Adulthood Quotes

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.

~ Meg Ray

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.

~ Betsy Cornwell

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

~ Alison Espach

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

~ Gia Russell

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

~ Tim Relf

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.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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, and he should have had decades left to play; a century of games and joy and edging cautiously toward adulthood.But he didn’t. I could see his childhood dying in his eyes as he looked at me, silently begging me to answer for him.

~ Seanan Mcguire

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.

~ M. Verano

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.

~ Pierce Brown

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.

~ James Thurber

Once we were young, now we are adult.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

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.

~ James P. Blaylock

I had been riding horses before my memory kicked in, so my life with horses had no beginning. It simply appeared from the fog of infancy. I survived a difficult childhood by traveling on the backs of horses, and in adulthood the pattern didn't change.

~ Monty Roberts

We look at the world once, in childhood.The rest is memory

~ Louise Glück

There is magic everywhere around you, but most people are too busy being grownup to notice it.

~ Sassafras Lowrey

You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

~ Sylvia Plath

Stupid girl. You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

~ Sylvia Plath

If you manage to make it to some semblance of adulthood, just showing up turns out to be one of the kindest, most selfless things you can do for someone.

~ Tim Kreider

My father moved out a week later. I hugged him at our front door and couldn't bear to watch him leave with so much luggage.

~ Alison Espach

You go through so many changes as a child, then you grow up and discover that none of that stuff mattered, except for the impression it made on your mind.

~ Joan Walton Collaso

A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.

~ Thomas Szasz

The most difficult journey any of us ever take in our adulthood is the return to our parents’ house. A home visit makes us recall all of the childhood events that formed us. Returning home reacquaints us with family members and our former self.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

At thirty a man steps out of the darkness and wasteland of preparation into active life it is the time to show oneself, the time of fulfillment.

~ Thomas Mann

There, sitting cross-legged on the floor, he stared absently at his legs. They began to look strange. They no longer seemed to grow from his trunk at all, but rather, completely unconnected, they sprawled rudely before him. When he got this far, he realized something he had never noticed before—that his legs were unbearably hideous. With hair growing unevenly and blue streaks running rampant, they were terribly strange creatures.

~ Sōseki Natsume

I didn't grasp that desire and duty could rival each other, least of all that they most often did.

~ Susan Choi

A child who grows up too closely aligned with adults assumes knowledge of a life she hasn’t yet experienced.

~ Suzanne Haynes

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

~ Maia Wojciechowska

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.

~ Lauren Groff

I thought that once I got to this city nothing could ever catch up with me because I could remake my life daily. Once that had made me feel infinite. Now I was certain I would never learn. Being remade was the same thing as being constantly undone.

~ Stephanie Danler

Pigeons flew in diminishing waves between the low buildings. The sun rose. It said, Now that you've done this, you can never have that. Now that I'm like this, I can never go back.

~ Stephanie Danler

Most insensible, corrupt, cheap, disrespectful young girls run after bad, rude, cocky, nonsensical boys, but a mature, educated, thoughtful, virtuos lady opts for a wise, well breed, experienced, humble, modest gentleman.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Sometimes he looked at her and thought, Gosh, I wonder what's underneath all that anger, all that hard glossy armor? Maybe there's just an innocent, wounded little girl in there who wants to come out and play and be loved and get happy. But now he wondered if maybe that little girl was long gone, or if she'd ever been there at all. What was under all that armor, all that anger? More anger, and more armor. Anger and armor, all the way down.

~ Lev Grossman

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.

~ Hendrik Willem Van Loon

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!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

All fathers are liars . . . If you want to be a father, you have to be prepared to become a liar.

~ Alison Espach

He welcomes the chance to do fatherly things with the little girl, and those ten morning minutes with dear little four-year-old Ruby, with her deep soulful eyes, and the wondrous things she sees with them, and her deep soulful voice, and the precious though not entirely memorable things she says with it, and the smell of baby shampoo and breakfast cereal filling the car, that little shimmering capsule of time is like listening to cello music in the morning, or watching birds in a flutter of industry building a nest, it simply reminds you that even if God is dead, or never existed in the first place, there is, nevertheless, something tender at the center of creation, some meaning, some purpose and poetry.

~ Scott Spencer

Lies are for adults who are sad in their lives.

~ Jesse Eisenberg

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.

~ Sol Luckman

Fettucini alfredo is macaroni and cheese for adults.

~ Mitch Hedberg

It's mind-boggling when you think about how important it is to do what you feel is right. You don't know what you'll be missing when you make a bad choice.

~ Jay Alton