Midlife Crisis Quotes

“Towards the end of your life you have something like a pain schedule to fill out—a long schedule like a federal document, only it's your pain schedule. Endless categories. First, physical causes—like arthritis, gallstones, menstrual cramps. New category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love. The question then is: So why does everybody persist? If love cuts them up so much....”
― Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak

“I feel as if I have been piling things into my arms for the last twenty years, holding it all,
managing it all, doing it all, being it all and suddenly I am looking at the pile, realizing how much
of it doesn’t belong to me, and hungering to let it drop, to lay it all down, to walk away. I have
learned that when people see you carrying a lot and not dropping anything, that they often
think, “I guess she can hold this for me.” When they see you saying yes, they decide to also ask
you for things. When they see you doing something, they think, “She can do something for me
too.” And, eventually, the load becomes unbearable and you are driven into the ground by a
weight that you have opened your arms to accept.”
― Molly Remer, Walking with Persephone

“All three are hip-deep in midlife, when the eyes go and the waistline spreads and the city on the hill that shone so brightly in youth turns out to be more like a semi-incorporated town in the middle of a garbage strike. An age when a person can feel not so much himself as an inexplicably inferior version of himself.”
― Mary McNamara

“I remember before I finally fell asleep feeling like there wasn't all that much to say about my life. I'd had several satisfying relationships, they hadn't amounted to much. I'd gotten better at my work and been rewarded for it, but I sometimes felt like life had run out of surprises for me. I did what I did and got the results I expected. I kept up my practice and it paid my way. My wheels made an agreeable noise when they spun.”
― John Darnielle, Devil House

“There is no anti-aging more potent than a young lover
bursting with lust for your middle age vulnerability
who pulls you out of rut with his arduous banter
and make you whole again with his benevolent smirk”
― Nalini Priyadarshni

“In my experience, Gen X women spend lots
of time minimizing the importance of their uncomfortable or confusing feelings. They often tell me that they are embarrassed to even bring them up. Some of the unhappiest women I spoke with, no matter how depressed or exhausted they were, apologized for “whining.” Almost every one of them also described herself as “lucky.”
― Ada Calhoun, Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

“People talk a lot about midlife crisis, the momentary stress that arises when you finally slack off. The sublime flash of greenish light as the curtain of the sanctuary rips, when poets start reviewing books and programmers take jobs in quality control.”
― Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper

“It occurred to me that both Maria and I were on the run in the twenty-first century, just like George Sand whose name was also Amantine was on the run in the nineteenth century, and Maria whose name was also Zama was looking for somewhere to recover and rest in the twentieth. We were on the run from the lies concealed in the language of politics from myths about our character and our purpose in life. We were on the run from our own desires too probably, whatever they were.”
― Deborah Levy, Things I Don't Want to Know

“When we are disconnected from our deep healing, introspective power of our Wild Woman, our Knowing Self, and by default, our Divine Power, we become empty. We develop a spiritual hole where our Divine Self used to reside.”
― Tanya Valentin, When She Wakes, She Will Move Mountains - 5 Steps to Reconnecting With Your Wild Authentic Inner Queen

“Imagine what our story would look like if, rather than succumbing to the insistent voices of family or culture, we determined that our vocation was to be a better human.”
― James Hollis, Ph.D.

“I couldn't bear being this suburban mom who was alternating between screaming at her kids and being the heartfelt, privileged witness to their joy. But the people around us - the haranguing mothers and sexless fathers - I kept trying to find ways that I was better than these people, but all I kept landing on was the fact that the common denominator was me.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“Okay,” Mishti said. “You know that if she had left Barry and went off with you she'd be your whole life and you’d be her midlife crisis.”
― Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, Hex

“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura"

Midway along life's journey
I woke to find myself in a dark wood”
― Dante Alighieri

“You can see it as a mid-life crisis or you can see it as a mid-life awakening.”
― Dan Pearce

“Aging is inevitable, but getting "old" is entirely optional!”
― Lisa Levine

“Here I am pondering impermanence, having just tasked myself with the responsibility of keeping something – with sustaining it. A colony is not a book or an archivable object and you can’t hold it in a glass cabinet or on a shelf. It is live and shifting and if this one doesn’t take to our little rectangular space it’ll be put of here faster than you can say swarm.”
― Helen Jukes, A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings: A Year of Keeping Bees

“When the demands of life are pressing, too urgent to be ignored, it would be a mistake to devote all day to contemplation, reading Wordsworth, or playing golf. Being mortal, think of mortal things. Yet if you lose touch with existential value, if you find no place in your life for the activities of the gods - ones that make life worth living to begin with- you risk a midlife crisis not unlike John Stuart Mill's.”
― Kieran Setiya, Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

“In philosophers' terms, the shift in perspective is not temporal, but "epistemic": it has to do with knowledge. Emotionally, there is a fundamental difference between knowing that I will miss out on something good and knowing what, knowing that I won't achieve all my ambitions and knowing which.”
― Kieran Setiya, Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

“The way in which you relate to the activities that matter most to you is by trying to complete them and so expel them from your life. Your days are devoted to ending, one by one, the activities that give them meaning.”
― Kieran Setiya, Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

“We can escape the self-destructive cycle of pursuit, resolution, and renewal, of attainments archived or unachieved. The way out is to find sufficient value in atelic activities, activities that have no point of conclusion or limit, ones whose fulfilment lies in the moment of action itself. To draw meaning from such activities is to live in the present - at least in one sense of that loaded phrase - and so to free oneself from the tyranny projects that plateau us around midlife.”
― Kieran Setiya, Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

“Now what?”
― J.R. Rim

“If only a bad hair day was a hairstyle.”
― Main Character of And Then There's Margaret

“The goal is for your mid-life crisis to turn into a mid-life discovery.”
― Joan Anderson, A Weekend to Change Your Life

“Many of us reach the end of the rainbow and realize there is no pot of gold, only more rainbow…”
― Ana Maria Santuario, FAITH, In Stories That Change

“I want a place with stories and genuine laughter, Dollars on crossbeams, bra’s strung from the rafter

No focus group menu and sanitized spaces,
I’ll settle for friends in old seedy places!

Nick Schlonski”
― RB Conch, Seedy Places: Key West Comedies Book 1

“A period of protracted, repeated, profound, emotional turmoil, beginning sometime in the second or third year of the practice of law, and continuing off and on, mostly on, many times for the rest of the legal career, characterized by a rather significant, continuous, and oftentimes all-consuming, desire to explore alternative possibilities; to explore a change, any change at all, and to effect the change. These periods are typically coupled with a constant search for a new dream to pursue, potentially followed by additional periods of intense regret as dreams are not fulfilled.”
― Mark Shaiken, And... Just Like That: Essays on a life before, during and after the law

“Perhaps it’s time you stopped looking at work or money or reputation as the biggest source of achievement. Perhaps you can now measure your worth by how you help others and contribute to the community or how well you are growing as a person, both mentally (e.g. self-awareness and calm) and physically (eat healthier, train hard, and gain a shredded body).”
― Binod Shankar, Let's Get Real: 42 Tips for the Stuck Manager

“The fact is that Planet Earth is overloaded with highly qualified and uber experienced folk who are rubbish in the triple wisdom- have a dim idea of who they are, can’t manage themselves well and are middling at managing others. They rose up the ranks powered by mostly technical skills but now that’s far less important. They have entered their comfort zones but what got them here most certainly won’t get them there and what will take them further are some tough behavioral changes.”
― Binod Shankar, Let's Get Real: 42 Tips for the Stuck Manager

“He smiles and his wavy haired, bright eyed head scoops me in but quickly lands on Mimi. It lingers a bit long, his chest frozen as if the breath's been knocked out; he already loves her. Mothers know these things. It's the kind of love that springs from awe, attraction, intellectual curiosity, and finding a woman mom approves of... the girl next door with exciting fangs. I wonder if their offspring will have fangs.”
― Penelope Przekop, Centerpieces

“He smiles and his wavy haired, bright eyed head scoops me in but quickly lands on Mimi. It lingers a bit long, his chest frozen as if the breath's been knocked out; he already loves her. Mothers know these things. It's the kind of love that springs from awe, attraction, intellectual curiosity, and finding a woman mom approves of... the girl next door with exciting fangs. I wonder if their offspring will have fangs. - Holly Carter”
― Penelope Przekop, Centerpieces