Quotes about adulthood

Charles Bukowski - You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

when we were kidslaying around the lawnon ourbellieswe often talkedabouthowwe'd like todieandwe allagreed on thesamethingwe'd alllike to diefucking(althoughnone of ushaddone anyfucking)and nowthatwe are hardlykidsany longerwe think moreabouthownot todieandalthoughwe'rereadymost ofuswouldprefer todo italoneunder thesheetsnowthatmost ofushave fuckedour livesaway.

Fredrik Backman - Beartown

Children need the lie to be brave enough to sleep in their beds parents need it to be able to get up the next morning.

Chad Harbach - The Art of Fielding

People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences in fact it was just the opposite.

Maia Wojciechowska -

I wanted to give you advice. Adults are always doing that it's one of their occupational hazards.

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah -

children spend their time for they think they have more time adults cry over their time for they see they have less time

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. -

Men do not quit playing because they grow old they grow old because they quit playing.

Robert Charles Wilson - The Chronoliths

Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.

Simon Van Booy - Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories

Children are the closest we have to wisdom, and they become adults the moment that final drop of everything mysterious is strained from them.

Paul Auster - Moon Palace

I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally do, everything changes inside you, you can never be the same again. I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden, without the slightest flicker of a doubt, I understood that my life was my own, that it belonged to me and no one else.I’m talking about freedom, Fogg. A sense of despair that becomes so great, so crushing, so cata

Neil Gaiman - The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Oh, monsters are scared', said Lettie. 'And as for grown-ups...' She stopped talking, rubbed her freckled nose with a finger. Then, 'I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.'...We sat there, side by si

O. S. Hickman -

When You Live Life Too Early, You Learn Life Too Late.

Maria Semple - Today Will Be Different

That was happiness. Not the framed greatest hits, but the moments in between. At the time, I hadn't pegged them as being particularly happy. But now, looking back at those phantom snapshots, I'm struck by my calm, my ease, the evident comfort with my life. I'm happy in retrospect.

Maya Angelou - Letter to My Daughter

I am convinced that most people do not grow up...We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.

Peter David - Tigerheart

That was when it was all made painfully clear to me. When you are a child, there is joy. There is laughter. And most of all, there is trust. Trust in your fellows. When you are an adult...then comes suspicion, hatred, and fear. If children ran the world, it would be a place of eternal bliss and cheer. Adults run the world; and there is war, and enmity, and destruction unending. Adults who take charge of things muck them up, and then produce a new generation of children and say, "The children are

Adhish Mazumder -

If you were to love, love not for the lust that you yearn but the rather the pain that you earn with it. Remember though that the ones who brave the pain are eternally bound in Cupid's chain. It is these chains that many of us fear. The fear of losing the freedom of choosing for self. The fear of placing the needs of our better halves before our own. The fear is understandable for history has taught us to despise and the society has given us the chance to entice. However, if you were to pause an

C.G. Jung - Modern Man in Search of a Soul

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook.

Marilynne Robinson - Gilead

Adulthood is a wonderful thing and brief. You must be sure to enjoy it while it lasts. I believe the soul in Paradise must enjoy something nearer to a perpetual vigorous adulthood than to any other state we know.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana -

Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana -

There is so much woman in many a girl and too much boy in many a man.

Amit Kalantri - Wealth of Words

Parents expect only two things from their children, obedience in their childhood and respect in their adulthood.

Amit Kalantri - Wealth of Words

Father has a strengthening character like the sun and mother has a soothing temper like the moon.

Albert Einstein -

Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.

Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights

The red firelight glowed on their two bonny heads and revealed their faces, animated with the eager interest of children; for, though he was twenty-three and she eighteen, each had so much of novelty to feel, and learn, that neither experienced nor evinced the sentiments of sober disenchanted maturity.

Johanna de Silentio -

Relax. You will become an adult. You will figure out your career. You will find someone who loves you. You have a whole lifetime time takes time. The only way to fail at life is to abstain.

Vineet Raj Kapoor -

In Your Early Years people Tell You, Correct You and Forgive You. But when you become an Adult, they Neither Correct you nor Forgive You

L.M. Montgomery - Rilla of Ingleside

The body grows slowly and steadily but the soul grows by leaps and bounds. It may come to its full stature in an hour.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana -

The average adult hates being treated like a child, unless it suits them.

Matshona Dhliwayo -

In my youth I had three teachers: friends, enemies, and books. In my adulthood I had three professors: God, nature, and life.

Gwenda Bond - Triple Threat

The man was a bully. A bully who'd elevated himself to a high-level position, but a bully just the same. No amount of flattery would change how I saw him.

Sinclair Lewis - Kingsblood Royal

In a matter of weeks, he had learned that without suffering and doubt, there can be no whole human being.

Teju Cole - Open City

There was no starting point for the rebellion, but I could mark an arbitrary one: that a grown-up was someone who, first and foremost, could drink a Coke at whim.

Michael Chabon - Manhood for Amateurs

We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, i

Richard Paul Evans - Healing and Hope

Dance. Dance for the joy and breath of childhood. Dance for all children, including that child who is still somewhere entombed beneath the responsibility and skepticism of adulthood. Embrace the moment before it escapes from our grasp. For the only promise of childhood, of any childhood, is that it will someday end. And in the end, we must ask ourselves what we have given our children to take its place. And is it enough?

Lailah Gifty Akita -

The adult were once young.The young have not yet attained adulthood.

Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

Without them, one’s status as an adult is never secure; a childless adult creates adulthood for himself , and as exhilarating as it often is, it is also a state of perpetual insecurity

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

Children do not always appreciate their parents encouraging them to explore and grow. The selfishness of a child manifests itself in his or her intent to remain a child and never enter an adult world of distress, disappointment, and jadedly surrendering an envisioned life by making commitments that limit boundless options.

Miranda Emmerson - Miss Treadway and the Field of Stars

How do you explain to a child who likes everyone in the world that adult life consists to a great extent of cutting people away?

Lailah Gifty Akita - Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

Sum of life; Birth, childhood, youth, adulthood, parenthood, old age and death.

Lailah Gifty Akita - Think Great: Be Great!

Every child born into the world has a divine mission to fulfill.As the child grows into adulthood, he or she must act to fulfill the divine mission.

Leila Aboulela - Coloured Lights

And why is it that so many years later it is so easy to distinguish the bullies from their prey? Adult bodies surrounding the children of long ago. The years have changed nothing.

Alan Bradley - As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust

One of the things I dread about becoming an adult is that sooner or later you begin letting sentimentality get in the way of simple logic.

Avra Amar Filion -

We were wiser as children if not for anything else but for our ability to always reflect. Reflection is a powerful tool to move forward into an enlightened stage of wisdom. Children reflect everyday about being reprehended, what made them happy, something new they discovered. This constant state of reflection is what makes them grow and unfortunately the arrogance of adulthood brings reflection to a halt and puts a stop to a continual growth that we should pursue, as we once did.

Neil Gaiman - The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.'I said, 'Are you a monster? Like Ursula Monkton?'Lettie threw a pebble into the pond. 'I don't think so,' she said. 'Monsters come in all shapes and sizes, Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but the

Judy Blume - Summer Sisters

A person can have a happy and fulfilling life without children.

Ashley Ormon -

I want to know we're not pushing children toward the traditions of life, but instead cultivating them to grow in their own specific purposes, and make the dreams of their youth become realities as they age.

Mitch Albom - For One More Day

Never tell a child that something it’s too hard

Ashley Ormon - God in Your Morning

Children take joy in their work and sometimes as adults we forget that's something we should continue doing.

Dan Groat - An Enigmatic Escape: A Trilogy

As an adult I had mastered the art of looking without seeing and listening without hearing and eating without tasting and maybe even existing without living.

Lailah Gifty Akita - Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

Do all the work you while you still have strength.

Rebecca West - The Return of the Soldier

Now, why did Kitty, who was the falsest thing on earth, who was in tune with every kind of falsity, by merely suffering somehow remind us of reality? Why did her tears reveal to me what I had learned long ago, but had forgotten in my frenzied love, that there is a draft that we must drink or not be fully human? I knew that one must know the truth. I knew quite well that when one is adult one must raise to one's lips the wine of the truth, heedless that it is not sweet like milk, but draws the mo

Michael Chabon -

His body had almost no hair and his naked little circumcised johnson was nearly as pale as the rest of him, white as a boy's - perhaps over time one's genitals emerge from the pots and bubbling vats of love permanently stained, like the hands of a wool dyer.

Josie Sigler - The Galaxie and Other Rides

As a man begins to understand the sacrifices he must make to live the life he dreams of, he often loses his courage for such a life.

Nathan Filer -

I guess there's a Use By date when it comes to blaming your parents for how messed up you are.I guess that's what turning eighteen means.Time to own it.

Dominic Riccitello -

You can’t just be. You have to become.

Dominic Riccitello -

I’ve spent awhile trying to figure out where I’m going and the only thing I’ve come to realize is it doesn’t matter where, it’s how I get there.

Lailah Gifty Akita - Think Great: Be Great!

When I was a child, I thought like a child.When I became adult, I seek a deeper understanding of life.

Lukasz Laniecki - You Have The Right Not To Make Your Parents Proud. A Book Of Quotes

We are all entitled to our own share of mistakes and learning experiences in life. No one should take them away from us. Not even our parents.

Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

And though our roots belong to the same tree, our branches have grown in different directions.

Gabrielle Hamilton - and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

How can it be, after all this concentrated effort and separation, how can it be that I still resemble, so very closely, my own detestable mother?

Andrea Lavinthal - and Other Big-Girl Drama You Thought You Would Have Figured

Unfortunately, some family members are so psychotic that no matter how hard you try to forge a healthy relationship, nothing will help. Now that you're an adult, take refuge in the fact that some things are beyond your control. You owe it to yourself to steer clear of people who are harmful to your health.

Lailah Gifty Akita - Think Great: Be Great!

Age is only a number. Keep an active life.

Jalina Mhyana - Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes

All of the sudden, we were a grown-up married couple! Like little figures in a doll's house, we sat there dazed, in awe, wishing a chubby little arm would pass through a window and move us around, tell us what to do. We would have given anything for a magnificent child to show us how to be husband and wife.

Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

You boys are really turning into a bunch of Peter Pans," he said. "Willem, what are you? Thirty-six? I'm not sure what's going on with you lot. You’re making money. You've achieved something. Don't you think you guys should stop clinging to one another and get serious about adulthood?" But how was one to be an adult? Was couplehood truly the only appropriate option?

Stephanie Perkins - Isla and the Happily Ever After

We can’t stop smiling at each other. I can’t believe that adults get to do this every day. And I don’t even mean sex, though it’s wonderful, but things like this. Brushing our teeth at the same sink. Do adults realize how lucky they are? Or do they forget that these small moments are actually small miracles? I don’t want to ever forget.

Elizabeth Wein - The Pearl Thief

I realized I would be forced to run away from home if someone tried to arrange a marriage for me. I didn't want to think about it.

James A. Autry -

Yes, the life of an adult entails accepting and in some way being responsible for pain.

Jennifer DeLucy -

I'd like to go back to five years old again. Just sometimes. To be turning over rocks and looking for pill bugs and holding earthworms, playing dolls, erecting forts, digging through dirt for marbles, burrowing in leaf piles, failing at igloo building, when my biggest concern was going to sleep with the lights off. I wish I was five again, before things got hard, before I was forced to grow up way too early and been stuck in this "adult" thing way too long. I wish I could sit in my Grandpa's lap

F.H. Buckley -

It’s time to ask why [the United States] is the only country in the world where we permit our children to be saddled with tens — sometimes hundreds — of thousands of dollars of debt before they begin to earn a penny.

Amaka Imani Nkosazana - Sweet Destiny

A man that knows your worth doesn't need to be told how to treat you. That's a given! You won't have to question his feelings, his motives, nor his intentions. How will I know? You ask. See, he will freely show you how he feels and prove it consistently. If you're settling for anything less than what you deserve. Then, maybe you don't even know your worth.

Amaka Imani Nkosazana - Sweet Destiny

Moral obligations verses Legal obligations. Legally, you must abide by the laws of the land or face the consequences of being fined, imprisoned or both. Moral obligations tend to lean more towards a spiritual nature of a person. Some people perform immoral acts because legally there are no consequences. Morals birth in the heart of the individual. Moral characteristics are developed at an early age and continue into adulthood. It's a disgrace to neglect having good moral character.

Craig D. Lounsbrough -

To abandon the child ‘within’ means that the adult ‘without’ will be an adult in name only. And frankly, I can only name a handful of things that are that tragic.

Tim Relf - Stag

Forgiveness is what makes adults different to children: children just forget, adults forgive.

James Thurber -

In his grief over the loss of a dog, a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood. After this most inconsolable of sorrows there is nothing life can do to him that he will not be able somehow to bear.

M. Verano - Diary of a Haunting

I used to get so worked up about this or that boy, or who was passing notes in math class. All that stuff seems so far away now, ever since Real Life came along and punched me in the face.

Seanan McGuire - An Artificial Night

He was still so very young. Faeries—true faeries, not their changeling throwaways—live forever, and when you have an eternity of adulthood ahead of you, you linger over childhood. You tend it and keep it close to your heart, because once it ends, it’s over. Quentin was barely fifteen. He’d never seen the Great Hunt that came down every twenty-one years, or been present for the crowning of a King or Queen of Cats, or announced his maturity before the throne of High King Aethlin. He was a child, a

Pierce Brown - Morning Star

How could any boy know that freedom is lost the moment you become a man. Things start to count. To press in. Constricting slowly, inevitably, creating a cage of inconveniences and duties and deadlines and failed plans and lost friends.

Betsy Cornwell -

Children’s and YA books are about being brave and kind, about learning wisdom and love, about that journey into and through maturity that we all keep starting, and starting again, no matter how old we get. I think that’s why so many adults read YA: we’re never done coming of age.

Matthew Quick - Leonard Peacock

The whole time I pretend I have mental telepathy. And with my mind only, I’ll say — or think? — to the target, 'Don’t do it. Don’t go to that job you hate. Do something you love today. Ride a rollercoaster. Swim in the ocean naked. Go to the airport and get on the next flight to anywhere just for the fun of it. Maybe stop a spinning globe with your finger and then plan a trip to that very spot; even if it’s in the middle of the ocean you can go by boat. Eat some type of ethnic food you’ve never

Meg Ray -

The future isn't written in the stars. There are no guarantees. So claim your adulthood. Be intentional. Get to work. Pick your family. Do the math. Make your own certainty. Don't be defined by what you didn't know or didn't do.You are deciding your life right now.

Alison Espach - The Adults

Inside my house, nobody was home, except everybody, but it was easy to feel like those were one and the same.

Lailah Gifty Akita - Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

Once we were young, now we are adult.

James P. Blaylock - Night Relics

There was a time when that kind of thing looked like the kingdom of heaven, but somewhere along the line it had lost its glow. Maybe that was just the cost of growing up. And maybe the cost of growing up was too high.

Crystal Woods - Write like no one is reading 2

The monsters were never under our bed, but in the forest our future.

Rebecca Solnit - A Field Guide to Getting Lost

In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you.

Gia Russell - Will He Ever Return?

To make a difference in the world, it only takes one optimistic person, who can gather millions of people to make the change.

Kelly Williams Brown - Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps

One of the most jolting days of adulthood comes the first time you run out of toilet paper. Toilet paper, up until this point, always just existed. And now it's a finite resource, constantly in danger of extinction, that must be carefully tracked and monitored, like pandas?

Stephanie Danler - Sweetbitter

The vision that accompanied me on my drive was a girl, a lady actually. We had the same hair but she didn't look like me. She was in a camel coat and ankle boots. A dress under the coat was belted high on her waist. She carried various shopping bags from specialty stores and as she was walking, pausing at certain windows, her coat would fly back in the wind. Her boot heels tapped on the cobblestones. She had lovers and breakups, an analyst, a library, acquaintances she ran into on the street who

James C. Dobson - Life on the Edge: A Young Adult's Guide to a Meaningful Future

Each year, more responsibility and freedom (they are companions) must be given to the child so that the final release in early adulthood is merely a small, final release of authority.

Sonya Watson -

Someone wise told me recently that Adulting was hard. My response: TRUE STORY

David Foster Wallace - A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I'm starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life's sumptuous branching complexity at

Robert Epstein - Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families from the Torment of Adolescence

[One way] researchers sometimes evaluate people's judgments is to compare those judgments with those of more mature or experienced individuals. This method has its limitations too, because mature or experienced individuals are sometimes so set in their ways that they can't properly evaluate new or unique conditions or adopt new approaches to solving problems.

S.R. Crawford - Depression & Stress

You’re probably wondering what the heck I mean by “The Pillars of Your Life”, right? Well this is simple. It’s the things that make your life what it is. The things or people that make you, you. There’s work, family, your hobby, your art, and your traditions. Except, some of us have wonky pillars. Some of us give one pillar too much to hold, and the others not enough. One’s too tall, whilst the others are too small. Therefore we become unstable, and sometimes, everything comes crashing down.

Neil Gaiman -

Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you're ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can. Then, perhaps, you will come back to it when you're older, and you will find the book has changed because you have changed as well, and the book is wiser, or more foolish, because you are wiser or more foolish than you were as a child.

Fredrik Backman - My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

In the beginning the queen had been a courageous and fair-minded princess very much liked by all, but unfortunately she grew up and became a frightened adult, as adults tend to be. She started loving efficiency and avoiding conflict. As adults do.

Ursula K. Le Guin - A Wizard of Earthsea

He began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark. In the Creation of Ea, which is the oldest song, it is said, 'Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright th

John McNee - Prince of Nightmares

Growing up, imagination gave way to cynicism. Ignorance was traded in for world weariness. Fears remained, but they were the dull, suburban fears of illness, destitution, and death. The visceral terror of the unknown- of unseen things lurking under the bed or creeping out of the cupboard- became a fuzzy memory.

Craig D. Lounsbrough -

Be absolutely assured that we will die long before our own deaths if we ever allow the fear of adulthood to kill the wonder of childhood.

Jane Yolen -

And at twelve, heading for adulthood, a child fears that the way she is at that moment is all she's ever going to be.

Ian McEwan -

This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might not exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo’s sincerely godless generation, the question hasn’t come up. No one in his bright, plate-glass, forward-looking school ever asked him to pray, or sing an impenetrable cheery hymn. There’s no entity for him to doubt. His initiation, in front of the TV, before the dissolving towers, was intense but he adapted quic

Related Quote Subjects

adulthood

maturity

state

date