Midlife Crisis Quotes

Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72.

Life begins at 40, and I'm living proof.

Life begins at 40. I could attempt writing. Life is taking me into different directions.

There are lots of scary things about getting older, but one of the biggest, I guess, is death itself. Especially in midlife, when we suddenly wake up to the fact we may have fewer years left than we have already lived.

I had my crisis at 30. I was actually really comfortable with 40. Life was in a better place.

'Dr. Quinn' came along when I turned 40, so my career actually peaked then.

Midlife is a time of explosive change, particularly for women. It's just like experiencing another puberty. The changes that take place in your body are enormous and, like puberty, you have to throw off the past.

You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived.

Allowing the pain of personal growth to be a crucible of your spirit-the alchemical grail through which the metal of your former self turns into gold-is one of the highest callings of life. Pain can burn you up and destroy you, or burn you up and redeem you. It can deliver you to an entrenched despair, or deliver you to your higher self. At midlife we decide, consciously or unconsciously, the path of the victim or the path of the phoenix when it is rising up at last.

Once I accomplish one thing and I'm satisfied, I try something else. I may be 50 and doing something totally outside of music and acting. Maybe I'll become a kindergarten teacher.

I turned 30 as a janitor. I was thinking at the time that Hank Williams died when he was 29. All my peers were at least 10 years younger than I was. I felt like an old has-been at the time.

I'm nearly 50. I'm past being photographed falling out of bars.

I make no bones about the fact that I'm over 40.

Everything seems fine until you're about 40. Then something is definitely beginning to go wrong. And you look in the mirror with your old habit of thinking, 'While I accept that everyone grows old and dies, it's a funny thing, but I'm an exception to that rule.'

When I turned 50, I said to myself, well, if this is what it's like turning 50, I can't wait to turn 60 because I still felt very, very mentally and physically good, outside my back surgery.

I think I was going through a lot of change at 27, but I didn't know it was happening until it was over.

I remember when I was 33 or 34, it was devastating because I realized I wasn't a kid anymore. The great thing about 40 was that I really felt like I had life experience and knew what I was doing now.

We used to say when we were 20 years old, that when you reach 30, you gotta hang up your guitar and get a real job.

A man of forty today has nothing to worry him but falling hair, inability to button the top button, failing vision, shortness of breath, a tendency of the collar to shut off all breathing, trembling of the kidneys to whatever tune the orchestra is playing, and a general sense of giddiness when the matter of rent is brought up. Forty is Life's Golden Age.

Once people start to think they've wasted parts of their life, or they're wasting their life as they speak, that means there's going to be great dramatic and comedic tension.

The problem is I'm older now, I'm 40 years old, and this stuff doesn't change the world. It really doesn't.

When I turned 50, I asked some of my girlfriends, all actresses of the same age, 'What are we going to do now?' I wanted to go live somewhere for a while, learn archaeology, or take part in healing the world on some level. I wanted to dig deep and say, 'Who am I now? What do I have to offer? What do I have to learn?'

But, I think that the reason I responded to this book, sort of paradoxically, is that it starts out like The Big Chill, sort of. Four friends, who are not quite happy with their life, and every year they get together for a week and look for some comfort from each other.

The first time in my career I thought it makes no sense anymore, that I'll retire.

Men regret their life has been ill-spent, but this does not always induce them to make a better use of the time they have yet to live.