At thirty a man steps out of the darkness and wasteland of preparation into active life it is the time to show oneself, the time of fulfillment.

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

Je commence à avoir trente ans, et je perds le talent de vivre.

Do you know I've been sitting here thinking to myself: that if I didn't believe in life, if I lost faith in the woman I love, lost faith in the order of things, were convinced in fact that everything is a disorderly, damnable, and perhaps devil-ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man's disillusionment — still I should want to live. Having once tasted of the cup, I would not turn away from it till I had drained it! At thirty though, I shall be sure to leave the cup even if I've not emptied it, and turn away — where I don't know. But till I am thirty I know that my youth will triumph over everything — every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I've asked myself many times whether there is in the world any despair that could overcome this frantic thirst for life. And I've come to the conclusion that there isn't, that is until I am thirty.

Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.

Marita,
Please find me,
I am almost 30

If I ever thought of myself as a man of thirty-five it was a visualization of dreary decrepitude.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

This is the way it goes. In your mid-forties you have your first crisis of mortality (death will not ignore me); and ten years later you have your first crisis of age (my body whispers that death is already intrigued by me). But something very interesting happens to you in between.

As the fiftieth birthday approaches, you get the sense that your life is thinning out, and will continue to thin out, until it thins out into nothing. And you sometimes say to yourself: That went a bit quick. That went a bit quick. In certain moods, you may want to put it rather more forcefully. As in: OY!! THAT went a BIT FUCKING QUICK!!! ... Then fifty comes and goes, and fifty-one, and fifty-two. And life thickens out again. Because there is now an enormous and unsuspected presence within your being, like an undiscovered continent. This is the past.

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 as significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less a 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.

When I turn thirty, in thirty days or so, I might be feeling old, so I’ll probably call my grandma up, because as old as I’ll feel, she’ll be feeling older. Twelve years older.

When I was young, I was 13 going on 31. Then when I was 30 going on 31, I was 30 going on 29. Now I’m in love and I’ve lost all sense of time — and all the rest of my sense.

I feel like I’m late for love. I’ll be 30 in March. Damn it! I knew I should have set my alarm clock.

spent hours apart by myself, taking stock of where I stood, mentally, on this my thirtieth birthday. It came to me queerly how, four years ago, I had meant to be a general and knighted, when thirty.