Thirties Quotes

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

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

Oh antic God
return to me
my mother in her thirties
leaned across the front porch
the huge pillow of her breasts
pressing against the rail
summoning me in for bed.
I am almost the dead woman's age times two.
I can barely recall her song
the scent of her hands
though her wild hair scratches my dreams
at night. return to me, oh Lord of then
and now, my mother's calling,
her young voice humming my name. ~ Lucille Clifton

In his twenties, John Bridgens most identified with Hamlet. The strangely aging Prince of Denmark - Bridgens was quite sure that the boy Hamlet had magically aged over a few theatrical weeks to a man who was, at the very least, in his thirties by Act V - had been suspended between thought and deed, between motive and action, frozen by a consciousness so astute and unrelenting that it made him think about everything, even thought itself. ~ Dan Simmons

I was comfortable in my thirties playing the romantic partner, the hero that saves the day, or the woman who is facing a world that revolves around younger kid actors. ~ Sharon Lawrence

As a drama student I got into Thirties and Forties suits. ~ Gary Oldman

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

I used to have about a hundred suits in my late twenties and early thirties when my stock was riding high and I was rich. ~ Sebastian Horsley

I know plenty of actresses in their early thirties who look amazing, although there's that old saying: 'Ladies get older, men get more distinguished.' ~ Scott Porter

I was living in Germany in the thirties, and I knew that Hitler had made it his mission to exterminate all Jews, especially the children and the women who could bear children in the future. I was unable to save my people, only their memory. ~ Roman Vishniac

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

The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848. ~ C.L.R. James

The most potent reward for parenthood I have known has been delight in my fully grown progeny. They are friends with an extra dimension of affection. True, there is also an extra dimension of resentment on the children's part, but once offspring are in their thirties, their ability to love their parents, perhaps in contemplation of the deaths to come, expands, and, if one is fortunate, grudges recede. []p. 209] ~ Carolyn G. Heilbrun

Because it is so hard, some people wait until they are in their thirties, forties, fifties, or even older before breaking their silence. ~ Erin Merryn

It was the great evil of plays that every character had some kind of purpose. Absorb too much of them, and you could go about believing there was something wrong with you if you drifted unremarked towards your thirties, and coasted into a quiet beach of no interest to anyone. ~ Natasha Pulley

And, well of course, Count Basie, and I think all of the black bands of the late thirties and early forties, bands with real players. They had an influence on everybody, not just drummers. ~ Buddy Rich

The last time I was single the men I was looking at were in their thirties and I still had that youthful image fixed in my head. It was depressing at first, choosing from a pool that's not regarded as desirable or vital in your society. [...] I managed to re-educate myself eventually. Now I'm only attracted to people my age. A young face looks like a blank page to me. ~ Viv Albertine

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

By your thirties, you should be doing whatever it is you're supposed to be doing with your life and just get on with it - which is what I suppose happened with me as much as to anyone else. ~ Douglas Coupland

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

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

I still feel that I am in my prime right now but I think my best fights were in my thirties. ~ Larry Holmes

The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners looked like pencil sharpeners - your basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they'd been put together in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you'd find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made a certain kind of sense, because the most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a series of elaborate props for playing at living in the future. ~ William Gibson

Take public speaking: I spent all of my twenties and early thirties avoiding it. When I once asked a speech teacher about my aversion, she explained that dancers and writers were especially difficult to teach to speak in public, since both had chosen a profession in which they didn't have to talk - and I had been both. ~ Gloria Steinem

I think that love isn't what you think it is when you're in your twenties or even thirties. ~ Paul Theroux

Derek was in good shape, not just for a man his age but for any man. So maybe he wouldn't be able to get away with wearing skinny jeans, but that didn't matter. Those were for emo kids, hipsters, and twinks and should be outlawed for over thirties anyway ~ Lisa Henry

The Madingley paper56 represented a kind of closure for me, a climax to the first part of my scientific career, beginning in my early twenties and ending in my early thirties. At this point, I took off in an entirely new direction, never to return to those youthful mathematical pastures. That new direction, which was to define the rest of my career, and approximately the second half of my life, opened up with the publication of my first book, The Selfish Gene. ~ Richard Dawkins

It doesn't surprise me that men in their twenties and thirties are often looking for a much older woman. What is the problem with a man of 30 being with a woman of 50? It is a matter of energy and the soul, not a matter of age of the body. ~ Monica Bellucci

There is a time in our lives, usually in mid-life, when a woman has to make a decision - possibly the most important psychic decision of her future life - and that is, whether to be bitter or not. Women often come to this in their late thirties or early forties. They are at the point where they are full up to their ears with everything and they've "had it" and "the last straw has broken the camel's back" and they're "pissed off and pooped out." Their dreams of their twenties may be lying in a crumple. There may be broken hearts, broken marriages, broken promises. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

It's a fact that a dancer's career is not forever. Eventually, if you dance hard and you dance often, your body is going to rebel. I do dance hard and often, but I don't think about that. I know there may come a point where I won't be able to do what I do now. I know a lot of pros who retire in their thirties. I've seen it and wondered, What if…? But I keep it way, way in the back of my mind. Instead, I look for ways to defy age and keep my body strong and limber. I learn as much as I can about nutrition and exercise and I keep moving forward. Life is truly a series of transitions, from one season to another, from one phase to another. ~ Derek Hough

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

This was one of those mid-thirties moments when you take a look at the stale, half-chewed bagel your life has become and kiss jealousy on its smokey mouth. ~ Steve Almond

When people get into their 30s plus "boyfriend" sounds weird ... if you really think about it. Instead, I think we should universally start using the term "manfriend" or "snookie bookie cuddles pie". ~ Michelle M. Pillow

For many people, a western lifestyle equates to living in a toxic home, working a toxic job, eating toxic food, being sick from your thirties onward and eventually dying from preventable disease. ~ Steven Magee

I don't know how long a child will remain utterly static in front of the television, but my guess is that it could be well into their thirties. ~ A.A. Gill

Most of the bands that I really like no longer exist. That might just be because I'm in my thirties or whatever. But I also think it's the rare band that doesn't, like, turn into something else. ~ Babatunde Adebimpe

The use of isoquants to describe the production function did not develop to any great extent until the thirties. ~ Kenneth E. Boulding

I love French style from the Thirties and Forties. French movie stars like Jean Gabin and Yves Montand had so much natural, effortless style. ~ Vincent Cassel

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

My forte is the music. But obviously if ya don't keep up with the business, then your kinda doing it for nothing. So I do plan on being well off doing, maximizing what I do now. I heard Jimmy Kimmel describe being in your thirties in hip-hop is like the equivalent to being 300 yrs. old; almost like a dinosaur. ~ DJ Quik

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

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

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

I'm torn about late parenting. I believe people should spend their twenties living and having fun and not having any regrets later. I also think people in their thirties generally make better parents but so many of my friends are having trouble - myself included - as fathers get older. ~ Eric McCormack

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

It's actually totally badass to go from your twenties to your thirties. There are so many awesome things that happen to you! Like deeply bonding with your yoga pants, developing a burning passion for expensive cheese, having real, actual orgasms (!), not giving two shits what other people think, figuring out the things you actually like to spend time and money doing, and embracing giant underwear. ~ Ingrid Reinke

My my Laura Goodman. I must say that is a charming name for a charming young lady."
"Eric's old." I broke in. "Really really old."
"Er - really?" Laura asked. "Gosh you don't look even out of your thirties."
"Tons of face-lifts. He's a surgical addict. I'm trying to get him help." I added defensively when they both gave me strange looks. ~ MaryJanice Davidson

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

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

There was, apparently, a nuclear reactor at a place called Indian Point, just thirty miles away in Westchester County. If something bad happened there, we were constantly being informed, the 'radioactive debris', whatever this might be, was liable to rain down on us. (Indian Point: the earliest, most incurable apprehensions stirred in its very name.) Then there was the question of dirty bombs. Apparently any fool could build a dirty bomb and explode it in Manhattan. How likely was this? Nobody knew. Very little about anything seemed intelligible or certain, and New York itself - that ideal source of the metropolitan diversion that serves as a response to the largest futilities - took on a fearsome, monstrous nature whose reality might have befuddled Plato himself. We were trying, as I irreverently analysed it, to avoid what might be termed a historic mistake. We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a pre-apocalyptic 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 and, for that matter, Moscow. In my anxiety I phoned Rachel's father, Charles Bolton, and asked him how he'd dealt with the threat of nuclear annihilation. I wanted to believe that this episode of history, like those old cataclysms that deposit a geologically telling layer of dust on the floors of seas, had sooted its survivors with special in ~ Joseph O'Neill

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

I think there's an audience for The Wombles at almost all levels. We thought it was going to be confined to people in their late twenties, early thirties, who remembered it from before - they were maybe 10 or 12 in the Seventies when it was happening. ~ Mike Batt

I had no idea that marriage was only supposed to be between two people who wanted to get between the sheets and make more people. What ever happened to marrying for love - or to get on your partner's health insurance policy, or for presents? No one was going to buy two people in their thirties a four-slice toaster if we just continued to live in sin. ~ Jen Kirkman

I was in my thirties before I learnt that I too would prefer not to see what I could no longer have ~ Tim Winton

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 my late thirties the dream of disappointment and exhaustion had been the dream of the exploding head: the dream of a noise in my head so loud and long that I felt with the brain that survived that the brain could not survive; that this was death. Now, in my early fifties, after my illness, after I had left the manor cottage and put an end to that section of my life, I began to be awakened by thoughts of death, the end of things; and sometimes not even by thoughts so specific, not even by fear rational or fantastic, but by a great melancholy. This melancholy penetrated my mind while I slept; and then, when I awakened in response to its prompting, I was so poisoned by it, made so much not a doer (as men must be, every day of their lives), that it took the best part of the day to shake it off. And that wasted or dark day added to the gloom preparing for the night. ~ V.S. Naipaul

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

Those of us who've bypassed the exits for marriage and children tend to motor through our thirties like unlicensed drivers, unauthorized grownups. ~ Kate Bolick

She was fast approaching thirty, and with that impending birthday the way she thought of her own life was beginning to change. When she was twenty, she thought of people in their thirties as, well, old: after all, they had lived as long as she had and half as long again, and so they must have been tired, with the beginnings of aches in their bones and the first intimations of their own mortality.

But the peculiar horror of growing older was not what she expected. In fact, she felt the same age as she had eight years ago, and twenty-eight years of life had managed to compress themselves into a life-span that once comfortably held twenty. It wasn't that she was getting older, but that the years were getting shorter, and were therefore more precious. You had to use them sparingly. ~ Dexter Palmer

We may say that all ages are dangerous to all people, in this dangerous life we live. But the thirties are a specially dangerous time for women. They have outlived the shyness and restraints of girlhood, and not attained to the caution and discretion of middle age. They are reckless, and consciously or unconsciously on the lookout for adventure. They see ahead of them the end of youth, and that quickens their pace. ~ Rose Macaulay

Atticus: You hear that? The nice blonde in her thirties is actually over 140 years old. :
Oberon: She must use that Oil of Olay stuff. I wonder if it would get rid of the wrinkles on a shar-pei? ~ Kevin Hearne

When you're in your mid-thirties, the cult of people who have children around you all want you in their cult, and they constantly ask you, 'So when are you going to have a baby?' ~ Jenny Lewis

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 feel to that the gap between my new life in New York and the situation at home in Africa is stretching into a gulf, as Zimbabwe spirals downwards into a violent dictatorship. My head bulges with the effort to contain both worlds. When I am back in New York, Africa immediately seems fantastical – a wildly plumaged bird, as exotic as it is unlikely.

Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such a sudden and violent upending of value systems.

In my part of Africa, death is never far away. With more Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message, memento mori, you too shall die. In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal.

Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in A ~ Peter Godwin

She 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. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

As she grew older, she was aware of her changing position on mortality. In her youth, the topic of death was philosophical; in her thirties it was unbearable and in her forties unavoidable. In her fifties, she had dealt with it in more rational terms, arranging her last testament, itemizing assets and heirlooms, spelling out the organ donation, detailing the exact words for her living will. Now, in her sixties, she was back to being philosophical. Death was not a loss of life, but the culmination of a series of releases. It was devolving into less and less. You had to release yourself from vanity, desire, ambition, suffering, and frustration - all the accoutrements of the I, the ego. And if you die, you would disappear, leave no trace, evaporate into nothingness ... ~ Amy Tan

They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life. ~ Alice Munro

By your late thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day that it admits you. ~ Thomas McGuane

One of my biggest fears is not being able to break out of a rut; of becoming a prisoner to my ways, unable to change course. But in my mid-thirties, I learned you can change your thinking. ~ Matt Dillon

You feel you're learning everything about love as you watch him, from the other side. He imagines you leaving your cozy London world for a man in his thirties who has no real job, who still travels on buses, who's never found a firm footing with his life. The poet, the dreamer, and you would have fallen for it once. But you're too old, now. You just want to fuck. ~ Nikki Gemmell

She repeated what her mother had told me, that she had been moved when she heard me playing as she passed the house. She had seen me on the street a few times, too, and begun to worship me. She actually used that word: worship. It made me turn bright red. I mean, to be 'worshiped' by such a beautiful little doll of a girl! I don't think it was an absolute lie, though. I was in my thirties already, of course, and I could never be as beautiful and bright as she was, and I had no special talent, but I must have had something that drew her to me, something that was missing in her, I would guess. Which must have been what got her interested in my to begin with. I believe that now, looking back. And I'm not boasting. ~ Haruki Murakami

I owe a huge debt to Anaïs Nin, because I fell into her diaries, essays, and collected letters in my Twenties and Thirties like a fish falling into water. She was, in some ways, a deeply flawed human being, and perhaps she makes a strange kind of hero for someone like me, committed to the ethical and spiritual dimensions of my craft as well as to the technical ones, but a hero and strong influence she remains nonetheless.

Source: Her blog. ~ Terri Windling

Though Brian was only in his late thirties, his life had been scarred by death: not only had he lost his father and brother, but his first wife had died of diabetes when she was seven months pregnant. He had since remarried, yet there were no children, and he suffered spells of what he called "wild, despairing sorrows. ~ David Grann

... 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

I wanted a settled life and a shocking one. Think of Van Gogh, cypress trees and church spires under a sky of writhing snakes. I was my father's daughter. I wanted to be loved by someone like my tough judicious mother and I wanted to run screaming through the headlights with a bottle in my hand. That was the family curse. We tended to nurse flocks of undisciplined wishes that collided and canceled each other out. The curse implied that if we didn't learn to train our desires in one direction or another we were likely to end up with nothing. Look at my father and mother today.

I married in my early twenties. When that went to pieces I loved a woman. At both of those times and at other times, too, I believed I had focused my impulses and embarked on a long victory over my own confusion. Now, in my late thirties, I knew less than ever about what I wanted. In place of youth's belief in change I had begun to feel a nervous embarrassment that ticked inside me like a clock. I'd never meant to get this far in such an unfastened condition. (p.142) ~ Michael Cunningham

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

I've been a much happier person in my early thirties than I was in my twenties. ~ Jake Shears

When my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1991, I asked him if he had any regrets, and he said no. I was a burnt-out litigation solicitor in my thirties, hating my life, and his cancer made me re-evaluate it all. ~ Michelle Paver

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

I spent my thirties living out of boxes and moving every six months to a year. It was my cloud period: I just wandered like a cloud for ten years, following the food supply. I was a hunter, gatherer, an academic migrant. ~ Sandra Cisneros

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

Everything has its place and time. We men of the nineteen-forties can smile at the mistakes of the nineteen-thirties, and, in turn, the men of the nineteen-fifties will laugh at the mistakes of the nineteen-forties. It is this historical perspective that shall save us. ~ Lin Yutang

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

Rich loved taking care of women. He would swoop in like Tarzan swinging on a vine, rescue them from whatever situation they found themselves in, and be their hero. He would make all the decisions, and he would be strong and dependable. "What a catch!" they would feel.

But they did not see his inability to allow them to disagree or have an opinion. He could not yield to another person. He could not show weakness or vulnerability. He would make up for that inflexibility by being a very attractive "strong man" to women who would want to be swept off their feet more than they wanted a real person.

So, they would be a perfect match - until he would see the other side of a passive, compliant woman. She would be sneaky and not tell him exactly what was going on. Then, lo and behold, one day she would really "mess up" and have a wish contrary to somthing he wanted or valued. Then, from his perspective, she had "changed" and had become "selfish." "She used to be nice, and now look!"

But in reality, this is not what had happened. She had not changed. When they first met, she showed only half of who she was, hiding the other half, which would come out in sneaky, indirect ways. After a while, it came out directly, such as when she disagreed with him. Then he would cry, "Foul."

So they both got what they asked for. In her compliance, she attracted a controller. In his control he attracted an adaptive person who had a secret side and was indirec ~ Henry Cloud

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

I didn't cry at my father's funeral, and I felt guilty about that. Of course, he got sick not too long after he and I had had that final altercation, and I felt real guilty because of that, too. Then years later, one day, I was probably in my late twenties, early thirties, and I just broke down crying, because I finally got my father. ~ Billy Bob Thornton

Bess Meredyth, Anita Loos and I were asked our advice on virtually every script MGM produced in the thirties," Frances said with some resentment because she not only felt that their efforts were unappreciated, they were forced to conceal their influence and power. They were careful to always carry the scripts in "unmarked plain covers" because they were painfully aware of the whispers about "the tyranny of the woman writer." Along with women like Kate Corbaley and Ida Koverman, Frances had "fed the machine" that the studio had become. They brought in talent before others discovered it and found stories in places others didn't look. Adding to her frustration was her calculation that while only half of the stories she had worked on appeared on screen with her name on them, most men would demand screen credit "no matter how small their contribution to the final script. ~ Cari Beauchamp

I haven't given up drinking, just drinking a little less and going to the gym. I think when you get into your thirties you have to start. I'm not 18 anymore so you can't just be partying every day, you've got to have some kind of balance, so I try and go to the gym now once a year, that keeps me going! ~ Brian McFadden

It took a year for us to conceive our second child. This is a common ordeal for the average middle-class American couple that puts off having children until their thirties. We knew so many other couples that had experienced fertility problems and miscarriages that it was more surprising when someone we knew had a child without being consigned to thirty-eight consecutive weeks of bed rest. Turns out God WANTS you to conceive when you're eighteen years old, apparently so that you can spend your twenties miserable and penniless and living in a camper. ~ Drew Magary

In my teens my drug of choice was acceptance, in my twenties it was approval, in my thirties it was love, in my forties it was Scotch. That lasted a while,' she admitted. 'Now all I really crave is a good bowel movement. ~ Louise Penny

On some intuitive level, I knew that learning had to be more than the mastery of facts. I've experienced it as an adult. I become consumed with a subject like quilting or preparing yogurt cultures, and that topic takes over my life - fabric scraps scattered on the floor, little jars of white sludge cuddled by blankets on my kitchen countertops. When I learned to play guitar in my thirties, no one had to schedule my practices. My guitar lived on a stand in the living room and I tormented our ears multiple times a day until my fingers bled. Passion for learning has that fiery, consuming, can't-stop quality. ~ Julie Bogart

Then I heard footsteps on a stairs, and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and, walking through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips, and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: "Get some chairs, why don‟t you, so somebody can sit down. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

When it came time for me to go to bed, my mother beckoned me to her, and kissed me, and whispered, "I know I'll never have another anxious moment with my own dear laddie." I pondered these words before I went to sleep. How could I reconcile this motherliness with the screeching fury who had pursued me around the kitchen with a whip, flogging me until she was gorged with - what? Vengeance? What was it? Once, when I was in my thirties and reading Freud for the first time, I thought I knew. I am not so sure I know now. But what I knew then was that nobody - not even my mother - was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself on the surface. ~ Robertson Davies

I began doing my own research into Wicca, reading about it and even meeting a group of local teens who were followers of the religion. They were a good source of information, but I couldn't stand being around them. They were all extremely flaky and melodramatic. I felt embarrassed for them, as they didn't have the sense to realize how socially inept they were. Wicca is a beautiful religion in theory, but I distanced myself from anything to do with it because I couldn't take the people. Many of them are people in their thirties who still try to live and behave like teenagers. Wicca seems to draw a great many people who cannot or will not grow up. ~ Damien Echols

In my twenties, I was determined to change the world. In my thirties, I tried to transform the church. In my early forties, I discovered I was the problem. ~ Jeff Iorg

Leave it to a vampire to think a healthy guy in his late thirties or early forties was on his deathbed. ~ MaryJanice Davidson

Bonnie and Clyde became not just a big hit, but a movie that went through young audiences like a first slug of Scotch. It affected clothes, talk, manners. Though set in the thirties it had the feeling of 1966, the most dangerous moment in American young people remembered. ~ Edward Jay Epstein

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