But You're Still So Young Quotes

“That night, being surrounded by my friends, being supported by them, made me understand that my heartbreak wasn’t as final as it felt like. In the morning, I’d get up. In the morning, I’d keep going.”
― Kayleen Schaefer, But You're Still So Young: How Thirtysomethings Are Redefining Adulthood

“But the longer I took to figure out what I wanted, the more comfortable I got with the uncertainty. As a result, on my best days, I felt like I was earning my achievements, after struggling with them both inwardly and outwardly. They seemed right and exciting when I got there, not like I was pushed into completing them because of my age.”
― Kayleen Schaefer, But You're Still So Young: How Thirtysomethings Are Redefining Adulthood

“There is this delay of the full implementation of adulthood at the beginning of the life cycle, but there is also an extension at the end...The proportion of the population living to 80 or 90 is continuing to go up, so adulthood is shrinking at the younger ages, but extending at the older ages. It's a way I don't hear expressed very often, but if you didn't start adulthood until you were in your thirties, you would still have as many years of adulthood now as you would have in the 1950s or 60s. It's not just a delay, but it's a shift, too. The delay is the more important part of the story, but it's also an upward shift in the life cycle.”
― Kayleen Schaefer, But You're Still So Young: How Thirtysomethings Are Redefining Adulthood

“Someday, of course, there will be a flatness, a plateau where we know we’ve made most of our choices. When we get there we may be scraped or bruised. We may be exhilarated. We may be wondering, Is this it? But no matter what, the spot we stop at will be ours alone, where we’ve arrived because of what we went after, what we decided we didn’t want, and what we had to let go. And in all likelihood, we will be somewhere we couldn’t see until we were standing there because, before then, we were still so young.”
― Kayleen Schaefer, But You're Still So Young: How Thirtysomethings Are Redefining Adulthood

“In the scope of what I could do with my life, whether to have a child is the decision I struggled with the most. I saw it as the only one I couldn’t take back. What I did for work, who I dated, where I lived, even who I married, all of that could be undone if it turned out I’d made the wrong choice. But a child would always be mine. How could I know for sure that I wanted to raise someone?”
― Kayleen Schaefer, But You're Still So Young: How Thirtysomethings Are Redefining Adulthood

“As she’s gotten older, though, dating has felt more fraught, as if she can’t spend a couple of months hanging out with a guy if she isn’t sure he’s the person she’s going to have a family with. “Everyone tells you your clock is ticking,” she says. “It didn’t seem like I could have fun anymore. I had to be on mission, but I couldn’t walk into a date and say, ‘Hey, are you marriage material or not?”
― Kayleen Schaefer, But You're Still So Young: How Thirtysomethings Are Redefining Adulthood

“I was devastated my ex didn’t want to be with me. I also thought, in the dark aftermath of all of this, that I’d never get married. At the time, not being married seemed like an overwhelming loss, one that took away from all that I was happy with in the other aspects of my life. I remember telling my mom that I had nothing, which in the moment felt indisputable, as if all I’d ever wanted was gone because I hadn’t gotten engaged. It will all work out, my mom reassured me as I cried in her arms, like I was five and it was story time. I’m sure my mom meant that I’d find my way to marriage eventually, but as I stayed in Texas longer than I’d planned because I was too crushed to go back to New York, I started to think about why I wanted to be married.”
― Kayleen Schaefer, But You're Still So Young: How Thirtysomethings Are Redefining Adulthood

“If Black veterans did apply to school, Northern universities were slow to let them in, while Southern colleges refused them entirely. “Though Congress granted all soldiers the same benefits theoretically,” historian Hilary Herbold writes in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, “the segregationist principles of almost every institution of higher learning effectively disbarred a huge proportion of Black veterans from earning a college degree.”
― Kayleen Schaefer, But You're Still So Young: How Thirtysomethings Are Redefining Adulthood

“During World War II in 1944, the government passed the GI Bill, which is best known for giving veterans free college tuition. By 1956, some 2.2 million veterans had taken advantage of this, but even though 1.2 million Black men had fought in the war, in segregated ranks, they were effectively excluded from the new law.”
― Kayleen Schaefer, But You're Still So Young: How Thirtysomethings Are Redefining Adulthood

“But the reality of this prosperous era was that it disproportionately benefited white men. White women had access to the middle class primarily through marriage, not through their own achievements, and African Americans were kept out almost completely. Government policies, as well as universities, business owners, and housing developers were set on excluding them from gaining any wealth.”
― Kayleen Schaefer, But You're Still So Young: How Thirtysomethings Are Redefining Adulthood