Ella Purnell Quotes

It was one of those times when you can feel the air in a room. Everything stood still. I can remember the T-shirt I was wearing and the bag I was carrying. I don't think I breathed for 15 minutes. It was a devastating moment. They said they wanted me to experience more things. OK. I began contemplating things. Maybe I should take LSD or become a hooker. I left Juilliard and was just meandering and drifting for a while. Thank God I had support from my family and close friends. Bad times.

So, yeah, I mean, there is something universal about that feeling - that 20-something, what the hell am I going to do with my life, I'm lost and my parents are freaking me out, and what's the point? Every generation has a way of making that unique, but there are certain universals of that feeling.

I, at the age of 17 or 18 as a medical student, suddenly came up against a problem: 'What am I? What is the meaning of my existence as I experience it?'

I didn't have any knowledge of the music industry when I first got to L.A., and I really didn't know on a creative level what I wanted to sound like, so I had to do a lot of experimenting. It led to a spiral of depression and being broke.

I'm obsessed with adolescence. I love to write about people in their 20s. It's such a fraught and exciting and kind of horrible time.

Sometimes I wake up and think, 'How did I get here?'

You are 27 or 28 right? It is very tough to live at that age. When nothing is sure. I have sympathy with you.

I kind of feel, in a way, all of us will forever be asking those questions of ourselves: Who am I and how do I fit in in the world and what is all this about? Because those aren't really... there are no answers to those questions, in a sense.

Right after 'Friday Night Lights' ended, I was in sort of an existential crisis.

There was a time where I was really confused about who I was and what I was doing, and I was just kind of depressed.

We don't often talk about the quarter-life crisis, but it is a real thing.

Oh my god what am I doing with my life?

I've been having a midlife crisis since I was four years old.

MID-TWENTIES BREAKDOWN: A period of mental collapse occurring in one's twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage.

Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered life? Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one’s own life.

I feel bad for young people. The 20s are a nightmare also. The 20s are hard to do.

What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid.

I do not know who I am, where I am going - and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions.

Yeah, you know, I performed occasionally. I was in such despair because I just - if I didn't have my music to connect with, I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to be doing. There was never a 'B' plan here; it was just this. So it took me a long time to find my way.

I was just dying to get out of my twenties.

I've always been in this sort of perpetual state of existential longing. I feel like something's missing.

My 20s were a time where I made it; my 30s were when I was away, confused, and trying to figure it all out.

I'm trying to use the language of today to express a general existential crisis that I think the world and I are going through.

I think that half of us feel fraudulent in our lives anyway. There's that strange disconnect of not really knowing what we're doing sometimes, or why it matters. It's our existential crisis.

Sometimes, I wonder what I'm doing here.