Generational Divide Quotes

“Do you think we enjoy hearing about your brand-new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we're pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You'd last about ten minutes if you were my age these days.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“We remember the old world as it had been for a thousand years, so beautiful and diverse, and which, in only thirty years, has crumbled away. When we were young every country still had its own architecture and customs and food. Can you ever forget the first sight of Italy? Those ochre houses, all different, each with such character, with their trompe l'oeil paintings on the stucco? Queer and fascinating and strange, even to a Provencal like me? Now the dreariness! The suburbs of every town uniform all over the world, while perhaps in the very centre a few old monuments sadly survive as though in a glass case.”
― Nancy Mitford, Don't Tell Alfred

“You are not my father."
So it all meant nothing, all those years of shared jokes, of affection, of defending her, of caring for her children, of assisting her and Hector with money and time. Love and family meant nothing to her? Nothing mattered to her at this moment but her pride. Did she think she was being brave in disobeying him? She, Hector, the whole mad lot of them, they knew nothing of courage. Everything had been given to them, everything had been assumed as rightfully theirs. She even believed her defense of her friend was the matter of honour. One war, one bomb, one misfortune and she would fall apart. He meant noting to her because like all of them she was truly selfish. She had no idea of the world and so she believed her drama to be significant. [........] She had no humility and no generosity. Monsters, they had bred monsters.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap

“My generation, we're like animals born in captivity: we accept the state of things because it's pretty much all we've ever known. Sailor was old enough to have experienced a better world. And that knowledge was a sadness she could never shake.”
― Emma Sloley, The Island of Last Things

“Only a man of Colonel Sartoris’ generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.”
― William Faulkner

“Ho cominciato a disprezzare le convenzioni sociali, le pratiche religiose, il denaro. Trascrivevo poesie di Rimbaud e di Prévert, incollavo fotografie di James Dean sulla copertina dei quaderni, ascoltavo "Le mauvaise réputation" di Brassens, mi annoiavo. Vivevo la mia ribellione adolescenziale in maniera romantica, come se i miei genitori fossero stati borghesi. Mi identificavo con gli artisti incompresi.”
― Annie Ernaux, A Woman's Story

“The generation I belong to was born into a world where those with a brain as well as a heart couldn't find any support. The destructive work of previous generations left us a world that offered no security in the religious sphere, no guidance in the moral sphere, and no tranquility in the political sphere. We were born into the midst of metaphysical anguish, more anxiety and political disquiet.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet