Middle Age Crisis Quotes

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.'

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

I don't like being 50 and I don't like thinking about death.

There comes a time in every man's life when he realises he will never be James Bond.

The signs that presage growth, so similar, it seems to me, to those in early adolescence: discontent, restlessness, doubt, despair, longing, are interpreted falsely as signs of decay. In youth one does not as often misinterpret the signs; one accepts them, quite rightly, as growing pains. One takes them seriously, listens to them, follows where they lead. ... But in the middle age, because of the false assumption that it is a period of decline, one interprets these life-signs, paradoxically, as signs of approaching death.

I guess, as a conductor, one goes in and out of fashion. Your career starts with a bang, everyone thinks you're wonderful, and then with middle age, something happens and you go into the wilderness.

All men in their 40s want to be in rock bands, and I reserve the right to be in a pub band at some point.

I feel like I am too old to eat jelly. But I am too young to eat prunes. I am between grapes.

Most all of the writers I admired when I was in my teens and twenties died young. Fitzgerald lived the longest. He was 44. Dylan Thomas was 39. And then once you're approaching 40, you suddenly think, "Well, maybe I would like to live longer than Fitzgerald or Thomas."

[My father] had a massive middle-age breakdown. And left the family. And then it just completely fell apart. And my mother was heartbroken, just completely devastated. To make ends meet we started selling off all our possessions.

At 35, I'm thinking, Oh, I don't have any of that initial inspiration that I had before, all that angst. I always thought I would burn out very quickly.

The creation of Spoleto was a social experiment. Because I've always suffered guilt from being a Catholic, when I was in my fifties I felt a need of being needed.

You are to consider that a certain melancholy and often a certain irascibility accompany advancing age: indeed it might be said that advancing age equals ill-temper. On reaching the middle years a man perceives that he is no longer able to do certain things, that what looks he may have had are deserting him, that he has a ponderous great belly, and that however much he may yet burn he is no longer attractive to women; and he rebels. Fortitude, resignation and philosophy are of more value than any pills, red, white or blue.

A wacky, trendy outfit on a guy over 40 indicates he's got big issues.