The Sixties Quotes

“You may say, But wasn't this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“I'd seen old Yardley Slickers- the makeup now just a waxy crumble- sell for almost one hundred dollars on the internet. So grown women could smell it again, that chemical, flowery fug. That's how badly people wanted it- to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been, still existed inside of them.

There were so many things that returned me. The tang of soy, the smoke in someone's hair, the grassy hills turning blond in June. An arrangement of oaks and boulders could, seen out of the corner of my eye, crack open something in my chest, palms going suddenly slick with adrenaline.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“There is a bird in my chest

with wings too broad

with beak that rips me

wanting to get out.

I have called it an idiot parrot.

I have called it

a ravening eagle.

But it sings.

Bird of no name

your cries are red and wet

on the iron air.

I open my mouth

to let you out

and your shining

blinds me.”
― Marge Piercy, Hard loving:Poems

“His father in law, who was as old as the century, had just retired and was living in a country house in Gelderland. He would be coming by car. Saskia called and suggested that he pick them up--then they could get coffee together first. A typical country dweller, he replied that he wouldn't be caught dead in Amsterdam; what did they think, that he wanted to be attacked by a gang of hippie Provos? He laughed as he said it, but he didn't come, though God knows he'd faced worse dangers in his life.”
― Harry Mulisch, The Assault

“For those of us who identify with the movements of the sixties this period represents not so much a decade as a state of consciousness, characterized by the transpersonal expansion, the questioning of authority, a sense of empowerment, and the experience of sensuous beauty and community. This state of consciousness reached well into the seventies. In fact, one could say that the sixties came to an end only in December 1980 with the shot that killed John Lennon.”
― Fritjof Capra, Uncommon Wisdom : Conversations With Remarkable People

“Everybody loves the sixties, especially those who weren’t there.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo