Quotes about growing-up

It’s called ”being an artist” for a reason it’s something YOU ARE. It’s how you live. It’s WHO you are. How you spend your life and what you leave behind.

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.

Growing apart doesn't change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side our roots will always be tangled. I'm glad for that.

It made me realize that Beatrice had changed that she did not pull her wagon so much as she got taken for rides.

Today was the end of freedom. High school had fallen behind college loomed ahead. Tomorrow he traded freedom and Arizona for Colorado and discipline.

Youth is but the painted shell within which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the spirit of a man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some than in others.

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.

When the most important things in our life happen we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is going on. A man does not always say to himself, "hullo! i'm growing up." It is only when he looks back that he realises what has happened and recognises it as what people call "growing up.

I did not see Pirahã teenagers moping, sleeping in late, refusing to accept responsibility for their own actions, or trying out what they considered to be radically new approaches to life. They in fact are highly productive and conformist members of their community in the Pirahã sense of productivity (good fishermen, contributing generally to the security, food needs, and other aspects of the physical survival of the community). One gets no sense of teenage angst, depression, or insecurity among

You know all those bad girls who take off their selendang and put round their neck like fashion-show? One day, when the wind is very strong, the selendang will catch the wind. Then it will swing up and down and then round and round so fast, very fast, until it traps the spirit of the wind. Then it will grow long and thick and wrap itself round and round and round this girl’s neck. And then, when the girl cannot breathe, it will swallow her whole. Be careful, girl, be careful how you wear this.

Feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up.

Then, as Father had trained him, Rigg thought past his feelings.

I once made a solemn vow that I could not keep... I am from this world. Even with all its failures and suffering it is still worthy of my best efforts... and wishing it was otherwise does not make it so." Eiij'lam told the king.

Love is growing up.

Before you know it you'll be my age telling your own granddaughter the story of your life and you wanna make it an interesting one, don't you? You wanna be able to tell her some adventures, some excitements, some something. How you live your life, little one, is a gift for those who come after you, a kind of inheritance.

...that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my

Jocelyn did not want to always remain the same. Where was the adventure in that?

I realized if I didn’t just go, I’d never go. Going was the key. It didn’t matter where I was headed just as long as I was headed somewhere. ~ Ben Davis

September felt panic burn through her like gasoline. Why couldn't he understand her? "But I didn't [choose]! I have hardly had a chance to breathe since I got here and it's always like that in Fairyland. Everything is always happening and all at once. And I am growing up, Saturday! I am growing up and I have read books, so many books, and I know that growing up means you can't keep going to Fairyland the way you did when you were a child! Something happens to you and suddenly you have to keep a

The beige linoleum floor turned into the ocean, crashed and crashed against Lotto's shins. He sat down. How swiftly things spun. Two minutes ago he'd been a kid, thinking about his nintendo system, worried about asymptotes and signs. Now he was, heavy, adult.

Everything was brighter and more colorful in those years, as if my childhood was ending in an explosion of unreal passion that made my life feel sacred and holy.

It was only high school after all, definitely one of the most bizarre periods in a person’s life. How anyone can come through that time well adjusted on any level is an absolute miracle.

Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't (...) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That's me and my memories.

Aging is something! It always makes you remember yesterday!

I guess I just grew up thinking that when we become adults, we get to do what we love. For work, for fun, forever. I don't know where I got that from. Seems silly now.

... and it was quite a sad thing,the way I watched you sleep like nothing could go wrong and I did not want to harm it, I did not want to blur it, but how could I notwhen everything I’ve ever known has slowly gone awayand I know by now that that’s the way you let the new day in with new roads and views and chances to growbut it was quite a sad thing because I don’t want this to ever become ’then’ or ’was’ and it was quite an unfamiliar thing. The way I took off my shoes again, put down my bag an

For your information, Lester, there are at least five wonderful parts of the female body that can be viewed by the owner only with a hand mirror.

For your information, Lester, there are at least five wonderful parts of the female body that can be viewed by the owner only with a hand mirror.'And as they stared after me, I went regally back down the hallway and up the stairs to Dad's room.

Dad?""What?" A small bird rises from a tree in front of us."What should I be when I grow up?"The bird disappears over a far ridge. I don't know what to say. "Honest," I finally say.

I liked being with the books: they reminded me of how many ways of thinking existed outside my own - how small and fleeting my pulse was when set alongside those ageing spines.

When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.

In my experience, the biggest reason people struggle to get where they want to be is guilt. Guilt that they have let someone down, and also guilt that they are about to leave someone they love ...behind.

But space shrinks when you get old, and things lose their wonder, and the wisest thing to do then is to try your best to sleep.

He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.

My child, I know you're not a childBut I still see you running wildBetween those flowering trees.Your sparkling dreams, your silver laughYour wishes to the stars above Are just my memories.And in your eyes the oceanAnd in your eyes the seaThe waters frozen overWith your longing to be free.Yesterday you'd awokenTo a world incredibly old.This is the age you are brokenOr turned into gold.You had to kill this child, I know.To break the arrows and the bowTo shed your skin and change.The trees are flo

Release-For yearsthey told you tosit.Stay.Now they open the doorand tell you toget up.Leave.Where do you gowith no oneto show youthe way?

She had been a teenager once, and she knew that, despite the apparent contradictions, a person's teenage years lasted well into their fifties.

At their core, Tiger Eyes, Forever..., and Sally J. Freeman are all books about teenage issues, but to an adult reader, the parents' story lines seem to almost overshadow their daughters. I'm bringing an entirely new set of experiences to these novels now, and my reward is a fresh set of story lines that i missed the first time around. I'm sure that in twenty or thirty years I'll read these books again and completely identify with all the grandparent characteristics. That's the wonderful thing a

When Uncle W. G. held out his hand to take my money, I dropped the dead mouse in his hand.

I'm going to go throw up now, because ive turned into my dad. If vomiting doesn't work, I'll see if I can get an exorcism.

I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility.

Part of me is afraid that everyone will laugh, that I’m a caricature of myself.

I wasn’t ready to think about the other yet: that it wasn’t that I wasn’t right for Macon, but that maybe he wasn’t right for me. There was a difference. Even for someone who things didn’t come easy for, someone like me.

Boys annoyed her. Girls annoyed her. She should have been a cat.

She’d always pictured her future self as a lone wolf traveling around the world, ensnaring romantic conquests and achieving her wildest and most ambitious goals. She didn’t think that at nineteen she would be so dependent on other people; she pictured herself as an autonomous and untouchable force that occasionally flitted back home to show off her new feathers before flying away to her life that was much more exciting than theirs.

Laura knew then that she was not a little girl any more. Now she was alone; she must take care of herself. When you must do that, then you do it and you are grown up. Laura was not very big, but she was almost thirteen years old, and no one was there to depend on. Pa and Jack had gone, and Ma needed help to take care of Mary and the little girls, and somehow to get them all safely to the west on a train.

It didn't matter what anyone else saw in me. For the first time, I felt like I was seeing myself.

There was always so much I didnt know, but not knowing was part of it all.

Growing up, I believed in miracles. I guess I don’t anymore.

So it was a crossroads summer, when the universe seemed to stand perilously still like an egg wobbling on a precipice, a regular rite of passage summer that saw us traverse the hazardous divide between the illusions of boyhood and the far more pernicious deceptions of maturity, et cetera.

I would have stayed forever within the garden of Re-mose's childhood, but time is a mother's enemy.

Ethan’s voice was choked. “I realize now, what my father felt. When I left home. He must have felt as if everything was ending. That everything he knew was finishing. I wasn't even aware of what he was going through, how it felt for him. I was so caught up in the excitement of moving out and having a job that would buy me a car. I was so eager to leave. His heart was breaking, and I totally missed it. I was completely unaware that his whole world was changing too. But for him it wasn't gaining,

Your love life is insignificant when it comes to raising your children to be respectable human beings. The moment you see them suffer or lower their standards because of your selfishness, is the day you should realize that nothing matters more than them. You are not just the queen or king of your fairy tale. The real story of your life is the gift of time God gave you with them.

All seek perfection from our parents … Just wait till your parents start depending on you, that is when your own perfection, or lack thereof, will be apparent.

For the first time he considers the full emotional dimensions of the day. His life is changing but his parent’s lives are changing too. Like a habitat, abruptly deprived of a major species, the household will be wrenched into realignment by his departure. Like all young people, he has no idea who his parents really are. For 18 years he has experienced their existence only in so far as it is related to his own needs. Suddenly his mind is full of questions. What do they talk about when he's not ar

One day ask your daughter the kind of mother she wants to be! One day ask your son the kind of father he wants to be! One day ask yourself the kind of parent you have been! And one day, ask yourself how you have run the race of life through the good and the bad times with the baton of life in your hands!

Stop using him, and start protecting him. I know he thinks he doesn't need it, but sometimes he does. Sometimes we all do.

Until she had had children of her own she had not been able to contemplate the death of either of her parents; when the subject had arisen, in conversation or in her own imagining, she had said only: I just don't know what I'd do.

But kids don't stay where they're supposed to. You turn around and find her not in the bedroom but hiding in a closet; you turn around and see she's not three but thirteen. Parenting is really just a matter of tracking, of hoping your kids do not get so far ahead you can no longer see their next moves.

She was deemed an unfit mother, in spite of the fact that she goes to the gym every day,' Hal once told me. . . .Beautiful people are often forgiven for many things--and maybe she's gotten through life that way, but I don't forgive her for anything--and I don't even know what awful things she's done other than showing a lack of parental fitness.

I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.Brian Fitzgerald, talking about his children.

Sometimes you really want to say "Duh," but you can't. It's a part of growing up, I guess.

Except that today, oblivious to everyone, there is a hair standing tall inside his shorts: a single hair: long, black and shining. Sprouting out of nowhere, it stands rebelliously erect on his tiny barren orb, not thwarted by the force of the cloth of his underwear, announcing its eventual arrival with élan.

It's really best not to tell people when you feel bad. Growing up is about keeping secrets, and pretending everything is fine.

I, on the other hand, still might not be considered a proper adult. I had been very grown-up in primary school. But as I continued through secondary school, I in fact became less grown-up. And then as the years passed, I turned into quite a childlike person. I suppose I just wasn't able to ally myself with time.

Maybe you never stop feeling like an eight-year-old in front of your parents. You resolve to be your mature self, to react in this considered way rather than that elemental way, to breathe evenly from the bottom of your stomach and to see your parents as equals, but within five minutes your intentions are blown to hell, and you're babbling and screaming in rage like an angry child.

It’s hard to have done all one’s growing up since 33 — but that’s a damn sight better than not growing up at all.

This is the first fall that I haven't gone to school. Maybe that's why I feel weird all the time.

Since when do you look out for me? You really have grown up.""Had to happen sometime," I say.

How do we deal with all the people we’ve been? What happens when we have to confront them?

It was like adults had their own little world that we weren't allowed to be a part of, and it didn't make sense because we were part of the world, too.

I'm seventeen today and dressed for a party. But I can't move. I can't think, much less move. I can't breathe, much less think. This is the moment when my life will change forever.

Remember, it's still a mystery to be an adult. If you knew it all before eighteen, you'd have nothing to look forward to.

It was tough coming to the realization that I wasn’t interested in anything, though realizing it didn’t mean I could then immediately find something to engage my interest. I tried to think of something. Maybe I could study a foreign language or study abroad in Rome or somewhere? Or, more realistically, grab some guy I knew and have a destination wedding abroad. But everything I could think of was based on how envious it would make people, not on any genuine interest I might have.

We make people into Gods, desperate that they never leave us and hopeful that someday, if we ever deserve it, maybe they’ll love us back even half way.

He broke off his explanation, seeing in his daughter's eyes the exact moment that a child first understands there are limits on what her parents can do, rather than just limits on what they choose to do. He knelt before her in a moment's silence, somewhat less than he had been just seconds before, and Emy a half step closer to the woman she would one day become.

It doesn't matter. I've moved on from something that was never there to begin with. That's one of the dire things about escaping from childhood. Eventually you grow up and realize the things you wanted when you were young weren't really yours to ask for. I know that now.

At seventeen, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you became as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked "this too shall pass" - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something that everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgettingone how painful it had been at the time.

I don't really enjoy it, Mom.""And you've always felt this way?""I don't know. I guess I want a break.

Sometimes you’re 23 and standing in the kitchen of your house making breakfast and brewing coffee and listening to music that for some reason is really getting to your heart. You’re just standing there thinking about going to work and picking up your dry cleaning. And also more exciting things like books you’re reading and trips you plan on taking and relationships that are springing into existence. Or fading from your memory, which is far less exciting. And suddenly you just don’t feel at home

I guess that’s what growing up is. Saying good-by to a lot of things. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it isn’t. But it is all right.

Growing up feels like your skin no longer fits. Like you just want to crawl out of that thinly stretched space and lay down in the grass and sob for hours. Instead, I am in a cafe eating lunch and trying not to scream. Looking around wondering if anyone else in this building is doing the same thing, wondering if they ever have and, if so, how they got through it. Maybe I would calm down if I just had the assurance that other people have looked in the mirror and no longer recognized themselves. M

Perhaps I just wanted to know what it was that I wanted. Maybe that is all that growing up means.

But, really, are there any guys out there who aren’t jerks? I don’t even know any grown-up men who aren’t jerks.

Seniority has nothing to do with intellectuality, your individuality wins the majority or minority, simply because you maintained the status quo of your peculiarity.

That’s the thing about being youngwe are textbook pagesof trial and errorfalling down and getting upnot by way of standing andbrushing off our jeansbuy by laying where we felluntil we were high enough to forget

You learn, finally, that you'll die, and so you try to hang on to your own life, that gentle, naive kid you used to be, but then after a while the sentiment takes over, and the sadness, because you know for a fact that you can't ever bring any of it back again. You just can't.

I don't have to get married to grow up!

My existence is young like the blossoming leaves. I have experienced nothing yet.

He left that morning, the last words still echoing in my head, and though he said he’d come back one day I know a broken promise from a right one for I have used them myself and there is no coming back. Minds like ours are can’t be tamed and the price for freedom is the price we pay.

How did I get to be a grown-up? At times, I find myself still sitting on the hillside, plotting revenge against the adult world.

The older I get the more mixed up life seems. When you're little, it's all so plain. It's all laid out like a game ready to play. You think you know exactly how it's going to go. But things happen...

You don't grow up, she reasoned now, until you begin to evaluate yourself, to recognize your good traits and acknowledge that you have a few faults.

If you happen to be white in a white country; pretty according to the dictates of fashion; rich in a country where money is adored, it’s almost impossible to grow up and to grow up honest inside. It is almost impossible. Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging. But to grow up, to take responsibility for the time you take up, and the space you occupy, to honor every l

Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience.

She logged in and read a few of her old posts, smiling at the issues she had raged about and shaking her head at how some of the rants now seemed pretentious and judgmental. She had grown so much without even realizing she had. Mythili typed out the draft, spicing it up subtly and after a last read, she published it. Admiring the brand new post on her main page, she realized she missed writing. She had barely written anything since her last by-line. Typing this out, she felt like she was back wi

I know more about my father than I used to know: I know he wanted to be a pilot in the war but could not, because the work he did was considered essential to the war effort… I know he grew up on a farm in the backwoods of Nova Scotia, where they didn’t have running water or electricity. This is why he can build things and chop things… He did his high school courses by correspondence, sitting at the kitchen table and studying by the light by a kerosene lamp; he put himself through university by w

Jacen reflected bitterly that a large part of growing up seemed to involve watching everything change, and discovering that all changes are permanent. That nothing ever changes back. That you can’t go home again.

but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst. So how do you tell an adult that maybe everything wrong in the world stems from the fact that she’s stopped believing the impossible can happen?