To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.

~ Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams Economy Thirties Time

In western societies many people become sick in their thirties, develop serious medical conditions in their forties and are disabled in their fifties.

~ Steven Magee

Steven Magee Conditions Disabled Fifties Forties Medical People Sick Societies Thirties Western

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

Steven Magee Disease Dying Eating Equates Food Home Job Lifestyle Living People Preventable Sick Thirties Toxic Western Working

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

~ Helen Fielding

Helen Fielding Angst Humour Power Thirties Twenties Women

My first impression of [Patricia Highsmith] was a loneliness, a sadness in one so young (we were both in our early thirties) with absolutely no sense of joy or balance. Gauche to an extreme, really physically clumsy as well as boyish, it was almost impossible to put her at ease. It was as if she felt a deep distrust of everything.

~ Patricia Schartle

Patricia Schartle Asperger S Aspergers Syndrome Autism Balance Boyish Clumsy Distrust Ease Extreme Gauche Impression Joy Loneliness Sadness Thirties Young

Tom has a theory that homosexuals and single women in their thirties have natural bonding: both being accustomed to disappointing their parents and being treated as freaks by society.

~ Helen Fielding

Helen Fielding Bonding Freaks Gay People Single Women Society Thirties

There are worse things than being thirty-five, single, and female in New York. Like: Being twenty-five, singled, and female in New York. It's a rite of passage few women would want to repeat. It's about sleeping with the wrong men, wearing the wrong clothes, having the wrong roommate, saying the wrong thing, being ignored, getting fired, not being taken seriously, and generally being treated like shit. But it's necessary.

~ Candace Bushnell

Candace Bushnell Men New York City Thirties Twenties Women

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

Rose Macaulay Age Ageing Thirties Women Youth

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ — and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, gay with light romantic laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show the bare framework of a man-made thing — oh, that eternal hand!— a play, most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches, sweated over by the eternal plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by men subject to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald Thirties Twenties Youth

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

Michelle M. Pillow Boyfriend Comedy Comedy Humor Humor Manfriend Nonsense Relationships Thirties

Even in your twenties you know how old you are. I'm twenty-three, you say, or maybe twenty-seven. But then in your thirties something strange starts to happen. It's a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I'm – you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you're not. You're thirty-five. And then you're bothered, because you wonder if this is the beginning of the end. It is, of course, but it's decades before you admit it.

~ Sara Gruen

Sara Gruen Age Thirties