You are all a lost generation.

[with credit to Gertrude Stein]

You are all a lost generation.

That is what you are. That's what you all are ... all of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.

"You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.

It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called "lost generation."

Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.

Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations.

A generation on the verge of being lost, have been found.

I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be

One generation got old One generation got soul This generation go no destination to hold Pick up the cry

They were immigrants into the sea; like all immigrants they longed for the Old Country. Then the second generation. Like all second generations they had no patience with the old people or their tales. This was real, this sea, this gale, this rope! Then the third generation. Like all third generations it felt a sudden desperate hollowness and lack of identity. What was real? Who are we? What is NEMET which we have lost? But by then grandfather and grandmother could only mumble vaguely; the cultural heritage was gone, squandered in three generations, spent forever. As always, the fourth generation did not care.

Emptied of us the land, Ghostly our going,
Fallen, like spears the hand Dropped in the throwing.We are the lost who went, Like the cranes, crying;
Hunted, lonely, and spent, Broken and dying.