Quotes & Sayings About Thirty

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

It rarely snows because Antarctica is a desert. An iceberg means it's tens of millions of years old and has calved from a glacier. (This is why you must love life: one day you're offering up your social security number to the Russia Mafia; two weeks later you're using the word calve as a verb.) I saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; airplane hangars carved by Louise Nevelson; thirty-story buildings, impossibly arched like out of a world's fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman's shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit's cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidding black. — Maria Semple

I knew Frank Herbert for more than thirty-eight years. He was a magnificent human being, a man of great honor and distinction, and the most interesting person at any gathering, drawing listeners around him like a magnet. To say he was an intellectual giant would be an understatement, since he seemed to contain all of the knowledge of the universe in his marvelous mind. He was my father, and I loved him deeply. — Frank Herbert

At thirty, she was a straight-backed, strong, short woman with rough red cheeks, a mountaineer's long stride, and a mountaineer's deep lungs. — Anonymous

Of course, the young male demographic has always been the target demographic for 'Star Trek,' the men ageing fifteen to about twenty-five or thirty, a very tough market to appeal to. — Kate Mulgrew

I never liked hearing anyone say I was the new George Gershwin, because I knew I could have never even carried that man's music case. If George Gershwin hadn't died when he was thirty-nine years old, there is no knowing how much more great music he would have written. — Burt Bacharach

None of us ate together: my Aunt Gladys ate at five o'clock, my cousin Susan at five-thirty, me at six, and my uncle at six-thirty. There is nothing to explain this beyond the fact that my aunt is crazy. — Philip Roth

All across America public libraries were, and are, being shut down, while prisons-with libraries-were, and are, being built. This has been a choice the American public has been making for over thirty years. — Avi Steinberg

Before I had studied Zen for thirty years,
I saw mountains as mountains,
and waters as waters.
When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains,
and waters are not waters.
But now that I have got its very substance
I am at rest.
For it's just that
I see mountains once again as mountains,
and waters once again as waters. — Li Ching-Yuen

As the prisoners' commanding officer and senior medical officer, Dorrigo Evans reported to Major Nakamura that four men had died the day before, two overnight, and that this left eight hundred and thirty-eight POWs. Of this eight hundred and thirty-eight, sixty-seven had cholera and were in the cholera compound, and another one hundred and seventy-nine were in hospital with severe illness. A further one hundred and sixty-seven were too ill for any work other than light duties. — Richard Flanagan

I wasn't a stranger to dealing with thirty-plus-year-old adolescents — Terri Anne Browning

Sheldon Adelson, for example, gave more than $53 million to Super PACs, but all eight of the candidates he supported lost.59 Karl Rove, a strategic mastermind who won fame advising George W. Bush, oversaw groups that spent $175 million and still lost twenty-one out of thirty elections. — Laurence H. Tribe

I smiled, reached into my pockets and pulled out a pair of ultrapowerful earplugs, the kind that are standard issue for skyway construction workers, artillery soldiers, and roadies for the thirty-five most popular teen boy bands. — John Zakour

He was given a ranch, and two lovely mistresses. 'Imagine, at thirty, I was put out to stud. And we Latins are such drowsy pigs that I almost fell for it. — Warren Eyster

For what could a silent man of five-and-thirty hope, when opposed to a very lively one of five-and-twenty? — Jane Austen

The post on her left was occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley, an old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he had to say before he was thirty. — Oscar Wilde

It is better not to sit on the grass after thirty when sprawling at all is difficult, let alone sprawling gracefully. — Elizabeth Bibesco

He asked us what we were doing, and our smuggler said, "Oh, nothing. We're just hanging out" - as if lots of Americans in ninja suits loitered around Syria in the middle of the afternoon. We asked him if he had a cell phone. He didn't, which meant we had twenty or thirty minutes to get back across the Turkish border. — Richard Engel

PLEASE BELIEVE that I am falling apart. I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug - that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of acceleration. I ask you only to accept (as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust. — Salman Rushdie

I would not be young again, if you offered me the world. But then I'm prejudiced.' 'You talk,' I said, 'as if you were ninety-nine.' 'For a woman I very nearly am,' she said. 'I'm thirty five. — Daphne Du Maurier

I just don't think of age and time in respect of years. I have too much experience of people in their seventies who are vigorous and useful and people who are thirty-five who are in lousy physical shape and can't think straight. I don't think age has that much to do with it. — Harrison Ford

Aw, everybody knows that game, the day I hit the homer off ole Charlie Root there in Wrigley Field, the day October first, the third game of that thirty-two World Series. But right now I want to settle all arguments. I didn't exactly point to any spot, like the flagpole. Anyway, I didn't mean to, I just sorta waved at the whole fence, but that was foolish enough. All I wanted to do was give that thing a ride ... outta the park ... anywhere. — Babe Ruth

FOAM OF THE DAZE is a novel like no other, a sexy, innocent, smart and sweet cartoon of a world which then begins, little by little, to bleed real blood until, in the end, the blood turns out to be our own. I read it nearly thirty years ago in its previous incarnation as Mood Indigo and I loved it then; it's still one of my favorite books in the whole world — Jim Krusoe

Gogol remembers having to do the same thing when he was younger, when his grandparents died ... He remembers, back then, being bored by it, annoyed at having to observe a ritual no one else he knew followed, in honor of people he had seen only a few times in his life ... Now, sitting together at the kitchen table at six-thirty every evening, his father's chair empty, this meatless meal is the only thing that seems to make sense. — Jhumpa Lahiri

In that case, balls to the wall, man." Riaz yawned. "No guts, no glory."
"Why are you spouting aphorisms at me?"
"Because it's two-fucking-thirty in the morning and I need to be up for a six a.m. shift."
"Wimp."
Riaz gave him the finger. "Get some sleep and chase your wolf tomorrow." Another yawn. "And Coop? Forget about subtle. That's not your style. — Nalini Singh

I hurt my knee, and that messed up my running, and boy did that ever just have a cascade effect. I've gained about thirty pounds that my doctors have screamed at me about. I've got to get that off, and I know that. — Mike Huckabee

(The Eagles' song "Take It Easy") is clearly a problem of a young man, as no one over thirty-five could sustain interest in seven simultaneous relationships unless they're biracial and amazing at golf. — Chuck Klosterman

I feel old and finished. I'm nearly thirty now. — Rosamunde Pilcher

The leaky-replacement hypothesis - assuming for the moment that it's correct - provides the strongest possible evidence for the closeness of Neanderthals and modern humans. The two may or may not have fallen in love; still, they made love. Their hybrid children may or may not have been regarded as monsters; nevertheless someone - perhaps Neanderthals at first, perhaps humans - cared for them. Some of these hybrids survived to have kids of their own, who, in turn, had kids, and so on up to the present day. Even now, at least thirty thousand years after the fact, the signal is discernible: all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA. One — Elizabeth Kolbert

It was in this pub he'd learnt that, contrary to the belief of the majority of those laying bets, it is possible to flatten a hundred frogs with a hammer in less than thirty seconds. In short, it was a pub with a reputation. And very slimy walls. — Tony McGuin

We talked through Gillie's life from start to finish, including all her accomplishments and major life events. The woman fell asleep with a dreamy half smile still on her lips.
I remained by her bedside. Cog would be amused by my efforts to comfort an upper. No. Not amused. Proud. I liked Ella. She was a good sort, much nicer than Trella, and I hoped she managed to survive the next thirty hours. — Maria V. Snyder

It's always been Apple's goal to ship something we were proud of and something people would be proud to own, and I think that's still true from thirty years ago. — Michael Scott

How old are you exactly?"
The corner of his mouth curved up, the grin so ridiculously sexy it made butterflies take flight in her stomach. "Thirty-two."
"Hmm, eight year difference. Not exactly robbing the cradle, but I think I might have to rethink this whole thing between us." She kept her voice light, teasing.
He snorted and pinched her butt, making her yelp. "Think all you want, I'm not going anywhere. — Katie Reus

Here lies interred in the eternity of the past, from whence there is no resurrection for the days - whatever there may be for the dust - the thirty-third year of an ill-spent life, which, after a lingering disease of many months sank into a lethargy, and expired, January 22d, 1821, A.D. leaving a successor inconsolable for the very loss which occasioned its existence. — Lord Byron

Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, 'Collecting material'. No one can object to that. — Stella Gibbons

There'd been an epidemic, the man had told him. Thirty people had died incandescent with fever, including the mayor. After this, a change in management, but the tuba's acquaintance had declined to elaborate on what he meant by this. He did say that twenty families had left since then, including Charlie and the sixth guitar and their baby. He said no one knew where they'd gone, and he'd told the tuba it was best not to ask. — Emily St. John Mandel

I located America thirty-one years ago in a Model T Ford and planted my flag. I've tried a couple of times since to find it again, riding in faster cars and on better roads, but America is the sort of place that is discovered only once by any one man. — E.B. White

You know very well that whether you are on page one or page thirty depends on whether they fear you. It's as simple as that. — Richard M. Nixon

Those people who believe in previous lives always think they were dukes or queens or something, ignoring the fact that most people back then spent their whole lives up to their knees in shit before dying of toothless old age at thirty. — Tad Williams

Martin would be fifty in four hundred and thirty-seven days, and that reality was beginning to wear on him, like Chinese water torture of coastal erosion. — Marshall Thornton

One night in Pittsburgh, thirty-thousand fans gave me a standing ovation when I caught a hot dog wrapper on the fly. — Dick Stuart

Doctors tell me I have the body of a thirty year old. I know I have the brain of a fifteen year old. If you've got both, you can play baseball. — Pete Rose

Gay marriage is probably the biggest issue that will impact our state and our nation in the last, at least, thirty years. I AM NOT UNDERSTATING THAT. — Michele Bachmann

Somewhat leaky boat are on the lookout for a human companion. Not me. I have learned to love the inside of my own head. There isn't much I'd rather say than think. Of course for more than thirty years I've had Chuck. We've known each other so long that we don't have to talk, and when we do we don't have to say anything. When he asks me if I'd like to take a trip around the world I can say yes knowing I'll never have to go. — Abigail Thomas

Everyone has got their own ideas and they push them and say to hell with everyone else. That's the history of the human race. It got us on top, only now it is pushing us off. The thing is that people will put up with any kind of discomfort, and dying babies, and old age at thirty as long as it has always been that way. Try to get them to change and they fight you, even while they're dying, saying it was good enough for grandpa so it's good enough for me. Bango, dead. — Harry Harrison

In the final analysis, it is not critics who create literary canons, it is other writers who create them ... A writer can have published thirty-seven volumes, but if that writer doesn't interest other writers, they will all molder in the library and nobody will ever want to read them again. — Helen Vendler

Rhyme as an echo not a closing off of sound. Love it. I don't know where the rhymes came from. Or the puns like "no/know" and so on. Just a way my mind start moving toward what seemed urgent to it. I'd like to claim complete rational intent for it all, but it wasn't that way. if you asked me about rhyme thirty years ago, I'd have said: not me, never. And now I done it. — Gregory Orr

My musical genius reached its apex thirty years ago when I played the triangle in Haydn's children's symphony, so I could not play unless you needed someone to make one sustained note! — May Sarton

We did not oversleep at St. Nicholas. The church-bell began to ring at four-thirty in the morning, and from the length of time it continued to ring I judged that it takes the Swiss sinner a good while to get the invitation through his head. — Mark Twain

The time's come: there's a terrific thunder-cloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up ... It's going to blow away all this idleness and indifference, and prejudice against work ... I'm going to work, and in twenty-five or thirty years' time every man and woman will be working. — Anton Chekhov

The hawk is on my fist. Thirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket; a being whose world is drawn in plots and vectors that pull her towards lives' ends. — Helen Macdonald

I often think about this, that is, I imagine to myself that here is Vera, dead, totally motionless, lying on the table, in a coffin... and I too, of course can no longer live. But for some reason this gives me pleasure, a terrible amount of pleasure to imagine so the one I love: earlier I imagined grandmother and then my fiance in this manner, even my favorite animals, Sparky our cat with the fiery bursts of red on his gray-black fur.

("Thirty-Three Abominations") — Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal

My parents raised me that you never ask people about their reproductive plans. "You don't know their situation," my mom would say. I considered it such an impolite question that for years I didn't even ask myself. Thirty-five turned into forty faster than McDonald's food turns into cold nonfood. — Tina Fey

The problem (as I'd learned, repeatedly) was that thirty-six hours in, with your body in full revolt, and the remainder of your un-opiated life stretching out bleakly ahead of you like a prison corridor, you needed some fairly compelling reason to keep moving forward into darkness, rather than falling straight back into the gorgeous feather mattress you'd so foolishly abandoned. — Donna Tartt

Jesus had been betrayed for thirty pieces of silver. I'd betrayed myself for soap. — Nenia Campbell

According to Dr. Bruce Lipton, gene activity can change on a daily basis. If the perception in your mind is reflected in the chemistry of your body, and if your nervous system reads and interprets the environment and then controls the blood's chemistry, then you can literally change the fate of your cells by altering your thoughts.
In fact, Dr. Lipton's research illustrates that by changing your perception, your mind can alter the activity of your genes and create over thirty thousand variations of products from each gene. He gives more detail by saying that the gene programs are contained within the nucleus of the cell, and you can rewrite those genetic programs through changing your blood chemistry. — LIPTON

Thirty trillion dollars worth of services, scot-free to humanity, every year. — E. O. Wilson

No good play is a success; fine writing and high morals are useless on the stage. I have been scribbling twaddle for thirty-five years to suit the public taste, and I should know. — W.S. Gilbert

I will be a sonofabitch if he ain't in here at eleven-thirty at night, fartin' around in the dark with a pair of scissors and a paper sack. — Ken Kesey

In 1980, during my sophomore year at MIT, I realized that the school didn't have a student space organization. I made posters for a group I called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space and put them up all over campus. Thirty-five people showed up. It was the first thing I ever organized, and it took off! — Peter Diamandis

Baby smuggling is a serious crime,' he said. 'There were thirty-six babies on that plane. We could charge you with thirty-six counts of kidnapping.'
That, at least, got Second to look back at Mr. Reardon.
'Does FBI mean Federal Bureau of Idiots?' he asked. 'If any of you were any good at analyzing footprints, you would know that I fell when I was trying to sneak into the airport grounds, not out.'
'And why would you do that?' Mr. Reardon asked, hunching forward over a notepad.
'It was a dare, all right?' Second snarled. 'I was with my friends and we were talking about what it would be like to stand on a runway when a plane was landing and ... we decided to try it out.'
'That's a crime too,' Mr. Reardon said.
Second shrugged. 'It ain't thirty-six counts of kidnapping,' he said. — Margaret Peterson Haddix

When I met couples whose marriages were thriving after thirty and forty years, none of them were riding an emotional roller coaster of passion and then resentment. Instead, they loved each other as an act of their conscious will. They were more in control of their love than their "love" was in control of them. — Donald Miller

Improvising, I participated in the discussion, and questioned another woman in the group. I asked her how old she was and she answered, "Thirty." I replied, "No, you are not thirty but instead eighty and lying on your deathbed. And now you are looking back on your life, a life which was childless but full of financial success and social prestige." And then I invited her to imagine what she would feel in this situation. "What will you think of it? What will you say to yourself?" Let me quote what she actually said from a tape which was recorded during that session. "Oh, I married a millionaire, I had an easy life full of wealth, and I lived it up! I flirted with men; I teased them! But now I am eighty; I have no children of my own. Looking back as an old woman, I cannot see what all that was for; actually, I must say, my life was a failure! — Viktor E. Frankl

I think the internal combustion engine will disappear from the streets of our cities in the next thirty years because transportation will be mass transportation, or probably electrical power. — Gaylord Nelson

Fenway seats just over thirty-seven thousand, about the same number of people as have Huntington's in the United States. Thirty-seven thousand. It's a faceless number, — Lisa Genova

So I write melodies - thirty, forty, fifty - then I cast them off until I have just two or three. If only one is needed, I go see the director and ask him to decide. — Michel Legrand

Fair Fatality, you are the most unusual female I have encountered in all my thirty-eight years!" "You can't think how deeply flattered I am!" she assured him. "I daresay my head would be quite turned if I didn't suspect that amongst so many a dozen or so may have slipped from your memory. — Georgette Heyer

Ig had not been inside for years, but it was much as he remembered it. The foundry lay open to the sky, brick arches and pillars rising away into the slanting reddish light. Thirty years of overlapping graffiti covered the walls. The individual messages were mostly incoherent, but then perhaps the individual messages were of no importance. It seemed to Ig that all such messages were the same at heart: I Am; I Was; I Want To Be. — Joe Hill

The truth is, part of me is every age. I'm a three-year-old, I'm a five-year-old, I'm a thirty-seven-year-old, I'm a fifty-year-old. I've been through all of them, and I know what it's like. I delight in being a child when it's appropriate to be a child. I delight in being a wise old man when it's appropriate to be a wise old man. Think of all I can be! I am every age, up to my own. — Mitch Albom

I started writing when I was twenty. My first book came out when I was thirty-five. But I never expected that it would happen quickly. — David Sedaris

The typewriter is neat and compact and sturdy and blue, just the right machine to pound out a missive of love. When you strike the keys it's a sound that hasn't been heard in the qorld world for thirty years (we are so far away from a time when typewriters won world wars). When you strike the keys they make a sound like a pistol shot, a sound so definite and sure you feel like a genius, or an orayor orator, or a beat poet. When you strike the keys you just want to keep on fucking writing. You have to wrestle with the thing, like I am doing now, steer it like an old manual car, keep the words together and right and on the page, but the blood and muscle of a typewriter, it is a beautiful thing. — Yvette Walker

I teach child development and social policy as an undergraduate course, and I tell my students, "Look, on any of these issues, if you don't want to work on it for thirty years, don't start." — Edward Zigler

A wedding is allegedly one of the most wondrous experiences in a woman's life. All attending her presence are to make the occasion completely about her. Her beauty in that sliver of time is to be suspended in eternity so that ten years, thirty pounds and two kids later, she may sigh at the princess she once was. — Kenn Bivins

I will miss myself in relation to others. The rareness. The exceptional differences. I will miss the gift that comes with hardship and paying the price. I will miss the tragedy of my own life. As I once spoke...emphatically, but I now repeat here, quietly - the pain, the pain is what made it so God damn beautiful. I endured. You can wait a lifetime for thirty seconds, five minutes, or for an hour to come into your life - a brief interval that makes all the suffering purposeful. In such moments of splendor and rapture - even if the rapture be stilled, the private hours and years of reckoning are unloaded, a burden lifted and the spirit feels as it did on the happiest day of its life when it was young and untormented Or rather, unconscious of the torment waiting to be ignited. — Wheston Chancellor Grove

For me, I'm always looking for opportunities to work with people who are better than me, who are more experienced than me, people from whom I can learn. And who could I learn more from than someone with an unprecedented movie star career that has spanned over thirty years whose name is Tom Cruise? — David Oyelowo

You may have heard that America doesn't have enough scientists and is in danger of "falling behind" (whatever that means) because of it. Tell this to an academic scientist and watch her laugh. For the last thirty years, the amount of the U.S. annual budget that goes to non-defense related research has been frozen. From a purely budgetary perspective, we don't have too few scientists, we've got far too many, and we keep graduating more each year. America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn't want to pay for it. Within environmental science in particular, we see the crippling effects that come from having been resource-hobbled for decades: degrading farmland, species extinction, progressive deforestation... The list goes on and on. — Hope Jahren

Where is the indignation about the fact that the US and USSR have thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world? — Norman Cousins

He would now have comprehended that work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play consists of whaterver a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why construcing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill, is work, whilst rolling nine-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service that would turn it into work, then they would resign. — Mark Twain

Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish. — Akhil Sharma

As I sounded through the ice I could determine the shape of the bottom with greater accuracy than is possible in surveying harbors which do not freeze over, and I was surprised at its general regularity. In the deepest part there are several acres more level than almost any field which is exposed to the sun, wind, and plow. In one instance, on a line arbitrarily chosen, the depth did not vary more than one foot in thirty rods; and generally, near the middle, I could calculate the variation for each one hundred feet in any direction beforehand within three or four inches. Some are accustomed to speak of deep and dangerous holes even in quiet sandy ponds like this, — Henry David Thoreau

Four hours of makeup, and then an hour to take it off. It's tiring. I go in, I get picked up at two-thirty in the morning, I get there at three. I wait four hours, go through it, ready to work at seven, work all day long for twelve hours, and get it taken off for an hours, go home and go to sleep, and do the same thing again. — Peter Sarsgaard

Inside the music like this, she understood many things. She understood that Simon was a disappointed man if he needed, at this age, to tell her he had pitied her for years. She understood that as he drove his car back down the coast toward Boston, toward his wife with whom he had raised three children, that something in him would be satisfied to have witnessed her the way he had tonight, and she understood that this form of comfort was true for many people, as it made Malcolm feel better to call Walter Dalton a pathetic fairy, but it was thin milk, this form of nourishment; it could not change that you had wanted to be a concert pianist and ended up a real estate lawyer, that you had married a woman and stayed married to her for thirty years, when she did not ever find you lovely in bed. — Elizabeth Strout

When you are spending time in front of the television, you are not doing other things. The young child of three or four years old is in the stage of the greatest emotional development that human beings undergo. And we only develop when we experience things, real-life things: a conversation with Mother, touching Father, going places, doing things, relating to others. This kind of experience is critical to a young child, and when the child spends thirty-five hours per week in front of the TV set, it is impossible to have the full range of real-life experience that a young child must have. — Jerry Mander

Lose thirty pounds within the next thirty days, or I'll have Chief Horrall put you on the 'Fat Husband's Diet' recently extolled in the Ladies' Home Journal. — James Ellroy

Never before have the American people had their noses so deeply in one another's business. If I announce that I and eleven other diners shared a thirty-seven-course lunch that likely cost as much as a new Volvo station wagon, Those of a critical nature will let their minds run in tiny, aghast circles of condemnation. My response to them is that none of us twelve disciples of gourmandise wanted a new Volvo. We wanted only lunch and since lunch lasted approximately eleven hours we saved money by not having to buy diner. The defense rests. — Jim Harrison

The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too soon needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute - like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness. There is no way around it: my memory is growing ever more distant from the spot where Naoko used to stand - ever more distant from the spot where my old self used to stand. And nothing but scenery, that view of the meadow in October, returns again and again to me like a symbolic scene in a movie. Each time it appears, it delivers a kick to some part of my mind. "Wake up," it says. "I'm still here. Wake up and think about it. Think about why I'm still here." The kicking never hurts me. There's no pain at all. Just a hollow sound that echoes with each kick. And even that is bound to fade one day. — Haruki Murakami

He was thinking about men like his Uncle Ted, a Cornishman to his bones, who lived and would die in St. Mawes, part of the fabric of the place, remembered as long as there were locals, beaming out of fading photographs of the Life Boat on pub walls. When Ted died - and Strike hoped it would be twenty, thirty years hence - they would mourn him as the unknown Barrovian Grammar boy was being mourned: with drink, with tears, but in celebration that he had been given to them. What had dark, hulking Brockbank, child rapist, and fox-haired Laing, wife-torturer, left behind in the towns of their birth? Shudders of relief that they had gone, fear that they had returned, a trail of broken people and bad memories. — Robert Galbraith

It was a heavy piece, about thirty inches in height, carved of stone. And so ugly that it defied description. Surely only a blind person could have carved it.
Maybe carving it was what made the person blind. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

A student well versed in even one technique will naturally see corresponding points in other techniques. A upper level punch, a lower punch, a front punch and a reverse punch are all essentially the same. Looking over thirty-odd kata, he should be able to see that they are essentially variations on just a handful. — Gichin Funakoshi

When Debbie was fourteen, she felt "impressed by the Lord" to marry Ray Blackmore, the community leader. Debbie asked her father to share her divine impression with Prophet LeRoy Johnson, who would periodically travel to Bountiful from Short Creek to perform various religious duties. Because Debbie was lithe and beautiful, Uncle Roy approved of the match. A year later the prophet returned to Canada and married her to the ailing fifty-seven-year-old Blackmore. As his sixth wife, Debbie became a stepmother to Blackmore's thirty-one kids, most of whom were older than she was. And because he happened to be the father of Debbie's own stepmother, Mem, she unwittingly became a stepmother to her stepmother, and thus a step grandmother to herself. — Jon Krakauer

The police never saw a noun they didn't want to turn into a verb, so it quickly became "to action", as in you action me to undertake a Falcon assessment, I action a Falcon assessment, a Falcon assessment has been actioned and we all action in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine.
This, to review a major inqurity is to review the list of "actions" and their consequences, in the hope that you'll spot something that thirty-odd highly trained and experienced detectives didn't. — Ben Aaronovitch

Then everything was normal again, except that the liner was speeding for the planet Krim at something more than thirty times the speed of light. Normality extended through all the galaxy so far inhabited by men. There were worlds on which there was peace, and worlds on which there was tumult. There were busy, zestful young worlds, and languid, weary old ones. From the Near Rim to the farthest of occupied systems, planets circled their suns, and men lived on them, and every man took himself seriously and did not quite believe that the universe had existed before he was born or would long survive his loss. Time passed. Comets let out vast streamers like bridal veils and swept toward and around their suns. Some of them - one in ten thousand, or twenty - were possibly seen by human eyes. The liner bearing Hoddan sped through the void. In time it made a landfall on the Planet Krim. — Murray Leinster

The dissolute and unlawful king came: Herod! I saw him with my own eyes when he called me to Jericho to heal him. I took along my secret herbs - I knew all about such lore - and went. I went, and from that day on, I have not been able to eat meat, for I saw his putrescent flesh; I have not been able to drink wine, for I saw his blood filled with worms. I have retained his stench in my nostrils for over thirty years. — Nikos Kazantzakis

Oh, I had a great time. My thirty-three-year-old boyfriend said he wished they could package my cum like ice cream so he could eat it all day. — Augusten Burroughs

I have a Web site that parents and girls can use to learn about Title IX and take action if they find their school is not in compliance. Thirty years after Title IX passed, 80 percent of schools are not in compliance. — Geena Davis

I know, it looks pure and beautiful to you now, at your great old age of twenty-two. But do you know what it means? Thirty years of a lost cause, that sounds beautiful, doesn't it? But do you know how many days there are in thirty years? Do you know what happens in those days? ... I want you to know what's in store for you. There will be days when you'll look at your hands and you'll want to take something and smash every bone in them, because they'll be taunting you with what they could do, if you found a chance for them to do it, and you can't find that chance, and you can't bear your living body because it has failed those hands somewhere. — Ayn Rand

The Final Jeopardy! questions seem to be, by design, things you can't know. And so it's not about who knows them, but who can figure them out in thirty seconds. — Ken Jennings

He looked ninety years old for thirty years and then he got the notion that he would die, and did so. — Richard Brautigan

We raise our children, especially girls, to ignore their spontaneious reactions-we teach them not to rock the societal boat ... By the time she is thirty, the valient little girl's "Ick!"-her tendency to respond, to rock the boat, when someone's actions are really mean, may have been exciese from her behavior, and perhaps from her very mind. — Martha Stout

Never let them see you in public after you've turned thirty-five. You're finished if you do! — Norma Shearer