Lost Generation Quotes

A neat little apartment with a neat little bourgeois life. A neat little security on the edge of the abyss. Do you really see that? ~ Erich Maria Remarque

What I tell these young people is, the world is not as dangerous as the older generation would like you to believe. Anyone I know who has ever taken a risk and lost a job has ended up getting a better one two years later. ~ Jonathan Kozol

...unlike the Lost Generation, which was occupied with the loss of faith, the Beat Generation is becoming more and more occupied with the need for it. ~ John Clellon Holmes

The thing I've been talking about with daughter is the idea of - and I'm talking about essentially in America - the possibility of, a lost generation. I've been listening to a lot of music - as a fan, as a critic, as somebody who likes to dance - but I hear, you know, within these songs and half the people I hear, these philosophies encoded and embedded in these songs. ~ Saul Williams

The trouble with the lost generation is that it didn't get lost enough. ~ James Thurber

Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations. ~ Franz Kafka

Have you noticed there are some people
Americans especially
who seem untouched by the war, or at least, unmangled by it? I don't mean to imply that Mark was a shirker
he was in their Air Corps
but he's simply not sunk under it. And when I'm with him, I feel untouched by the war, too. It's an illusion, I know it is, and truthfully, I'd be ashamed of myself if the war hadn't touched me. But it's forgivable to enjoy myself a little
isn't it? ~ Mary Ann Shaffer

Then we change our possy and lie down again to play cards. We know how to do that: to play cards, to swear, and to fight. Not much for twenty years;
and yet too much for twenty years. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together."
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me.
Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so? ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Perhaps every generation thinks of itself as a lost generation and perhaps every generation is right. ~ Erica Jong

Our morality system has become a mechanical device for protecting us against ourselves; it is the handiwork of terror. ~ Harold Edmund Stearns

It was when we had come back from Canada and were living in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and Miss Stein and I were still good friends that Miss Stein made the remark about the lost generation. She had some ignition trouble with the old Model T Ford she then drove and the young man who worked in the garage and had served in the last year of the war had not been adept, or perhaps had not broken the priority of other vehicles, in repairing Miss Stein's Ford. Perhaps he had not realized the importance of Miss Stein's vehicle having the right of immediate repair. Anyway he had not been sérieux and had been corrected severely by the patron of the garage after Miss Stein's protest. The patron had said to him, 'You are all a génération perdue.'

'That's what you are. That's what you all are,' Miss Stein said. 'All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.'

'Really?' I said.

'You are,' she insisted. 'You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death ... ~ Ernest Hemingway

Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, 'You're all a lost generation.' That got around to certain people and we all said, 'Whee! We're lost. ~ Dorothy Parker

They were learning that New York had another life, too - subterranean, like almost everything that was human in the city - a life of writers meeting in restaurants at lunchtime or in coffee houses after business hours to talk of work just started or magazines unpublished, and even to lay modest plans for the future. Modestly they were beginning to write poems worth the trouble of reading to their friends over coffee cups. Modestly they were rebelling once more. ~ Malcolm Cowley

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. ~ Anonymous

More seriously-and this is probably why there has been a lot of garbage talked about a lost generation-it was easy to see, all over the landscape of contemporary fiction, the devastating effect of the Thatcher years. So many of these writers wrote without hope. They had lost all ambition, all desire to to wrestle with the world. Their books dealt with tiny patches of the world, tiny pieces of human experience-a council estate, a mother, a father, a lost job. Very few writers had the courage or even the energy to bite off a big chunk of the universe and chew it over. Very few showed any linguistic or formal innovation. Many were dulled and therefore dull. (And then, even worse, there were the Hooray Henries and Sloanes who evidently thought that the day of the yuppie novel, and the Bellini-drinking, okay-yah fiction had dawned. Dukedoms and country-house bulimics abounded. It was plain that too may books were being published; that too many writers had found their way into print without any justification for it at all; that too many publishers had adopted a kind of random, scattergun policy of publishing for turnover and just hoping that something would strike a cord.
When the general picture is so disheartening, it is easy to miss the good stuff. I agreed to be a judge for "Best of Young British Novelists II" because I wanted to find out for myself if the good stuff really was there. In my view, it is...One of my old schoolmasters was fond of devising English versions of ~ Salman Rushdie

Say a prayer for the lost generation, who spin the wheel out of desperation. ~ Robbie Robertson

People say the 'Lost Generation' in a romantic sense, but I think it was tragic. They were really lost. ~ Corey Stoll

To be or not to be, that is out of the question! I live in the 21st century. ~ Ljupka Cvetanova

Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely. ~ Umberto Eco

Failure has its successes. ~ Brian Howard

In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did not
completely trust anyone. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

For me, as for all the world, the War was a tragedy and a vast stupidity, a waste of youth and of time; it betrayed my faith, mocked my love, and irremediably spoilt my career. ~ Vera Brittain

Gloomy room
immersed in a scent
of modern cowards
filled with
shapeless creatures
sitting in silence
because they have
nothing to say

Fake plastic faces
with a grimace
of disappointment
painted on them

Are we stuck on hold
expecting our turn
in a waiting room
of so-called
lost generation? ~ Asper Blurry

My
gad," one of them, warrant officer pilot, captain and M. C. in turn said to me once; "if
you can treat a crate that way, why do you want to fly at all? ~ William Faulkner

I had try to tell the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know. ~ Ernest Hemingway

We are, now, just as valuable, intelligent, and real as Eliot or any of his contemporaries. Our ideas and experiences are just as sound and true. Our passion to save our world from what we see it becoming is just as authentic. We are always the Lost Generation, but with different accoutrements. ~ Nate Ragolia

Some guy on the radio called us the "lost generation" the other day. I wanted to find a payphone and a few quarters and tell that fool that we aren't lost at all.

We're exactly where they put us. ~ Alexandra Bracken

You are all a lost generation, Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night. ~ James Thurber

I am part of a lost generation
and I refuse to believe that
I can change the world
I realize this may be a shock but
"Happiness comes from within"
is a lie, and
"Money will make me happy"
So in 30 years I will tell my children
they are not the most important thing in my life
My employer will know that
I have my priorities straight because
work
is more important than
family
I tell you this
Once upon a time
Families stayed together
but this will not be true in my era
This is a quick fix society
Experts tell me
30 years from now, I will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of my divorce
I do not concede that
I will live in a country of my own making
In the future
Environmental destruction will be the norm
No longer can it be said that
My peers and I care about this earth
It will be evident that
My generation is apathetic and lethargic
It is foolish to presume that
There is hope

And all of this will come true unless we choose to reverse it.

There is hope
It is foolish to presume that
My generation is apathetic and lethargic
It will be evident that
My peers and I care about this earth
No longer can it be said that
Environmental destruction will be the norm
In the future
I will live in a country of my own making
I do not concede that
30 years from now, I will be ~ Jonathan Reed

After 1929, so many people had been traumatized by the stock market crash that there was a lost generation. ~ Ron Chernow

In his lifetime, that small fishing village had turned into the seventh largest port in the world, an eight-million-strong city; women had gotten the right to divorce, of which his wife took full advantage; and his son's living standard was so much higher than his, his so much higher than his own parents, that he couldn't understand the boy's constant desire for more, more, more. Despite a total lack of education from the state, Lao Song, unlike some of his classmates, was not entirely stunted; instead, he sought out the rebellious track of "growing his own mind," as he called it, teaching himself whatever he could through rudimentary means. Despite being in China's "Lost Generation," Song had somehow found himself. ~ Megan Rich

Not everyone's life is like a house that belongs to him and that he can go on decorating ever more richly with the furniture of his memory. Some people live in hotels, in many hotels. The years close behind them like hotel doors - and the only thing that remains is a little courage and no regrets. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate? ~ Harold Edmund Stearns

When a husband loses his wife, they call him a widower. When a wife loses her husband, they call her a widow. And when somebody's parents die, they call them an orphan. But there is no name for a parent, a grieving mother, or a devastated father who have lost their child. Because the pain behind the loss is so immeasurable and unbearable, that it cannot be described in a single word. It just cannot be described. ~ Bhavya Kaushik

The things we want are transformative, and we don't know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation Never to get lost is not to live. ~ Rebecca Solnit

For most of my childhood and adult life, I thought I had the answers and most of the world was just lost. As I've grown, I've learned that I know almost nothing. And so, in that I feel reborn in a sense. ~ Leah Remini

Ladies and Gentlemen, we deem it the central revelation of Western experience that man cannot ineradicably stain himself, for the wells of regeneration are infinitely deep. No temple has ever been so profaned that it cannot be purified; no man is ever truly lost; no nation is irrevocably dishonored. Khrushchev cannot take permanent advantage of our temporary disadvantage, for it is the West he is fighting. And in the West there lie, however encysted, the ultimate resources, which are moral in nature. Khrushchev is not aware that the gates of hell shall not prevail against us. Even out of the depths of despair, we take heart in the knowledge that it cannot matter how deep we fall, for there is always hope. In the end, we will bury him. ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

And as it quickly became clear, there were not very many survivors to find. Only fourteen people were pulled out of the rubble alive, all within the first twenty-four hours of the collapse. About 50,000 people had been working in the buildings that day. Two thousand and sixteen died. Also among the dead: 343 firefighters and 60 police officers who were in or near the buildings when they collapsed. In the months after the attacks, it was hard to imagine that life would ever go back to normal. It never will for many people, like my friend who lost her brother; like the hundreds of firefighters who have serious health problems caused by the toxic smoke and dust they breathed at Ground Zero; like the thousands who managed to escape that day, but who saw the horrors up close. Today, while the horrors of that day still linger, the city itself is more vibrant than ever. People have done their best to move forward. ~ Lauren Tarshis

My request today is simple. Today. Tomorrow. Next week. Find somebody, anybody, that's different than you. Somebody that has made you feel ill-will or even hateful. Somebody whose life decisions have made you uncomfortable. Somebody who practices a different religion than you do. Somebody who has been lost to addiction. Somebody with a criminal past. Somebody who dresses "below" you. Somebody with disabilities. Somebody who lives an alternative lifestyle. Somebody without a home.
Somebody that you, until now, would always avoid, always look down on, and always be disgusted by.
Reach your arm out and put it around them.
And then, tell them they're all right. Tell them they have a friend. Tell them you love them.
If you or I wanna make a change in this world, that's where we're gonna be able to do it. That's where we'll start.
Every. Single. Time. ~ Dan Pearce

The trees part before her slender form and close in again behind me. The roads weave a vast labyrinth, and I am lost. ~ Shan Sa

Muddy language is not confined to policies alone. Each of you has seen replies to simple questions in which the meaning was lost through hopelessly obscure wording. When a person writes to the Veterans Administration, he is entitled to an easily understood, frank, and courteous reply. If our replies cannot be understood, they are not only not worth writing, but they simply create additional work. ~ Omar N. Bradley

My sister is running away to get lost, but I am running away because I want to find something. And my parents love me so much that they want to help me. Yeah, Dad is a drunk and Mom is an ex-drunk, but they don't want their kids to be drunks. ~ Sherman Alexie

I have discovered a few things that help me when God seems silent ...
- Press in to God when you want to pull away.
- Praise God out loud when you want to get lost in complaints.
- Put yourself in the company of truth (reading Scriptures and surrounding yourself with positive, Godly people.) ~ Lysa TerKeurst

Everyone called it losing Mother, but she wasn't lost. She was gone, and no matter where I went - another town, another country, Fairyland, or Gnome Caverns - I wouldn't find her ~ Gail Carson Levine

Even when a prohibition in a fairy-story is guessed to be derived from some taboo once practised long ago, it has probably been preserved in the later stages of the tale's history because of the great mythical significance of prohibition. A sense of significance may indeed have lain behind some of the taboos themselves. Thou shalt not - or else thou shalt depart beggared into endless regret. The gentlest 'nursery-tales' know it. Even Peter Rabbit was forbidden a garden, lost his blue coat, and took sick. The Locked Door stands as an eternal Temptation. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

I think there is a generation gap. I personally look forward to, as our generation becomes the leaders, you are gonna see a change, and I think hopefully gay marriage will be a part of that country. ~ Vanessa Kerry

A thought that stayed with me was that I had entered a private place in the earth. I had seen exposed nearly its oldest part. I had lost my sense of urgency, rekindled a sense of what people were, clambering to gain access to high waterfalls and a sense of our endless struggle as a species to understand time and to estimate the consequences of our acts. ~ Barry Lopez

Yes, you are right. I lost my home, my mother, my identity. I lost it. Not you, Inspector Imandar. I did. They I don't understand, what did you lose? What did you lose that you hate them so much? ~ Sanchit Gupta

Being part of the natural world reminds me that innocence isn't ever lost completely; we just need to maintain our goodness to regain it. ~ Jewel

Learn how to grow out of yourself and into the world of others: Plant a shade tree under which you know you will never sit. Set some goals that may benefit your children or an orphanage or the employees of your company or future generations or your own city, fifty years from now. ~ Denis Waitley

At night thunderstorms arose often, shedding lightning that gave the terrain the pallor of a corpse. Fog would settle in for days, causing the edge of the cliff to look like the edge of the material world. At regular intervals the men heard the lost-calf moan of foghorns as steamships waited offshore for clarity. ~ Erik Larson

Christ's version of kindness:
I know you are hurt. I contributed to that. Maybe, I should have said more. Done more. Listened. I am sorry for my part in the situation. I am sorry if I caused you any pain or confused you with my actions or words. How can I help you move on? I want you to have peace in your life. Let's end this by communicating.
The world's perverted version of kindness:
You caused your own pain. You get what you get. Get over it and move on. Maybe, one day you will figure out what happiness really means. By the way, I am not responsible for giving it to you. Nor, do I have to put up with people that don't bring me joy or who I can't trust. I am only responsible for myself. I will pray for you because I am a good Christian. ~ Shannon L. Alder

When you devalue ethics and morals by proclaiming that our attitude toward them should be casual or lenient, you can't be surprised by a rising generation who then behaves disrespectfully, treating life, people, and choices as if they possess little value or worth. For whether or not that was the intention, society has taught them to believe thusly. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

... Jo loved a few persons very dearly and dreaded to have their affection lost or lessened in any way. ~ Louisa May Alcott

It was funny that she should have said that, for Julian chose that moment to begin baaing like a flock of sheep. His one long, bleating "baa-baa-aa-aa" was taken up by the echoes at once, and it seemed suddenly as if hundreds of poor lost sheep were baa-ing their way down the dungeons! Mr. Stick jumped to his feet, as white as a sheet. "Well, if it isn't sheep now!" he said. "What's up? What's in these "ere dungeons? I never did like them." "Baa-aa-AAAAAAAAAAP went the mournful bleats all round and about. And then ~ Enid Blyton

One generation after another falls like honeybees upon this memorable forest, rifle its sweets, pack themselves with vital memories, and when the theft is consummated depart again into life richer, but poorer also. The forest, indeed, they have possessed, from that day forward it is theirs dissolubly, and they will never return to walk in it at night in the fondest of their dreams, and use it forever in their books and pictures. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

I know the different ways that I have lost. I think that's beneficial to me because I know how I got in those situations in the past, and I know how to avoid those situations. ~ Michelle Waterson

Cats are like witches. They don't fight to kill, but to win. There is a difference. There's no point in killing an opponent. That way, they won't know they've lost, and to be a real winner you have to have an opponent who is beaten and knows it. There's no triumph over a corpse, but a beaten opponent, who will remain beaten every day of the remainder of their sad and wretched life, is something to treasure. ~ Terry Pratchett

Inside a book, she captures all that's lost. She journals so her words won't fly away. ~ Stephanie Hemphill

I know who you are in your heart,' Andres said. 'That's all that matters.' And that was it. That was the moment. Now I knew how I would feel if I ever lost him. That was how you knew love. My mother had told me that. All you had to do was imagine your life without the other person, and if the thought alone made you shiver, then you knew. ~ Alice Hoffman

I love you. I don't know when it started, years ago or weeks. But I know my heart's lost to you, and I wouldn't have it another way. You're what I want, all there is of you. ~ Nora Roberts

All you wander aren't lost, you know. ~ Karen White

I didn't see it happening, but the wheels were falling off of me. I didn't care about responsibilities like paying rent, I was just on a runaway train ride. The horribly ironic cosmic trick of drug addiction is that drugs are a lot of fun when you first start using them, but by the time the consequences manifest themselves, you're no longer in a position to say, 'Whoa, gotta stop that.' You've lost that ability, and you've created this pattern of conditioning and reinforcement. It's never something for nothing when drugs are involved. ~ Anthony Kiedis

An adult is one who has lost the grace, the freshness, the innocence of the child, who is no longer capable of feeling pure joy, who makes everything complicated, who spreads suffering everywhere, who is afraid of being happy, and who, because it is easier to bear, has gone back to sleep. The wise man is a happy child. ~ Arnaud Desjardins

We've always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. Or perhaps we've just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we've barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us. ~ Cooper - Interstellar

I'd been kind of a hiccup in my parents' lives. They lost track of me and I didn't know what I was going to do with myself. And then fate reached in and took me in its hands. I was discovered right out of high school and started getting work. ~ Sally Field

Enjoyment of football is part of the social context, and I have lost my faith in this social context. ~ Orhan Pamuk

If you have a great work in your head, nothing else thrives near it; all other thoughts are repelled, and the pleasure of life itself is for the time lost. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

If now, after the collapse, should any of these lackeys of Adolf Hitler have the insolence to claim they were merely harmless onlookers, let them feel the scourge of avenging mankind ... Whoever cries about having lost the Nazi system or wants to resurrect National Socialism is to be treated as a lunatic. ~ Friedrich Kellner

Heaven is won or lost on earth; the possession is there, but the preparation is here. ~ Richard Baxter

For a lifetime was but a moment in that place, and each man dreams his own heaven.
And in the darkness David closed his eyes, as all that was lost was found again. ~ John Connolly