16 Book Quotes to Help Your Quarter-Life Crisis

If you've ever found yourself anxious over what to do with your life, or weeping softly over your high school rival's Facebook post about her new high-power TV job, you might be having a Quarter Life Crisis. It's the charming name that people have given to the (actually very common) phenomenon of freaking out in your twenties. The only known cure is time, deep breaths, and reading book quotes on the internet to help you deal with your new and exciting Quarter Life Crisis.

It's easy to let self-doubt spiral into panic. Being in the first stage of your adult life is hard. You're broke, you're underemployed (or unemployed), and you're starting to think that the novel you've been working on for the last five years is a bust. Your love life is a hellscape, because you're mostly dating other twenty-somethings who are equally confused (or worse, writing their own novels). It seems like everyone else on social media has their life together (spoiler alert: they don't) while you subsist on the fringes of society like a gremlin. You're in full-blown crisis mode.

So here are a few quotes to ease that oh-my-god-I'm-in-my-twenties meltdown. Because things aren't as bad as they seem. And I promise you that it's honestly, actually going to be OK.

1. It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.

― André Gide, Autumn Leaves

2. Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

3. “Dear God," she prayed, "let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere—be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.”

― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

4. What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it. Don't complain.

― Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

5. Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.

― Dr. Seuss, Happy Birthday to You!

6. It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.

― Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent

7. If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

8. To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.

― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

9. We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

10. Reality continues to ruin my life.

― Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

11. Sometimes you just have to put on lip gloss and pretend to be psyched.

― Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

12. Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night's sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too.

― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish

13. Some people say, “Never let them see you cry.” I say, if you’re so mad you could just cry, then cry. It terrifies everyone.

― Tina Fey, Bossypants

14. He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

15. You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

16. I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Images: HBO, Giphy (17)