Mrs. Miniver suddenly understood why she was enjoying the forties so much better than she had enjoyed the thirties: it was the difference between August and October, between the heaviness of late summer and the sparkle of early autumn, between the ending of an old phase and the beginning of a fresh one. — Jan Struther

At any rate, nothing was more characteristic of him [Walter Benjamin] in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of "pearls" and "coral." On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection. — Hannah Arendt

Once you get into your thirties, you stop giving a fuck what people think about your opinions. You're more confident. — Aaron B. Powell

Once I reached my thirties I realized quickly reality sucks and dreams don't come true. — C.V. Hunt

The Sexual Revolution offered us women this deal: you can particiapate in higher education and the labor market, as long as you agree to chemically neuter yourselves during your twenties, and endure expensive, humiliating, and possibly dangerous infertility treatment during your thirties and forties. — Jennifer Morse

There are days when I definitely look in the mirror and go, "All right, I need to find a cream." I can't foresee myself ever going under the knife, but then again, I'm only in my mid-thirties. Maybe it's different when you're in your mid-sixties. — Kristen Stewart

Certain very old people reach an age where every funeral becomes some sort of insane confirmation of strength, rather than of vulnerability, as it is when we are in our thirties or forties and our friends die. — Erica Jong

In the nineteen-thirties, one in four Americans got their news from William Randolph Hearst, who lived in a castle and owned twenty-eight newspapers in nineteen cities. — Jill Lepore

Oh, my God, my thirties blew! Forties are great. — Jennifer Aniston

I was 21 and looking for work in 1932, one of the worst years of the Great Depression. And I can remember one bleak night in the thirties when my father learned on Christmas Eve that he'd lost his job. To be young in my generation was to feel that your future had been mortgaged out from under you, and that's a tragic mistake we must never allow our leaders to make again. — Ronald Reagan

When my pop career was over, I was scratching my head, thinking, "God, how am I going to do something after I'm forty?" I was in my mid-thirties, thinking I was on the scrap heap. — Nick Lowe

At the Sound of the Gunshot,
Leave A Message

That's what my friend spoke
into his grim machine the winter he first went mad
as we both did in our thirties with still
no hope of revenue, gravely inking
our poems on pages held fast by gyres
the color of lead.

Godless, our minds
did monster us, left us bobbing as in a swamp
until we sank. His eyes were burn holes
in a swollen face. His breath was a venom
he drank deep of. He called his own tongue
a scar, this poet

who can crowbar open
the most sealed heart, make ash flower,
and the cocked shotgun's double-zero mouths
(whose pellets had exploded star holes into plaster and porcelain
and not a few locked doors) never touched
my friend's throat. Praise

Him, whose earth is green.

(for Franz Wright) — Mary Karr

Her voice was trained, supple as leather, precise as a knife thrower's blade. Singing or talking, it had the same graceful quality, and an accent I thought at first was English, but then realized was the old-fashioned American of a thirties movie, a person who could get away with saying 'grand.' Too classic, they told her when she went out on auditions. It didn't mean old. It meant too beautiful for the times, when anything that lasted longer than six months was considered passe. I loved to listen to her sing, or tell me stories about her childhood in suburban Connecticut, it sounded like heaven. — Janet Fitch

Expression on his face. He's in his early thirties, tall and broad-shouldered, dressed in jeans, a black polo shirt, and black flip-flops. With his short brown hair, reddish goatee, and sideburns, McHugh looks like a typical Gen Xer, but he speaks in the soothing, considered tones of a college professor. McHugh doesn't preach or worship at Saddleback, but we've chosen to meet here because it's such an important symbol of evangelical culture. Since services are just about to start, there's little time to chat. Saddleback offers six different "worship venues," each housed in its own building or tent and set to its own beat: Worship Center, — Susan Cain

Protested Mrs. Featherstone, a lady in her thirties, whose violently compressed figure suggested that she was engaged in a perpetual struggle to compute her weight in terms of the first syllables of her name rather than the last. — Dorothy L. Sayers

I hope that in my thirties I grow as a writer, push into new territory. — Karen Russell

We can instantly map the usage of the word 'raven' across the United States, in works of narrative poetry, written by men in their thirties. but only up to 1923. When it comes to the last century, save if new law affords entry, then the lawyer - dark-robed sentry - who is ever at our door, will yet whisper, "Nevermore! — Erez Aiden

In the Twenties and Thirties, refrigerated railcars allowed growers to transport apples over great distances, and, thanks to cold-storage warehouses, wholesalers and retailers could keep them for long periods of time. — John Seabrook

The longer I live, the more boring youth becomes. So redundant. Each generation rediscovers the wheel of rebellion, the wheel of love, and so forth and so on. We hardly know which end is up until we're in our thirties. — Barbara Neely

There ought to be more grants that go to people in their late twenties and early thirties. That's a crucial age, although it's very hard to judge who is worth supporting and who is not. Looking back on my own life, I see that was the period when I was closest to giving up as a novelist and when I most needed some encouragement. — Edmund White

His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humour, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice must all be recognised and forgiven. Beyond and above them, and dwarfing them to insignificance, was a master's vision of the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss. Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and feelings that vision had power to project itself in blackly magical crystallisations and transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile America of the 'thirties and 'forties such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi as not even the nether slope of Saturn might boast. — H.P. Lovecraft

There are, of course, many songs dedicated to the glory of a backside, and if my thirties have taught me anything so far, it's that I'm ready to try to be myself with no apologies. — Taylor Jenkins Reid

Only, it's not an it. It's a her. A zombie. A woman. A zombie woman. She's older than Janine, closer to my age, maybe early thirties, missing a little bit of her face, but otherwise sort of pretty in a melancholy way. — Charles Yu

I suffered when I was in my late twenties and early thirties. I was awkward, I stuck out, I was nerdy. — Stephen Merchant

Australia, to the rest of the world, is just far away, and Australia in the Thirties was the faraway of the faraway. — Baz Luhrmann

Oh, the twenties and the thirties were not otherwise designedThan other times when blind men into ditches led the blind,When the rich mouse ate the cheese and the poor mouse got the rind,And man, the self-destroyer, was not lucid in his mind. — William Plomer

When I look back on my twenties, I just remember being afraid of everything, and in my thirties, I'm actually excited by things. And if things don't work out, you know, by the time you've hit your thirties, you've had your fair share of disappointments. — Anne Hathaway

She'd believed in forever in her twenties, when Gray had said it, meaning every word, and she'd believed in forever in her thirties, when William had said it, lying through his teeth. But she'd lived long enough to know that forever couldn't be guaranteed to anyone. Even tomorrow couldn't be relied upon. — Lisa Scottoline

I'd never want to go back to being in my twenties or thirties. I was lost and confused and uncomfortable in my own skin. — Leslie Mann

By the end of my thirties I was a mental and physical wreck! — Steven Magee

It does seem like between the groundbreaking writing of Edmund White's generation and the work of younger gay writers in their twenties and thirties there is a kind of gap. — Garth Greenwell

I have the distinct feeling that when I'm old, and I look back on my life, my thirties will be one huge blur. There's a lot that gets neglected: exercise, dishes, laundry, my poor garden. I try to prioritize the important but non-urgent things over the unimportant but urgent things. — Rebecca Makkai

No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. I was in my mid-thirties, with a marriage more or less behind me. I was no longer vulnerable to curiosity's enormous momentum. I had nothing new to murmur to another on the subject of myself and not the smallest eagerness about being briefed on Danielle's supposedly unique trajectory - a curve described under the action, one could safely guess, of the usual material and maternal and soulful longings, a few thwarting tics of character, and luck good and bad. A life seemed like an old story. — Joseph O'Neill

As women glide from their twenties to thirties, Shazzer argues, the balance of power subtly shifts. Even the most outrageous minxes lose their nerve, wrestling with the first twinges of existential angst: fears of dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian. — Helen Fielding

When I hit my thirties, that's when I calmed down and I wasn't so tough on myself. I wasn't doing the yo-yo dieting any more. I gave myself a break. I think that, if you're more accepting of yourself, you're more free and open and can just allow more people in. — Nicole Scherzinger

We were trying, as I irrelevantly analyzed it, to avoid what might be termed a historic mistake. We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington — Joseph O'Neill

I am pleased to say that I am not a tortured comedian - I laugh a lot. My twenties weren't particularly happy, but it's the same for a lot of people. In your thirties, you realise that your life and your worries are really insignificant, and you have to force yourself to be more positive and take each day as a gift. — Miranda Hart

When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry. — Grace Paley

Junction nineteen! Una, she came off at Junction nineteen! You've added an hour to your journey before you even started. Come on, let's get you a drink. How's your love life, anyway?"
Oh GOD. Why can't married people understand that this is no longer a polite question to ask? We wouldn't rush up to THEM and roar, "How's your marriage going? Still having sex?" Everyone knows that dating in your thirties is not the happy-go-lucky free-for-it-all it was when you were twenty-two and that the honest answer is more likely to be, "Actually, last night my married lover appeared wearing suspenders and a darling little Angora crop-top, told me he was gay/a sex addict/a narcotic addict/a commitment phobic and beat me up with a dildo," than, "Super, thanks. — Helen Fielding

My first few plays took place in the South and even The Lucky Spot was in the thirties but in Louisiana. — Beth Henley

The revelation of loneliness, the omnipresent, unanswerable feeling that I was in a state of lack, that I didn't have what people were supposed to, and that this was down to some grave and no doubt externally unmistakable failing in my person: all this had quickened lately, the unwelcome consequence of being so summarily dismissed. I don't suppose it was unrelated, either, to the fact that I was keeling towards the midpoint of my thirties, an age at which female aloneness is no longer socially sanctioned and carries with it a persistent whiff of strangeness, deviance and failure. — Olivia Laing

The guy at the cash register is a redhead in his thirties with freckles and a two-inch-diameter birthmark, as pink as uncooked salmon, on his pale forehead. The mark is uncannily like the image of a fetus curled in a womb, as if a gestating twin had died early in the mother's pregnancy and left its fossilized image on the surviving brother's brow. — Dean Koontz

I would already have a body count in the thirties by now, if it had been you. Heaven and hell. That's where I would go for you. — Tijan

Baseball players tend to have something like 20 good years in them and then around their mid-thirties they aren't in the same shape as the young guys in the league and kind of aren't worth as much. Then they retire before 40. And they are left floating adrift in the middle of the ocean. — Michael Cera

The thing about eyewear is that it is so potent, There are very few accessories that, if you were not wearing anything, if you put on they would date you to a whole era. You could look the Thirties, the Fifties, and the Nineties just by your eyewear. It's like a pair of shoes because it is sculptural. It exists without a face. It tells a lot about where you are architecturally or aesthetically in a particular period in time. — Tom Ford

(as a single woman in my early thirties, I was careful not to coo excessively over other people's infants, lest it seem like I was telegraphing my desperation; the necessity of this precaution annoyed me, making me want to defiantly announce that I'd always liked babies, — Curtis Sittenfeld

The experience also illuminated another fact: regardless of how you travel, as you get deeper into your thirties you might be the only person your age out on the road at all, whether it's in the hostels with the twentysomethings, or on the fancy cruises with the sixtysomethings. In your fourth decade, your compatriots are mostly at home, working, raising humans, getting husbands through rehab, living for someone besides themselves.

Suckers. — Kristin Newman

It was a cruel world though. More than half of all children died before they could reach maturity, thanks to chronic epidemics and malnutrition. People dropped like flies from polio and tuberculosis and smallpox and measles. There probably weren't many people who lived past forty. Women bore so many children, they became toothless old hags by the time they were in their thirties. People often had to resort to violence to survive. Tiny children were forced to do such heavy labor that their bones became deformed, and little girls were forced to become prostitutes on a daily basis. Little boys too, I suspect. Most people led minimal lives in worlds that had nothing to do with richness of perception or spirit. City streets were full of cripples and beggars and criminals. Only a small fraction of the population could gaze at the moon with deep feeling or enjoy a Shakespeare play or listen to the beautiful music of Dowland. — Haruki Murakami

No state, furthermore, unless it has aggressive military designs such as those which consumed Nazi leaders in the thirties, is likely to divert to defense any more of its resources and wealth and energy than seems necessary. — Lester B. Pearson

But she has always felt that her thirties were going to be her best decade, and since she is still lingering in her twenties, there is no hurry. — Steven Martin

In my twenties, I was obsessed with what other people thought of me. In my thirties, it's about my children, my husband, my work. In my forties, it's going to be about me, and I shan't care what anyone else thinks. I can't wait! — Jasmine Guinness

I was in my late thirties and decided my intention in life had nothing to do with the acquiring of material things, but rather it was now my intention to experience the evolution of my own soul and to grow spiritually. I wanted to come to know the highest truths of life and to express those truths in action, through myself. I wanted to become the grandest version of the greatest idea I ever held about who I am in regards to my relationship with God. — Neale Donald Walsch

The Thirties are a great mix of everyday glamour and something a bit more practical. — Nanette Lepore

I wasted too much time in my twenties. I worked, but I would do theater in the evening, and during the day I would surf and do irascible things. And then, for some reason, as I got closer to my thirties, I thought, 'Okay Joel, you've wasted enough time.' — Joel Edgerton

I think I was very lucky that I didn't get well-known until my early thirties. If it had happened when I was younger, you might have seen me falling out of nightclubs. I think I conducted myself as a much better human being because I was already married when all that came along (I got married five months after I got the role as Will). — Eric McCormack

This modern craze for putting the young in positions of authority - headmasters in their thirties, bishops without a gray hair on their heads, generals who scarcely need to use a razor - ever since it took hold the world's gone steadily downhill. — Elizabeth Goudge

Not until my middle thirties did I consider myself a novelist. — Rita Mae Brown

I think because I did become a well-known face in my thirties and not in my twenties, I was pretty settled in my boots and I knew who I was. And I think there's a sort of Scottish thing, too, where you don't take yourself too seriously, and you don't get carried away with your own sense of self-importance. — Ashley Jensen

If you're a man in your twenties or thirties, and you have yet to make your fortune, I would urge you not to get married. — Gene Simmons

Goalkeepers aren't born today until they're in their late twenties or thirties. — Kevin Keegan

What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more. — John Updike