Quotes about adults
Maia Wojciechowska -
I wanted to give you advice. Adults are always doing that it's one of their occupational hazards.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz - He Forgot to Say Goodbye
The problem with parents is that they're adults.
Emma Donoghue - Room
[E]verywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there's a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn't even hear.
Thomm Quackenbush - A Creature Was Stirring
My Christmas was a sum total of the ministrations of adults, usually adults who wanted me to encourage my parents to buy something for me to consume and discard.
Mehmet Murat ildan -
When we see an innocent child, this is an ordinary thing; but when we see an innocent adult, this is an extraordinary thing!
Dionisis Agelakis -
There are no problems.Just strange situations we have to deal with, as adults we are.
Herman Wouk -
No adult is without problems except a happy imbecile.
Jean-Louis Gassee -
Adults tend to repress their pleasure. Sad to say, I think we become adults only through disappointment, grief, and lies. So of course gradually we become tough, less sensitive.
Darnell Lamont Walker -
We are not sure what we will become, only what we want to and don’t want to. We often become what we never thought we could, then we become fine with that.
Angela Johnson - The First Part Last
And then I know I'm being a man, not just some kid who's upset and wants it his way.
Victoria Schwab - The Near Witch
Magda looks at me as if I've gone mad. Or I've grown up. It's kind of the same thing.
R.S. Vern - The Unconventional Life of Haee
An ordinary man can enjoy breakfasting on juice and rye bread.But when you are underfed, scorned, miserable or just plain bored, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food.You want something a little more colourful, exciting, tastier, meatier and juicier.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana - Sweet Destiny
Some people are crazy in love. They are so captivated to where they've lost themselves. Do not be lured in so deep that you lose the essence of who you truly are.
Israelmore Ayivor - The Great Hand Book of Quotes
The most ignorant and wasted youthful generation is the very one that the older generation uses to create social conflicts to their own youthful detriment!
J.R. Rim -
All of us learned how to walk by failing.
Jacqueline Woodson - Another Brooklyn
Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone —adults promising us their own failed future.
T.F. Hodge - From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"
By exchanging quality time for 'turn-up' times, what many of today's wayward youngsters have become - men and women of the village have failed them.
Mike A. Lancaster - Human.4
Adults are just making things up as they go along. And when they’re scared, adults have no more answers than us kids
Carew Papritz - his Final Gift
In reality, Little Ones, there are two winters. One made for kids; the other for adults. The one made for adults is always too cold and always too long. The one made for kids is always perfect. A kid winter is an endless and wild snow carnival where all the rides are free.
Stephanie Perkins - Isla and the Happily Ever After
Do adults realize how lucky they are?
Chuck Bridges -
Wondering if an adult does a stupid thing should he be tried as a child?
Deyth Banger -
People live up to 75, the other is just a gift.
Carew Papritz - his Final Gift
As an adult, be child-like as you learn but not child-ish as you live.
Robin Wasserman - Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader
One of the greatest tragedies of growing up is the discovery that your parents- and your teachers, and your sports heroes, and your favorite actors, singers, YouTube sensations- are fallible. Adults don't know all, and what they do know, they often won't tell you- because they've got their own agendas, or because they want to shield you from the hard truths "for your own good." Adults lie, they betray, they screw up in every way possible...
Richelle E. Goodrich - Making Wishes
The happiest adults are those who never buried old toys or abandoned imaginary friends.
Baba Tunde Ojo-Olubiyo -
Give An African Child Or Adult A Enabled Environment And Proper Facilities Like In The West And See The Many Great Wonders That Would Be Manifested Through This Often Criticized Race. In My Own Case I Was More Fortunate, But Later Transformed From A Soft Heart Person To A Very Stubborn And Stone Heart Person To Enable Me Push On Through. All Those Who Knew Me Could Tell You Of Me Very Well Home And Abroad.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Idiot
I don't like being with grown-up people. I've known that a long time. I don't like it because I don't know how to get on with them.
K. Martin Beckner - Chips of Red Paint
As a very young person, I was ready and willing to explore and try new things, unhampered by the daily routines that adults so often feel obligated to adhere to.
Yōko Ogawa - The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
When we grow up, we find ways to hide our anxieties, our loneliness, our fear and sorrow. But children hide nothing, putting everything into their tears, which they spread liberally about for the whole world to see.
Stephen King - It
Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up
Hendrik Willem van Loon - The Story of Mankind
On the other hand, when you grow up you will discover that some of the people in this world never passed beyond the stage of the cave-man.
Erick Kästner -
Some people discard their childhood like an old hat. They forget about it like a phone number that's no longer valid. They used to be kids, then they became adults - but what are they now?Only those who grow up but continue to be children are humans.
Robert McCammon -
But I think parents aren't teachers anymore. Parents -- or a whole lot of us, at least -- lead by mouth instead of by example. It seems to me that if a child's hero is their mother or father -- or even better, both of them in tandem -- then the rough road of learning and experience is going to be smoothed some. And every little bit of smoothing helps, in this rough old world that wants children to be miniature adults, devoid of charm and magic and the beauty of innocence.
William Deresiewicz -
Now students all seem to be converging on the same self, the successful upper-middle-class professional, impersonating the adult they've already decided they want to become.
Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics
One of my pet peeves was when an adult imagined they had to encapsulate Life for you, hand you Life in a jar, in an eyedropper, in a penguin paperweight full of snow-A Collector's Dream.
Michael Grant - Gone
Listen, Sam, and everyone, you need to know something so it won’t freak you out: Pack Leader can speak. I mean, human words. Like Smart-Girl Barbie there was saying, he’s some kind of mutant or whatever. I know you think I’m probably crazy.”She had Hermit Jim’s tin cup now and used it to scoop up another helping of wonderful, wonderful pudding. Blondie—Astrid—was opening a can of fruit cocktail.“What do you know about the FAYZ?” Astrid asked.Lana stopped eating and stared at her. “The what?”Astr
Peter De Vries -
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.
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.
Brom -
Magic?" What did magic have to do with breaking into someone's store and stealing their stuff?"Don't you get it?" Peter said. "You're free now. You don't have to live by their rules anymore." Peter pointed into the inky blackness of the basement. "The darkness is calling. A little danger, a little risk. Feel your heart race, listen to it. That's the sound of being alive. It's your time, Nick. Your one chance to have fun before it's all stolen by them, the adults, with their cruelty and endless r
Neil Gaiman - The Ocean at the End of the Lane
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 they aren't.
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Shadow
...you seemed to be listening to me, not to find out useful information, but to try to catch me in a logical fallacy. This tells us all that you are used to being smarter than your teachers, and that you listen to them in order to catch them making mistakes and prove how smart you are to the other students. This is such a pointless, stupid way of listening to teachers that it is clear you are going to waste months of our time before you finally catch on that the only transaction that matters is
Catherine Lacey - The Answers
The way children stretch time and the way adults forget that stretch could be one of the saddest differences in the world.
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.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
The average adult hates being treated like a child, unless it suits them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
If we had to earn our age by thinking for ourselves at least once a year, only a handful of people would reach adulthood.
John Green -
I bet if you look at the average teenager and the average adult, the average teenager has read more books in the last year than the average adult. Now of course the adult would be all like, 'I'm busy, I got a job, I got stuff to do.' WHATEVER! READ! I mean, you're watching CSI: Miami. Why would you be watching CSI: Miami, when you could be READING CSI: Miami, the novelization?
Mildred Armstrong Kalish - Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression
Without knowing it, the adults in our lives practiced a most productive kind of behavior modification. After our chores and household duties were done we were give "permission" to read. In other words, our elders positioned reading as a privilege - a much sought-after prize, granted only to those goodhardworkers who earned it. How clever of them.
Maurice Sendak - The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to Present
It's only adults who read the top layers most of the time. I think children read the internal meanings of everything.
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
Though the children did not know Levin well and did not remember when they had last seen him, they did not feel towards him any of that strange shyness and antagonism so often felt by children towards grown-up people who 'pretend,' which causes them to suffer as painfully. Pretence about anything sometimes deceives the wisest and shrewdest man, but, however cunningly it is hidden, a child of the meanest capacity feels it and is repelled by it.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
Most adults are knowledgeable to a child, but ignorant for their age.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana - The Use and Misuse of Children
The average adult has had sex innumerable times more than they have formed an opinion of their own.
Criss Jami - Healology
It is a healthy approach not to expect persons to turn out precisely how you would have wished.
Aurora Levins Morales - Getting Home Alive
The life I chose when I promised my six-year-old self never to forget being a child, never to grow frightened and dishonest like the grownups I saw, nodding politely to each other without affection, and decided to put my true self in a time capsule for later use.
Mehmet Murat ildan -
Every time we see a child we travel back to the times we have forgotten and we bitterly visit all the beautiful things taken from us in the name of being an adult!
Meia Geddes - Love Letters to the World
I would like to do more in appreciating the mindset of the child. Maybe it has something to do with taking ourselves very seriously and with great disregard, as well as having a healthy does of awe and doubt for all else.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana - Release The Ink
A child thinks and acts like a child. But when you are grown, you act and think like an adult. Too many people are still childish and immature and fail to realize it's a setback in their lives.
Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend
Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don't want to think about the rest. Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.
Manprit Kaur -
As adults we get so entrapped in illusions and trivia, that we forget the true essence of life; and so often we need to connect with children, to understand that it is the little, priceless joys that make life beautiful and worthy.
Criss Jami -
Generally it appears the case that, when faced with all life's problems, the baby, he wants to cry about everything, the child wants to question everything, the teenager wants to rebel against everything, the young adult wants to solve everything, the middle-aged adult wants to protect everything, and the elder wants to accept everything.
Paul Gitwaza -
Spiritual maturity is not measured by the years that you have spent in church, rather by your attitude before people different from you.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It is the mystery of the unknownThat fascinates us; we are children stillWayward and wistful; with one hand we clingTo the familiar things we call our own,And with the other, resolute of will,Grope in the dark for what the day will bring
Criss Jami - Electric Personality
A rebel adult often seems like a glorious savior, whereas a rebel child often seems like a little devil.
Maggie Stiefvater - Sinner
You and I both know that love is for children,'' he said. ''We're adults. Compatibility is for adults.''''Compatibility is for my Bluetooth and my car,'' Teresa replied. ''Only they get along just fine, and my car never makes my bluetooth feel like shit.
Kelli Jae Baeli - Supernatural Hypocrisy: The Cognitive Dissonance of a God Cosmology
Progress should never be impeded by a need to coddle adults who respond to the world as children.
Paul Murray - Skippy Dies
Their faith in him is at once touching and alarming -- their trust that they are safe simply because he's with them, as if an adult presence warded of all possible threat, emanated an unbreachable forcefield.
R.L. LaFevers - Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos
As far as I can tell, it doesn't make any difference to adults how clever children are. They always stick together. Unless you are sick or dying or mortally wounded, they will always side with the other adult.
Yōko Ogawa - The Housekeeper and the Professor
He preferred smart questions to smart answers.
Laura Lam - Shadowplay
You two are children almost grown. Your hearts have not hardened to the realities of the world. Your dreams have not fallen through your fingers. You still know hope.
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
V.C. Andrews - Flowers in the Attic
Then turn your eyes back on me,and tell me that Cathy and I are still children to be treated with condescension, and are incapable of understanding adult subjects.
K.J. Bishop - The Etched City
It occurred to Raule that all children were monsters in the world and were instinctively aware of it. They were reminded of their anomalous nature by adults, whom they failed to resemble, and with whose habitations and tools their bodies were at odds. This was surely why the little girl played with the sequins so solemnly and with such intense concentration. She was doing nothing less than conjuring, out of pattern and colour, a world that conformed to her desires and obeyed her will. The boy, o
Neil Gaiman - The Ocean at the End of the Lane
I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children’s books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.
Justin K. McFarlane Beau -
Children are being killed, because some "adults" think life is a game.Something is amiss.When children shoot up other children in school, it's a national tragedy, and a week of mourning.When grown men are killing unarmed young, yes unarmed young, it bespeaks the leagues of fear residing in these men's hearts; that they've created a world in which they themselves have become useless.Then it makes front page, and it becomes business as usual.Something is amiss here.If adults don't truly grow up, t
Toni Morrison - Love
Grownups don't pay it much attention because they can't imagine anything more majestic to a child than their own selves and so confused dependance for reverence.
James A. Murphy - The Waves of Life Quotes and Daily Meditations
Kids are naturally curious about the world around them. Everything is fascinating and holds their attention as they explore their new surroundings. Adults however, have grown up hearing the word ‘no’, ‘don't do that,’ and ‘quit daydreaming so often, they create their own little world, a world with lots of limitations. What then do most adults teach to their children? ‘No’, ‘don't do that,’ and ‘quit daydreaming.’ So, what can you learn from a child today…?
Hillary DePiano - New Year's Thieve
DOSTIE: Let's be honest here. People? Sometimes they suck. But kids, well, they're like a new snowfall, you know?
Criss Jami - Killosophy
Children are the most reasonable about discipline. When they tell you not to do something, it's always because they know why.
E. Nesbit -
This shows you that even mistakes are sometimes valuable, so do not be hard on grown-up people if they are wrong sometimes.
Stephen McCauley - Insignificant Others
From what I can tell, the chief distinguishing factor between children and adults is that children hear everything while appearing not to and adults hear nothing while pretending to listen.
Bryant McGill - Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
I talk to children like adults and to adults like children.
Neil Gaiman - The Ocean at the End of the Lane
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 side, on the old wooden bench, not saying anything. I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really childr
Jenny McCarthy - Bad Habits: Confessions of a Recovering Catholic
I had so much respect for the fact that Father Andrew saw his own sins in my actions. I wished all adults were like Father Andrew.
Neil Gaiman - The Ocean at the End of the Lane
I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies...
Neil Gaiman - The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Children, as I have said, use back ways and hidden paths, while adults take roads and official paths
Alison Bechdel -
Four years after my father's death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation i would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me.
Eric Bishop-Potter - Mrs Fisher and Me
I catch sight of Janice. Her eyes are so full of excitement that I half expect her to jump up and down. This is something she'll never forget, I tell myself. As an old lady with all the spirit knocked out of her and nobody believe in she'll remember a happy day in July when a horny young guy strutted his stuff and made her heart beat fast.
Carter Quinn - Fire & Rain
If you're adult enough to have sex, you're adult enough to talk about your feelings.
Deborah Ainslie - All Flowers Are Not Yellow
Let's teach that loving isn't always loving. Like when you loved the hamster so much that it died. Some adults do that too. Too much, the wrong way. These are 'Stay away' zones on your body. These are 'Stay away' people. You don't have to obey all adults. Not even parents. Disagree respectfully. Run, if you need. Shout, if you need. Adults can be bad too.
Ryan Lilly -
Not only should we encourage kids to daydream, but also to jump-in and build those dreams. Dreaming is largely lost among adults drowning in self-imposed realities.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - The Little Prince
Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them
Anthony T Hincks -
We use Halloween to scare the kids and bankers to scare the adults.
Michael Ende -
One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about.
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
Rick Riordan - The Red Pyramid
Why did adults have to be so thick? They always say “tell the truth,” and when you do, they don’t believe you. What’s the point?
William Deresiewicz - Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
The purpose of college, to put this all another way, is to turn adolescents into adults. You needn't go to school for that, but if you're going to be there anyway, then that's the most important thing to get accomplished. That is the true education: accept no substitutes. The idea that we should take the first four years of young adulthood and devote them to career preparation alone, neglecting every other part of life, is nothing short of an obscenity. If that's what people had you do, then you
John Steinbeck - The Log from the Sea of Cortez
Adults, in their dealing with children, are insane," he [Ed Ricketts] said. "And children know it too. Adults lay down rules they would not think of following, speak truths they do not believe. And yet they expect children to obey the rules, believe the truths, and admire and respect their parents for this nonsense. Children must be very wise and secret to tolerate adults at all. And the greatest nonsense of all that adults expect children to believe is that people learn by experience. No greate
Rick Riordan - The Red Pyramid
Why did adults have to be so thick? They always say 'tell the truth,' and when you do, they don't believe you. What's the point?
Kate DiCamillo - Raymie Nightingale
There was something scary about watching adults sleep. It was as if no one at all were in charge of the world.