The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—And How To Make The Most Of Them Now Quotes
"Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain. You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today."
"No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun."
"Almost invariably, growth and development has what’s called a critical period."
"The twentysomething years are real time and ought to be lived that way."
"I am too passionate about the twenties to let Kate, or any other twentysomething, waste his or her time."
"Uncertainty will always be part of the taking-charge process."
"The search of youth is not for all-permissibility, but rather for new ways of directly facing up to what truly counts."
"If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are."
"The twentysomething years have never been more in the zeitgeist."
"At a time when many twentysomethings yearn for somewhere to call home and have no idea where they might be in ten years, choosing a place can be incredibly useful."
"The other day, I was on the bus and I thought to myself: Maybe I’ve already done it. Maybe this is my big adventure. Maybe this is it."
"Too early to talk like this. Like it’s too early."
"And she’s still trying to figure out what to do for her career."
"But she’s not happy at all… and I think… I hope I don’t wind up like that."
"Everyone says I should be out in the world exploring. But I did that! I just want to go home!"
"It would be a relief! That would mean I could go home."
"Why am I going broke living here? Why am I trying to meet someone so far away from where I want to be?"
"To accept life in its disjointed pieces is an adult experience of freedom, but still these pieces must lodge and embed themselves somewhere, hopefully in a place that allows them to grow and endure."
"A person’s identity is not to be found in behavior… but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going."
"Differentness is part of what makes us who we are."
"An identity or a career cannot be built around what you don’t want."
"If Ian didn’t say yes to something, his life was going to become unremarkable and limited."
"That you can’t pull some great career out of a hat in your thirties. You’ve got to start in your twenties."
"The most important decision any of us make is who we marry. Yet there are no courses on how to choose a spouse."
"Sometimes I think I married my husband just because he was the closest chair to me at thirty."
"Other things may change us, but we start and end with family."
"Making the best of things is a damn poor way of dealing with them."
"You don’t need a fancy test to think about your personality or anyone else’s."
"The Big Five is not about what you like—it is about who you are, it is about how you live."
"This means that you came into this world with roughly half of who you are already in place."
"There is no right or wrong personality, there is just your personality and how it fits with the personalities of other people."
"Sometimes the only thing wrong with another person is that he or she is a poor match for your own personality."
"It is far more common to hear couples say that, in retrospect, the differences were there all along."
"Personality tells us something about how you and your partner will go about the good and bad days together."
"I thought he was quite successful as a microbiologist. Doesn’t that say something about his intellect?"
"In action breeds fear and doubt. Action breeds confidence and courage."
"Knowledge is not skill. Knowledge plus 10,000 times is skill."
"Life itself still remains a very effective therapist."
"Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness."
"The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood."
"We become what we hear and see and do every day. We don’t become what we don’t hear and see and do every day."
"Many men and women feel hugely stretched and stressed trying to help out their not fully independent twentysomething children at the same time the health of their octogenarian parents is failing."
"If you have your kids between thirty-five and forty and they have their kids between thirty-five and forty, parents will be pulled in two directions not by twentysomethings and octogenarians but by toddlers and octogenarians."
"There is something profoundly sad about seeing an eighty-year-old grandmother come to the hospital to meet a grandchild."
"Billy had a lot of regrets about his twentysomething pursuits, which only later did he realize were not as important, or even as memorable, as he once thought."
"What seemed plain to me was that I wasn’t scared of losing my past. I was scared of losing my future."
"So many years doing things and hanging out with people that don’t even rate a memory. For what?"
"Be ruled by time, the wisest counselor of all." –Plutarch, historian
"To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time." –Leonard Bernstein, composer
"The days and years pass, and we say, 'Where did the time go?'"
"I thought if I didn’t participate in adulthood, time would stop. But it didn’t. It just kept going."