Quotes About Midlife

We're not meant to be parents when we're 50.

People seem to think that, by the time you hit 45 or 50, you might as well just pack it in and call it a day.

That very day I resolved not to save all of my change until I turned forty. I resolved to have what I termed a little midlife crisis each day of my life in the hope of avoiding a larger one once I reached forty.

At 40, I went to bed for three days. I thought my life is over.

For most of the people she knew, people in their forties, this was a time of softening and expanding, of expectations growing blurred, of running a little to seed or to fat after the exhaustion of the chase: she saw them beginning to relax and make themselves comfortable in their lives.

For most of us, no matter how slim, middle-aged spread really does set in, and your waist thickens, irrespective of whether you've had children or if you exercise regularly.

There was a time when people had the decency to wait until they were approaching 50 to have a mid-life crisis. Now it seems many thirtysomethings find themselves succumbing to existential navel-gazing.

Driving around with a receding hairline and two kids in a Prius feels a bit boring for me.

I sailed a bit as a child, but it wasn't until I was around 40, when I was halfway through Patrick O'Brian's 'Master and Commander' novels, that I had the sudden epiphany that I had to go sail on a square-rig ship.

At forty-five not even expensive highlights and a boatload of Lycra could disguise the fact that her body had given up its struggle against gravity.

I started doing Pilates when I was in my mid-40s. I thought it was called 'pie-lattes' because I didn't hear anyone talk about it; I just read about it.

You hit 41 and you don't burn calories like you used to.

Approaching 50, I am living a life that is less sunlit Waldman/Chabon than tattered Charles Bukowski.

He was at that dangerous age when men suddenly notice that they're going to die eventually, inevitably, and there isn't a damn thing they can do about it, but that doesn't stop them from trying, whether it's shagging anything that moves or listening to early Bruce Springsteen and buying a top-of-the-range motorbike (a BMW K 1200 LT usually, thus considerably upping their chances of meeting death even earlier than anticipated).

At fifty you realize that you are no longer a kid. I ignored forty. It was like I was almost at middle age. Maybe it's the baby boomer thing. But undeniably, I am a man. I have to accept [mortality].

Other people get moody in their forties and fifties - men get the male menopause. I missed the whole thing. I was just really happy.

Menopause. A pause while you reconsider men.

Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.

A woman of 40 or 50 or 60 can take estrogen replacements, get facelifts, spend her money in bars.

Guitar makes even have a word for these baby-boomers-who-alwyas-wanted-to-be-great-guitarists-and-now-have-the-money-to-indulge-those-dreams: dentists

I have a problem about being nearly sixty: I keep waking up in the morning and thinking I'm thirty-one.

Perceptions are always profound, associations deceiving. No watermelon tastes red. Apropos: while waiting for a bus once, I saw open down the arm of a midfat, midlife, freckled woman, suitcase tugging at her hand like a small boy needing to pee, a deep blue crack as wide as any in a Roquefort. Split like paper tearing. She said nothing. Stood. Blue bubbled up in the opening like tar. One thing is certain: a cool flute blue tastes like deep well water drunk from a cup.

Just then things weren't going so well in my life. My business was precariously perched on the brink of bankruptcy, my anemic love life was the stuff of a Sartre treatise – Being with Nothingness – my car could use a tune-up, my apartment could use a scrubbing, my body could use some exercise, though who would give it that was a mystery to me. I was too young to feel old, and yet there it was, the despair of middle age, hanging around my neck like a noose.

I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn't augur well for my longevity