Quotes About Fifties

#1. Then there was a woman, in her mid-fifties about, who in almost every respect was perfectly normal. But this was the way with these people: in so many respects they were normal, there was just that one thing, that one terrible thing.

Daniel Wallace

#2. Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country.

Jackson Browne

#3. Re: Full Disclosure
Sharing with parents all the ways we tricked them as a child is no more amusing to them when we are in our fifties than it would have been had they caught us in the act.

Ron Brackin

#4. Music and fashion have had a kind of incestuous relationship since the Fifties. It started with people like Elvis Presley and pop icons like James Dean. Then it exploded in the MTV days. Now, with the Internet, it's instantaneous.

John Varvatos

#5. I wasn't like a Fifties dad.

Martin Freeman

#6. Once you get to your forties or fifties in this society, very few people haven't had at least one body blow - financial, bankruptcy, divorce, relationship disaster, addiction, trouble with a child, trouble with a parent. Most people take some blow.

Marianne Williamson

#7. When we're out of the eighties, the nineties are gonna make the sixties look like the fifties!

Dennis Hopper

#8. Towards the end of his life he became a Liberal of the type common in the forties and fifties.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#9. The fifties - they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.

Elizabeth Hardwick

#10. In the fifties I had dreams about touching a naked woman and she would turn to bronze or the dream about hot dogs chasing donuts through the Lincoln Tunnel.

Robert Klein

#11. Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.

Mona Simpson

#12. When I look at my life there are these streams, these things that have continuity from the fifties to now.

Anne Waldman

#13. Well, I actually grew up in the sixties. I feel very lucky, actually, that that was my slice of time that I was dealt. Let's remember that the real motivation in the sixties, and even in the fifties, was the Cold War.

Ann Druyan

#14. Food became, for dinner parties in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties.

Nora Ephron

#15. Like the tail fins on fifties American cars or the parabolic shapes of Populuxe furniture, 'West Side Story' incarnates the dream of momentum in the golden age of the twentieth century.

John Lahr

#16. In the Fifties, my parents were known as 'America's sweethearts'. Their pictures graced the covers of all the newspapers. They were the Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston of their day.

Carrie Fisher

#17. When I was in my early twenties, parts would be written for women in their fifties, and I would get them. And now I'm in my early thirties, and I'm like, 'Why did that 24-year-old get that part?' I was that 24-year-old once. I can't be upset about it; it's the way things are.

Anne Hathaway

#18. I swear to Go, if I see one of you girls anywhere near us, I'll have your prospective spouses whip you, fifties-style.

Amelie Fisher

#19. In my small way I became an integral part of the pottery movement, and added fuel to the fire which consumed New Zealand and and swept pottery to the forefront of the of the fifties and sixties.

Theresa Sjoquist

#20. What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution. I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. 'The Dreamers' was a total homage to cinema and that love for it.

Bernardo Bertolucci

#21. English television from the Fifties to the Nineties was the least bad in the world, and now it's just as bad as it is anywhere.

John Cleese

#22. I grew up in the Fifties and early Sixties, which were still quite conservative, and I wasn't given any information about sex or anything like that; I went out with girls at school because one had to. I didn't experiment with sex for quite a long time.

Elton John

#23. I guess that's one of the things about growing up in the fifties - it never occurred to me that you wouldn't be at least as successful as your parents.

Hunter S. Thompson

#24. In the forties, to get a girl you had to be a GI or a jock. In the fifties, to get a girl you had to be Jewish. In the sixties, to get a girl you had to be black. In the seventies, to get a girl you've got to be a girl.

Mort Sahl

#25. I suddenly became aware over the last couple of years that I'm in my sixties. I never thought about it. I thought I'd better start acting my age or find roles that are going to be interesting to me in the sexagenarian repertoire, because it's not what you do in your forties or fifties.

Geoffrey Rush

#26. Back in those days, in the fifties and sixties, countries had balance of payment's deficits or surpluses, those were reflected much more than today in movements of reserves among countries.

Robert C. Solomon

#27. Rock and roll's relatively new, in the sense of the Fifties, Sixties, right? They invented the first sort of rock stars, and they took it to excess, and then the excess became bitter, tormented. Then it became okay to succeed.

Albert Hammond Jr.

#28. 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

#29. Since the nineteen-fifties, rural Florida has marketed itself to Northerners and Midwesterners as an unexplored paradise of citrus and mermaids.

Anne Hull

#30. The hotel looked as though it had been built back in the fifties, when everything seemed designed to be quickly turned into a bomb shelter.

Carolyn McCray

#31. Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

Umberto Eco

#32. In my eighties, my best friends are in their fifties, and I have many friends at university. It keeps one young, and up with the vocabulary. That's terribly important, especially for a writer.

Mary Wesley

#33. I know so many women in their fifties, sixties and seventies who delight in being on their own. It's amazing. They don't see any stigma attached to it. We don't need a man to prove our identity anymore.

Erica Jong

#34. I think that wealthy white people would like to have a country that resembles the Fifties, when all the minorities were tucked away in ghettos and paid in very low wages but on the surface it was very bright and shiny and free and the rest of the world would look on it longingly.

Alice Walker

#35. If I really had to pinpoint my happiest days out of the United States, I'd choose those Fifties military days in Britain, particularly my time in South Ruislip. I had a ball.

Larry Hagman

#36. One of the great things about the Fifties is there are so many secrets - people who've come back from the war and done these terrible things that they don't want to think about, or can't say what they did because they signed the Official Secrets Act.

Sara Sheridan

#37. In housing in the fifties in Britain and the sixties, we pulled down the terraces - destroyed whole communities and replaced them with tower blocks and we built walkways that became rat-runs for muggers. That was the fashionable opinion. But it was wrong.

John Major

#38. Some of Eminem's rap songs kind of have the teenage love songs like the fifties love songs. It's kind of like domestic drama set to music. He is really good storyteller.

Bruce Dickinson

#39. I want a revamped feminism. Putting the vamp back means the lady must be a tramp. My generation of the Sixties rebels wanted to smash the bourgeois codes that had become authoritarian totems of the Fifties ... Thirty years later, we're still stuck with the ["nice" girl].

Camille Paglia

#40. When I was still in my psychiatric residency training in New York City, I was subjected to the doctor draft of that time, during the early fifties, at the time of the Korean War.

Robert Jay Lifton

#41. I'm not a good father and they're not children any more; the eldest is in his fifties. My relationship with their mothers broke down and, because of what the law was, they went with their mothers and were imbued with their mothers' morality in life and they were not my people any more.

Wilbur Smith

#42. there are deep stubborn veins of nostalgia for the 1950s (even among people my age; in much of Ireland the fifties didn't end until 1995, when we skipped straight to Thatcher's eighties),

Tana French

#43. I love oldies just kind of sweet, slinky, Fifties music. The slow stuff. And Billie Holiday.

Nastassja Kinski

#44. All the proliferating falsifications of what I and everyone I know experienced once in what it is now so convenient to call the "fifties" or "sixties," as if life was really measured or lived in arbitrary decades, when the history books are sold like comix.

Lester Bangs

#45. So I turned on the tube (throwback slang from the Nifty Fifties; televisions no longer have tubes) and channel-surfed for awhile. On

Stephen King

#46. As she slid into her fifties, with grace I might add, she learned the art of hatred, pulling on the pain from a broken heart. She kept this pain alive, growing on the outskirts of her soul, like a copse of trees that constantly needed pruning.

Lawren Leo

#47. As an older person, I do feel an obligation to tell the story about what was really happening in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, as I saw it.

Grace Paley

#48. Nobody ever said that growing old would be easy. Just having to hold the newspaper out in your forties and then hair growing out of unusual parts of your body in your fifties. It's tough on the ego.

Geoffrey Rush

#49. Oh you only think you know all I know. I don't even know what all I know. Half the time I just make it up, and it still turns out to be true! We learned that trick in the fifties. Tomorrow,

Tony Kushner

#50. Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties, revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties, and then tailing off.

Jerry Saltz

#51. Vegas; one of the few places still encouraging men in their fifties to dress like their in a boy-band from the 80's.

Dov Davidoff

#52. you know how some women that age can be really beautiful?" "Yes," I said. I was thinking of Christy's mother, who didn't fully come into her looks until she was in her fifties.

Stephen King

#53. It sounds so weird, but I'm totally pro-aging. If you look at the film industry, it's so funny how it's so much more accepted that actors begin their prime in their forties or fifties, and for women it's so different. I think it's time to change that. Aging is a beautiful thing.

Michiel Huisman

#54. Fifties advertising was a dogmatic art, to the point of pretending to be a science.

Rick Perlstein

#55. I have so many girlfriends in their twenties who live in a white box apartment, having mediocre meals with mediocre friends, waiting for the life they want to hit them in their forties or fifties. They are settling in the now - what's the point?

Daphne Oz

#56. Lao Yang told him that sixty, like sixteen, was the best time in life, an age where the burdens of one's forties and fifties had been laid down, but the slowdown and illness of the seventies and eighties had not yet arrived.

Liu Cixin

#57. Expert chess playing, for example, was once thought to epitomize human intellection. In the view of several experts in the late fifties: "If one could devise a successful chess machine, one would seem to have penetrated to the core of human intellectual endeavor.

Nick Bostrom

#58. What Autotune allows is for people like myself and Kanye West not to depend on the singer. Back in the Fifties, the songwriter was rendered invisible. Now the songwriter is there in the forefront.

Will.i.am

#59. You know, women have a history of just being - we've been told all our lives not to say - in the fifties you couldn't say birth or even be pregnant hardly on television - and then gradually things have changed.

Cybill Shepherd

#60. Both my parents were migrant workers who came to the U.K. in the Fifties to better themselves. The culture I grew up in was to work hard, save hard and to look after your family.

Sanjeev Bhaskar

#61. When I was at Cambridge in the early fifties, there was a school nearby for training Army officers in Russian, and some imaginative genius came up with the idea of putting on Russian plays with the students to improve their language skills.

Robert Gottlieb

#62. Living in the fifties America was in many ways like living in a public space that's suddenly emptied out, a theater after closing, or a classroom after school. The emptiness could feel liberating, but it could also make you feel blank and vaguely nostalgic.

James Harvey

#63. I was brought up in Zimbabwe, and there were seven of us in my family, so it was difficult to read aloud to us all. There weren't that many picture books around in the Fifties in Zimbabwe. My favourite was Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter, which was really frightening.

Korky Paul

#64. Marlys was a sturdy woman in her fifties, white curls clinging to her scalp like vanilla frosting. She wore rimless glasses, a homemade red-checked gingham dress, and low-topped Nikes. Short-nosed and pale, she had a small pink mouth that habitually pursed in thought, or disapproval.

John Sandford

#65. The art of these Fifties movies was in sustaining forever the moment before sex.

Twyla Tharp

#66. If this were the fifties, she'd be checking Sam's collars for lipstick stains. (Did people do that anymore? Why did women kiss collars, anyway? Besides, Sam almost always wore T-shirts.)

Charlaine Harris

#67. In walked a woman whose attitude was certainly in its fifties if she was not.

Jess Lourey

#68. My father is Hungarian and moved to Britain during the uprising, and my Spanish mum comes from Galicia; they moved here at the end of the Fifties.

Anton Du Beke

#69. People of my generation who became photographers in the late fifties, early sixties, there were no rewards in photography. There were no museum shows. Maybe MOMA would show something, or Chicago. There were no galleries. Nobody bought photographs.

Duane Michals

#70. In the fifties, no one wore beards. In Eisenhower's day, as in the time of the Founding Fathers, all chins were smooth, while during the Civil War, beards were as common as sepsis.

Donald Hall

#71. It evolved from my experience in the fifties, growing up during the McCarthy era, and hearing a lot of assumptions that America was wonderful and Communism was terrible.

Warren Farrell

#72. During the Fifties, political and military activities in Vietnam were heavily influenced by the French, who as recent colonial masters, made all-important decisions.

Nguyen Cao Ky

#73. In the fifties ... we were so busy being cool that we didn't know how to say the word love

Diane Di Prima

#74. In the late Fifties and early Sixties, opposition to state terror and aggression and torture and so on was zero. That was a horrible time: the massive Kennedy terror operation against Cuba, the first attacks on Vietnam in 1962, the imposition of national security states in South America.

Noam Chomsky

#75. I didn't understand 3-D in the fifties and I can't say I get it now either. I just don't see what the big deal is.

Richard Dreyfuss

#76. In Windsor in the forties, and even up into the fifties and sixties, if you were black, you had to sit in the balcony of the theatres, and you couldn't buy property in most places.

Wayne Grady

#77. The great triumph of the Sixties was to dramatize just how arbitrary and constructed the seeming normality of the Fifties had been. We rose up from our maple-wood twin beds and fell onto the great squishy, heated water bed of the Sixties.

Edmund White

#78. The high point for me in my career was when Sinatra called me his favourite performer in the Fifties. And I've been sold out ever since.

Tony Bennett

#79. It took Marvel Comics years to begin to put together any worthwhile superheroines. The first crop was, to a gal, embarrassingly disappointing. They had all the measly powers that fifties and sixties male chauvinism could contrive to bestow on a superwoman.

Michael Chabon

#80. If a writer knows what he or she is doing, I'll go along for the ride. If he or she doesn't ... well, I'm in my fifties now, and there are a lot of books out there. I don't have time to waste with the poorly written ones.

Stephen King

#81. Racism is to the current era what unAmericanism was to the Fifties: a curse word that provides a handy substitute for logical thought.

Steve Sailer

#82. The woman who looks back at me from my bathroom mirror is sliding toward her mid-fifties. She'd better be careful- she's getting old.
I myself am about thirty. I've been thirty for about twenty-three years now.

Cheryl Peck

#83. My memory of 3D movies is Fernando Lamas in a swashbuckling movie. And I suppose it had been the fifties, in which swords came out at you, bullets came out at you, things were thrown into the auditorium, apparently. All that sort of cheap, "Oh, look at us, we've got 3D" isn't in the film.

Ian McKellen

#84. Tango was very popular in Panama at the time when I was growing up. In the Fifties in Panama, the radio stations played all types of music.

Ruben Blades

#85. Many were starting to use computerized synthesizers & drum machines to produce an entirely new style of music. It was being punted by the critics that the guitar was old hat; I was reminded of the way my father & his clarinets were written off in the late Fifties.

Pete Townshend

#86. You get into your late fifties, people start falling like flies all around you. I don't take life for granted any more. I'm really glad to be here.

Tom Petty

#87. I feel sometimes and in some ways like Linda Romanoli and Monica Velour; I feel marginalized because I'm in my fifties. If you went online and you look at some of the blogs, which one can do on a lonely night, it's pretty startling what people will say about you just because you're in your fifties.

Kim Cattrall

#88. I know that some of the great painters and some of the great artists didn't even start to 'peak', as you say, till they were in their fifties and sixties. And God knows, history is full of artistic people that weren't even recognized till they were dead and gone.

Joe Perry

#89. Our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types who wave around Sixties banners to conceal their record of ruthless, beaver-like tunneling to the top.

Camille Paglia

#90. The riskiest thing I have done in my fifties is to do a Polish accent for a new film. I had a great time working on it and two wonderful people to guide me. A dialect coach that I have known for thirty years and a Polish actor.

Andie MacDowell

#91. I am a bit sickie happy. I am prone to black clouds too, but ... I am embarrassed about them. It's like: 'My diamond shoes are too tight. My money clip doesn't fit all my fifties.' I mean - really. Shut up.

Olivia Colman

#92. Now in my middle fifties, an irrelevant codger, I find it discomfiting to see this generation dancing to the music of apocalypse and carrying their psychic burdens in front of them like infants in arms.

Julie Schumacher

#93. Growing up in the fifties and sixties, I can only remember knowing one child, ever, whose parents got a divorce, and hardly any whose mother 'worked' at anything besides raising her children.

Joyce Maynard

#94. When I was young I was called a rugged individualist. When I was in my fifties I was considered eccentric. Here I am doing and saying the same things I did then and I'm labeled senile.

George Burns

#95. One of the things I'm most proud of about my country is the fact that we did lick McCarthyism back in the fifties.

Pete Seeger

#96. He was in his fifties. He'd wasted his entire life. Such people were very dear to those of us who'd wasted only a few years.

Denis Johnson

#97. We were the daughters of the post-World War II American dream, the daughters of those idealized fifties sitcom families in which father knew best and mother knew her place and a kind of disappointment, and tense, unspoken sexuality rattled around like ice cubes in their nightly cocktails.

Anne Taylor Fleming

#98. Certainly I was a bully. I'm not ashamed of it at all. The hostility of the establishment to what you were able to do in the Forties and Fifties was very strong. Sometimes you have to fight against your society.

Pierre Boulez

#99. People in their forties, fifties, and onward enjoy the whole world of books in a different way than the Internet-age kids do.

Oscar Hijuelos

#100. Let me give you an idea of Fifties Britain. The war had ended ten years before, and most people had returned to their gardens and allotments hoping life would revert to how it was before the hostilities.

Mary Quant