Quotes & Sayings About Middle Adulthood

With tremendous clarity and wisdom, Daniel Tomasulo has crafted a memoir at once heartbreaking and uplifting. Layers of time and memory - childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle age - are so beautifully revealed here, a trenchant reminder that our pasts are alive inside of us. There are psychologists who can write, and writers who can psychologize, but rarely have the two met on the page with such moving, profound results. — Dani Shapiro

Caught in the moorless place between young adulthood and middle age, we were just learning how to forgive ourselves. — Chloe Benjamin

It was the kind of upheaval, smack in the middle of adulthood, which was messy enough to make me consider, back then, the wisdom of early marriage. When we're young, after all, our lives are so much more pliant, can be joined without too much fuss. When we grow on our own, we take on responsibility, report to bosses, become bosses; we get our own bank accounts, acquire our own debts, sign our own leases. The infrastructure of our adulthood takes shape, connects to other lives; it firms up and gets less bendable. The prospect of breaking it all apart and rebuilding it elsewhere becomes a far more daunting project than it might have been had we just married someone at twenty-two, and done all that construction together. The — Rebecca Traister

Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations. — Neil Gaiman

Yet alongside this rebellion against the father, a respect for and acceptance of his authority continued to exist. This ambivalent attitude toward authority - rebellion against it coupled with acceptance and submission - is a basic feature of every middle-class structure from the age of puberty to full adulthood and is especially pronounced in individuals stemming from materially restricted circumstances. — Wilhelm Reich

Artillery has stopped for the moment, and the predawn fires inside the walls take on a steady middle life, an adulthood. — Anthony Doerr

Just as the blurring between childhood and adulthood has produced the kidult, so the stretching of middle into old age has fostered another peculiar chimera: septuagenarians with apoptosis sporting the depeche mode. — Will Self

I remember everything,' Bette Midler flatly notes. 'But you know how in life, you tend to hold grudges? Well, I don't do that any more. Bad, bad stuff. I did as a young person, but it just wore me out. Oh, it really did! How many times can you wake up in the middle of the night gnashing your teeth? It's so boring. Give it up! — Antonella Gambotto-Burke

It seemed to him [Otto Kugelblitz] obvious that the human life span runs through the varieties of mental disorder as understood in his day - the solipsism of infancy, the sexual hysterias of adolescence and entry-level adulthood, the paranoia of middle age, the dementia of late life ... all working up to death, which at last turns out to be sanity. — Thomas Pynchon

Success is different at different stages of development - from not wetting your pants in infancy, to being well liked in childhood and adolescence, to getting laid in young adulthood, to making money and having prestige in later adulthood, to getting laid in middle age, to being well liked in old age, to not wetting your pants in senility. What's — John Bradshaw

both of them having moved through space and across the parenting continuum to voice their concern for their middle daughter, the one in no-man's-land between the trenches of childhood and adulthood. — Laura Buzo

There's no use asking Mom and Dad to talk to Nana about her punishment. They won't stand up to her. They never do. This is why I decide I am not going to speak to Nana or Papa or my parents. What Leila and I did was wrong. But now I have been put in the middle of something else entirely. Something about Adam and the adults and things that happened before I was born, maybe even before Adam and Uncle Hayden and Mom were born.
~pgs 144-145; Hattie on adulthood — Ann M. Martin

I think anytime you're writing to the middle grades, you're writing to young readers who are trapped in a number of ways between two worlds: between childhood and adulthood, between their friends and their parents. — Rick Riordan