Quarter Life Crisis Birthday Quotes

WHAT 28 FEELS LIKE

Every year of your 20s is subject to a very specific set of emotions, at least that's what I think. 21 is great for obvious, surface-level reasons. 22 is a train wreck if you graduated in four years, and are then thrust into real life. 25 is when pretty much everything changes – from your priorities to your body. And, then, there's 28. I don't know what it is about this age in particular, but I've deemed it "The Crisis Year" and here's why.

1. The realization that you're now officially in your "late 20s" is enough to send you straight into the climax of a full-blown panic attack. You don't even get to start at the beginning of the said attack, no. You wake up on your 28th birthday, screaming and dry heaving. It's an instinctual reaction to knowing that, for the next 365 days of your life, you will be teetering on the fine line between actual adulthood and clutching on desperately to your youth.

2. Because you're now in your late 20s, your parents start to treat you more like an GULP adult. Even if you've been paying your own way since forever, maybe you both secretly knew deep down that, in case of a huge emergency, asking them for help wasn't off-limits. But, when 28 hits, it's no longer an option.

3. You just feel old(er). There's something about the curvy lines of the number "8" that cast a darker and much more serious shadow over things. You'll still go out to popular nightlife establishments, but you will be ~ Joseph Ejiro

I am having a quarter-life crisis," I announced to my mother.
"My generation never had those, we just had babies and thought about killing them from time to time. ~ Zoe Whittall

People do whatever the hell they want to do at any age they fancy. Last month you were thirty-five. That means you're five years from forty. Do you think that the day you reach forty you will be any different than you were at thirty-nine or forty-one for that matter? People create little ideas about ages so they can write silly self-help books, stick stupid comments in birthday cards, create names for internet chat rooms and look for excuses for crisis that are happening in their life. ~ Cecelia Ahern

I feel prematurely old. I'm actually having this major belated quarter-life crisis. I'm turning 30 in a couple of weeks. I've been thinking a lot about mortality. A lot about what I'm going to do with my life and how to enjoy it. One of the things I'm going to work on is being more spontaneous, letting go, embracing the beauty of come-what-may. ~ Chris Pine

Maybe you are Saul's quarter-life crisis, but so what? Maybe he's yours. Or maybe you two are the luckiest people in the world and you've just found your fireworks-in-the-sky, holding-hands-until-you-die Forever Person. Guess what? There are drawbacks either way.
Maybe you break up and it sucks, but then you heal and move on and fall in love again. Or maybe this is it, the last person you'll ever have butterflies for, your last first kiss, but you get to grow up together, start your life together sooner. And you know what else? You don't have to be afraid to walk away either way... ~ Emily Henry

Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis. You can sell a lot of junk to a lot of people by inventing a stage of life and giving it a name. ~ Jill Lepore

Might be a quarter life crisis, just disturbin' in my soul. ~ John Mayer

For just a second, Lauren wonders if she's going insane. But insane people don't think they're insane, everybody knows that. But...since that fact of insanity is common knowledge, doesn't that mean an insane person could use it to convince themselves they're not actually insane? Wouldn't that make them even more insane? ~ Patrick Anderson Jr.

It's impossible to plan things past a certain point, and even before that point your plans aren't guaranteed. But if you can keep steady, drive down that road and get over those humps that are inevitably going to pop up, chances are there'll be a nice stretch of paved concrete in between and you can enjoy the scenery...Or there might not be, who knows. The whole goddamn road could look like the surface of the moon and send you flying into a fucking tree. Doesn't really matter, because the point is you have to keep driving anyways. Just keep driving and eventually you'll reach a point where the scenery will be so beautiful, it'll take your mind off how long you've been on that road.
Which is really all you can ask for. ~ Patrick Anderson Jr.

The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there's arrogance at its core. It presumes you should be successful at twenty-six, when really it takes most writers much longer to get there. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Somewhere along the line, between the idealisms of youth and the realities of adulthood, we become pacified by our jobs; we tolerate how we hurt the world so that we can sustain our lives. At some point, blurred in the past, we traded the greater good for ourselves. ~ Richard Beckham II

Lauren realizes right then that the prospect of being single - of recent events leading to a divorce and her being a single mother with child support checks and the like - scares her to death. Dating itself is such a frightening, vulnerable time period, no matter what the circumstances. It sucks, really. She doesn't want to go through all that again. ~ Patrick Anderson Jr.

If a frog is placed into a pot of boiling water it will immediately try to jump out; but if it's placed into a pot of cool water that's gradually heated until boiling, it will stay put and never try to jump out. ~ Richard Beckham II

Simple people with less education, sophistication, social ties, and professional obligations seem in general to have somewhat less difficulty in facing this final crisis than people of affluence who lose a great deal more in terms of material luxuries, comfort, and number of interpersonal relationships. It appears that people who have gone through a life of suffering, hard work, and labor, who have raised their children and been gratified in their work, have shown greater ease in accepting death with peace and dignity compared to those who have been ambitiously controlling their environment, accumulating material goods, and a great number of social relationships but few meaningful interpersonal relationships which would have been available at the end of life. ~ Elisabeth Kubler Ross

You can't compare and rank heartache. Pain is pain is pain. There is no precise measurement. No quarter cup. ~ Kaui Hart Hemmings

I will be living with chronic pain for the rest of my life. I don't have the mobility, energy or life options I used to have. I work hard to manage the pain, and I want the medical system to be a respectful and effective partner, not a jailer. The opioid crisis is not my doing. ~ Sonya Huber

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. ~ Charles Bukowski

Blessings are better than miracles. If you live your life from one miracle to the next, you will live from crisis to crisis. It's better to be blessed with good health than to always need divine healing. God's will is for us to walk in blessing. ~ Andrew Wommack

Emotional exhaustion follows fast on the footsteps of physical and mental depletion. I feel my lifeblood draining away in an oily spigot of inner turmoil. Questions abound and personal survival hinges upon sorting through possible solutions and selecting the most fitting answers. Is my pain real or simply an illusion of a frustrated ego? What do I believe in? What is my purpose? I aspire to discover a means to live in congruence with the trinity of the mind, body, and spirit. Can I discover a noble path that frees me from the shallowness of decadent physical and emotional desires? Can I surrender any desire to seek fame and fortune? Can I terminate a craving to punish other persons for their perceived wrongs? Can I recognize that forgiving persons whom offended me is a self-initiated, transformative act? Can I conquer an irrational fear of the future? Can I accept the inevitable chaos that accompanies life? Can I find a means to achieve inner harmony by steadfastly resolving to live in the moment free of angst? Can I purge egotisms that mar an equitable perception of life by renunciation of the self and all worldly endeavors? Can I live a harmonious existence devoid the panache of vanities? ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Perhaps I can follow a heroic existential nihilist's sterling example of surviving the harshness of reality by employing an attentive narrative examination of my recalcitrant life to extract shards of personal truth and elicit a synthesizing purposefulness of my being from the darkness, anarchy, and chaos of existence. Perhaps through the act of engaging in a deliberative examination of the ontological mystery of being and investigating the accompanying stark brutal doubt that renders a materialistic life intolerably senseless, absurd, and meaningless, I can confront the baffle of being and establish a guiding set of personal values to live by in an indifferent world. Perhaps by using the contemplative tools of narrative storytelling, I can strictly scrutinize the key leaning rubrics veiled within an array of confusing personal life experiences. Perhaps by engaging in a creative act of discovery I can blunt the pain and anguish that comes from the nightmarish experience of suffering from an existential crisis. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

You had to take life as it came. It gave no quarter, spared no feelings. Limited no pain. Put no ceiling on happiness. ~ David Baldacci

Midlife crisis begins sometime in your 40s, when you look at your life and think, 'Is this all?' And it ends about 10 years later, when you look at your life again and think, 'Actually, this is pretty good.' ~ Donald Richie

A world of little cares is continually arising, which busy or affluent life knows nothing of, to open the first door to distress. Hunger is not among the postponable wants; and a day, even a few hours, in such a condition is often the crisis of a life of ruin. ~ Thomas Paine

You don't have to be in your later quarter of life to benefit from a future time perspective. Unplugging yourself from the present and projecting your dreams into the future can help you reach fulfillment at any age. ~ Susan Krauss Whitbourne

I don't believe, however, that every fiction we orchestrate is good. I cling to those that are painful, those that arise from a profound crisis of all our illusions. I love unreal things when they show signs of firsthand knowledge of the terror, and hence an awareness that they are unreal, that they will not hold up for long against the collisions. Human beings are extremely violent animals, and the violence they are always ready to use in order to impose their own eternal, salvific life vest, while shattering those of others, is frightening. ~ Elena Ferrante

The epitome of our life force turns on the seam where our tempered idealistic expectations meet the annealed exigencies fueling the cataclysm of a pressing personal crisis. Many of us do not decipher who we are and what we truly cherish until we experience the terror of an inconsolable loss. Failure and suffering lead to self-scrutiny. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Business crises energize me. Personal crises devastate me. The doctors call it an avoidance tendency. (Mirena to Eve) ~ J.D. Robb

The routine of life goes on, whatever happens, we do the same things, go through the little performance of eating, sleeping, washing. No crisis can break through the crust of habit. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

I turned fifty and decided to take a break. After twenty-five years of working, it seemed like a good idea. Honestly, I was feeling depleted. I still cared about my career and realized, amid a worsening economic climate, that I was lucky to have one. But that appreciation felt more lodged in my head than my heart. One day, United Airlines sent me a card, along with some new luggage tags, offering congratulations on having flown 2 million miles. Quick arithmetic translated all those zeroes into the equivalent of flying from one side of the country to the other every single day - Sundays, holidays, birthdays, sick or well - for more than two years. Maybe the card from United should have offered condolences. It all added up to an abiding fatigue. And a question: Did I want to fly 2 million more miles over the next twenty-five years of my life? Was I having a low-grade midlife crisis? I had no red sports car, reckless affair, ~ Marc Freedman

The sheep learn to know the shepherd's voice in the ordinary days of life so that in a time of crisis it can be immediately recognized. ~ M. Esther Lovejoy

Communities need tensions if they are to grow and deepen. Tensions come from conflicts within each person - conflicts born out of a refusal of personal and community growth, conflicts between individual egoisms, conflicts arising from a diminishing gratuite, from a class of temperaments and from individual psychological difficulties. These are natural tensions. Anguish is the normal reaction to being brought up against our own limitations and darkness, to the discovery of our deep wound. Tension is the normal reaction to responsibilities we find hard because they make us feel insecure. We all weep and grieve inwardly at the successive deaths of our own interests.

. . . When everything is going well, when the community feels it is living successfully, its members tend to let their energies dissipate, and to listen less carefully to each other. Tensions bring people back to the reality of their helplessness; obliging them to spend more time in prayer and dialogue, to work patiently to overcome the crisis and refind lost unity; making them understand that the community is more than just a human reality, that it also needs the spirit of God if it is to live and deepen.

I am told that there is a Chinese word for 'crisis' which means 'opportunity and danger'. Every tension, every crisis can become a source of new life if we approach it wisely, or it can bring death and division. ~ Jean Vanier