Midlife Transition Quotes

Right now I don't call it the menopause, I call it men-on-pause.

Getting a sleeve at my age is a midlife crisis for the man who can't afford a sports car.

I've had the longest mid-life crisis ever.

Once I turned 40, my whole life changed in the most mature - not boring way but much cooler way. I feel much more like an adult.

Some eras worship infancy; some, the aged. None as yet has adored middle age.

There's an 'Everything must go!' emotional liquidation feel to the end of your twenties, isn't there? What will happen if we turn thirty and we're not 'ready?' You don't feel entirely settled in any aspect of your life, even if you are on paper.

The mid-life crisis hits men harder than women.

The movement toward gratitude, authenticity, and union is the natural and organic inner work of the second half of our lives.

Just about everything significant in my life happened after I passed forty. I was a housewife and mother, but yearned to be a writer. I worked at my writing whenever I could snatch a moment, and I assembled several manuscripts. I was just about forty when my first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published. Then a few months later came The Good Earth. My career was launched at last, and it has given me the richest possible satisfaction

When I hit 50, I want to go be a professor.

I see a lot of people who change careers in the middle of their life and they think it's a good idea to come in the kitchen.

It's a great place to be at 36 because you're an adult and you're responsible for how you impact other people, the direction of your own life [too], but you're also young enough to say, "You know what? I'm not sure of where I'm at, and I'm going to change that course and do something different. I'm going to look at life differently." I think that's the magic of that age.

There was a time in my 40s where I thought, oh, it's all over - not just work, but I'm never going to feel young again, I'm always going to feel like I know what's going to happen, I'll know what to expect. Looking back I don't know if that was a midlife crisis, I don't know - but I don't feel that now. There's possibilities. It gets better.

It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness.

At 33 years old, I didn't have to work anymore. I had to search through 'What am I going to do for the rest of my life?' I wasn't ready to fly-fish for the rest of my life.

People may call what happens at midlife 'a crisis,' but it's not. It's an unraveling - a time when you feel a desperate pull to live the life you want to live, not the one you're 'supposed' to live. The unraveling is a time when you are challenged by the universe to let go of who you think you are supposed to be and to embrace who you are.

I'm what is known as perimenopausal. "Peri", some of you may know, is a Latin prefix meaning 'SHUT YOUR FLIPPIN' PIE HOLE'.

Change excites me. I am fifty years old. It's when the mind catches up with the body.

Life changed at 40 for me, as predicted by my acting teacher when I was leaving college. I became more hirable and more interesting... I'm not sure why.

It's very, very difficult to reinvent yourself when you're 40 or 50, whether you are a taxi driver who now needs to become a web designer, or anything else. It just becomes more difficult and more scary.

But I was ready for it and I knew I could do it. I've just turned 40, I have a son and I feel more settled and driven than ever. I think my 40s will be my most prolific time. It's a very rare life you get to lead as a sitcom guy.

Middle-aged life is merry, and I love to lead it.

For every fresh stage in our lives we need a fresh education, and there is no stage for which so little educational preparation is made as that which follows the reproductive period.

I'm in politics to change things - if possible, for the better. I was a journalist for a long time, but I had a kind of midlife crisis, and I decided I needed to do something to get on the pitch and stop endlessly kicking over other peoples' sandcastles.

There's a great deal of attention paid and books written about this change of life in a woman, and really very little written about a man's change of life.