The path to whatever your notion of success is will likely not be linear. Don’t take continuous personal growth for granted. Just because you’re older doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wiser. Your 20s will be full of failures — let them happen and learn as you go.

Every woman in her late 20s goes through a period where she just doesn’t believe love is out there anymore, but it is. And I think the minute you stop looking for it, is when it comes for you.

There’s an ‘Everything must go!’ emotional liquidation feel to the end of your twenties, isn’t there? What will happen if we turn thirty and we’re not ‘ready?’ You don’t feel entirely settled in any aspect of your life, even if you are on paper.

I’m never so sure as I was in my mid-20s.

20-somethings have the tendency to imagine that their 20s are the last chance they’re going to have to experiment, explore, and party. This is a false premise. Restaurants and cafes continue to let people over 29 through their doors. They even serve them alcohol.

Start your twenties with a lot of friends and leave with a few good ones. What happened? People faded away into their careers and relationships. Fights were had and never resolved. Shit happens.

When I was in my twenties, it felt like I was riding wild horses, and I was hoping I didn’t go over a cliff.

I like getting older. When you’re in your twenties you’re really forging for your future. Things take shape later on.

When you’re single and in your 20s, you throw on a pair of jeans and look fabulous.

When you’re in your early 20s your love life seems to explode every 20 minutes or so. By the time you’ve reached your thirties, it is every five or ten years.

The thing I love most about my generation — and something that rarely gets recognized — is that we’re fucking hustlers. We make it work. We get that money. We’re innovative and resourceful. The odds may be stacked against us and yet we still find a way to triumph.

[S]pend your twenties learning how to mentally block out trend pieces about the importance of reaching specific life milestones in a timely fashion.

In your twenties, if you have any amount of complexity in your childhood, or any trauma that you haven’t dealt with, it comes out. That’s why you have a lot of artists that don’t make it through.

I lived my twenties in a very public manner and if anyone’s twenties are documented it’s not always going to be pretty.

I think, for the majority of my twenties, I was always so concerned with what I didn’t have, or what I still wanted.

I feel like you don’t know if someone’s equipped for a romantic relationship until they’re out of their twenties.

[H]appiness comes out of being willing to do your work in your twenties to find out who you are, what you love.

In my early twenties, I had no idea who I was. And I think that’s one reason you should try different relationships. I’ve had good and bad ones, but I took away things from them that helped me become who I am.

I look back on my 20s. It’s supposed to be the prime of your life, the most vital, the most beautiful. But you’re making your critical decisions and sometimes your most critical mistakes.

I thought I knew everything about love and relationships in my 20s, the ignorance of youth is bliss. As you get older, you start to realise that you dont really know anything and life is a great traveling journey. Life is unexpected…you just never know whats going to happen.

As a kid I had dreams about being successful, thinking it would be cool. Then, when I was in my 20s, I really thought I had it much more figured out than I do now.

Once I hit 25 and exited the coveted 18-24 age bracket, I was like, “Whatevs. Just wake me when I’m 30.” 26 doesn’t feel much different than 25. They seem interchangeable. They leave the same impression. Both feel very young adult.

Creating emotion was what my career was all about. I wanted people to laugh at me; I wanted people to cry with me. I wanted people to feel good or to think about something when they watched me. I think that's why, even not being an Olympic champion, I have such a huge following around the world.

I am determined to hold on as long as possible, but if I should disappear, I should not have had the time to familiarize my successors with the necessary information.

Don't leave home without your sword - your intellect.

When one is giving service for the advancement of humanity, when one is working without money and without price, with no hope of earthly reward, there comes a real, genuine joy into the human heart.

My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers. Every two weeks, he'd take me to our local branch library and pull books off the shelf for me, stacking them up in my arms - 'Have you read this? And this? And this?'

Any time you stand in line at the D.M.V. and look around, you're like, Oh, my God, I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers.

I'm so convinced that hiking helps my writing that I recently decided to offer a series of hiking-writing workshops to see if others had the same experience.

Things parents say to children are oftentimes not heard, but in some cases you pick up on things that your parent would like to see you have done.

I don't think I'm like any of the characters I've played - they're all really far from who I am.

In the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, there were many gay men who were unable to come out about the fact that their lovers were ill, A, and then dead, B. They were unable to get access to the hospital to see their lover, unable to call their parents and say, 'I have just lost the love of my life.'

It is important to rise above rationalizations and make the best choices.

The first time you say something its heard. The second time its recognized and the third time its learned.

So, I decided that whatever I was, wanted to do with my life, it would have to do, it would have to have something to do with the exploration and doing new things.

Feminism is nothing but equality, and actually, feminism benefits men because it liberates us and it releases us from many stigmas imposed by the macho culture on us as well. So if more of us could understand that it's nothing but equality, I think many agendas in terms of equality would have advanced quicker because it really helps us as well.

At a certain point, you have to take the rearview mirrors off the bus and focus forward, and that's what we've sought to do.

Contrary to what many people believe, terrorism is actually a very expensive business.

I think we can win it if my brain holds out.

Well no administration ever wants an independent overseer, and there are very good career people who are in charge of this investigation, but it could get hairy.

Yugoslavia is a multinational community and it can survive only under the conditions of full equality for all nations that live in it.

Children don't really understand the concept of health. You can't give them an apple and say 'if you eat this you will be healthy when you're older' because they don't understand. You have to find a different way to motivate them.

I don't make political work. I don't make work that criticises the state. I make as human work as I can.

Youthfulness is about how you live not when you were born.

Arrogance really comes from insecurity, and in the end our feeling that we are bigger than others is really the flip side of our feeling that we are smaller than others.

You can sometimes avoid costly mistakes. Paint a corner of the room a certain color to see how the light affects it. Or buy just one yard of an expensive fabric to see how you like it in your room.