Peggy Noonan Quotes

Like many other people of my generation, I don't think I ever really bothered to grow up. I wasn't ever really a proper teenager until I was about 19, and maybe I got a bit stuck there, because it seemed to go on and on.

In your twenties, you think you are immortal. In your thirties, you hope you are immortal.

We drown our doubts in dry champagne and soothe our souls with fine cocaine. I don't know why I even care, we get so high and get nowhere.

I think growing up is difficult and it's a process that I'm always interested in, with kids and adults, they are often on two different universes.

It seems to be the fate of man to seek all his consolations in futurity.

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

Without hope we are lost.

Everything we do these days - our lust for ever more comfort, pleasure, and distraction, our refusal to engage with the mandates of reality, our fidelity to cults of technology and limitless growth, our narcissistic national exceptionalism - all of this propels us toward the realm where souls abandon all hope.

I think, at heart, unless you discover faith in something else, something other, it's very hard to shake the thing that you're adrift alone.

Most people are living lives of sort of survival. And constantly posing an existential crisis, either through fantasy or oblivion, really has been pretty much explored in rock and roll. At least in the western version of rock n' roll.

I'm not born again, I'm not Kabbalah, God forbid, but I did have an experience hitting 30 that I needed to lean on something that assured me that everything is going to be okay. I had to regain a lot of my belief in fairy tales, in happy endings.

To live without Hope is to Cease to live.

One quintessential moment in time is when you're 22, when you graduate college. And then another quintessential time is as a middle-age man. That's the convergence.

On a bigger level, 9/11 was a crystallizing moment for my generation... the bubble popped. We were like, 'Whoa, this is what the real world is like; it's not all fun and games.'

Chasing the sensation. Whether it was drugs or sex or whatever. Those things had become my main focus in life.

And almost every one, when age, Disease, or sorrows strike him, Inclines to think there is a God, Or something very like him.

Faith is the ticket to the feast, not the feast.

I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism.

Many people are despairing of the possibility of finding love. And some of the people who are despairing the most are in their thirties and forties and looking just great.

Youth is a religion from which one always ends up being converted.

Religion converts despair, which destroys, into resignation, which submits.

Sometimes I'll watch teenagers and find myself not quite believing I'm older than they are - even wondering, delusionally, if they can see any difference between us.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

Without faith, life is futile.

If I'm looking at life without a spiritual perspective, it's a lot more painful, a lot more confusing, and there's so much that I don't understand.