Adulthood Quotes

But grownups were always in a turmoil, every possible action muddied over by thoughts of the consequences, by self-doubt, by selfimage, by feelings of love and responsibility. Every possible choice seemed to have drawbacks, and sometimes he didn't understand why the drawbacks were drawbacks. It was very hard.

~ Stephen King

Interesting, Miles thought. Like himself, Father Mark, as a child, had been reassured by the imagined proximity of God, whereas adults, perhaps because they so often were up to no good, took more comfort from His remoteness.

~ Richard Russo

I wondered what a man I had encountered the day before on the plane en route to Chicago's O'Hare airport would have made of this. As he tried to push through a crowded aisle, he said loudly: Life is never easy. And it's never pleasant. I couldn't let this go. I looked up at him from my seat and said, I do hope life gives you cause to change that opinion. Otherwise you may find that opinion walking ahead of you, giving you more and more reasons to believe it.

~ Robert Moss

Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth.

~ Maya Angelou

He started writing poetry again, but it didn't come as easily. It was hard now to get past the self-consciousness - the silliness, really - of being such a well-established adult applying himself, seriously, to such a youthful joy.

~ B.j. Novak

He was still a kid inside. His body had grown, stretched, towered, tanned its skin, hardened its muscle, darkened its tawny shock of long hair, tightened its lines around jaw and eyes, thickened fingers and knuckles, but the brain didn't feel as if it had grown in sympathy with the rest. It was still green, full of tall, lush oaks and elms in summer; a creek ran through it, and the kids climbed around on its convolutions shouting, This way, gang - we'll take a short-cut and head them off at Dead Man's Gulch!

~ Ray Bradbury

It's strange how in childhood it feels like tomorrow won't come until the end of forever, but in adulthood it feels like the end of forever could come tomorrow.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Young people must appreciate the beauty of old age. The old people were once young.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Treasure the beauty of youthful life and the wisdom of adulthood.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

When you're finally a grown-up, one of the things you find is that there are no grown-ups.

~ Charles Finch

Like everyone I slipped into adulthood like a delinquent through the back door.

~ Charles Finch

They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.

~ George Eliot

The period of time between eligibility to vote and the start of adulthood is a window of opportunity that the liberals are willing to exploit to their advantage.

~ Mike Klepper

The adult world may seem a cold and empty place, with no fairies and no Father Christmas, no Toyland or Narnia, no Happy Hunting Ground where mourned pets go, and no angels - guardian or garden variety. But there are also no devils, no hellfire, no wicked witches, no ghosts, no haunted houses, no daemonic possession, no bogeymen or ogres. Yes, Teddy and Dolly turn out not to be really alive. But there are warm, live, speaking, thinking, adult bedf ellows to hold, and many of us find it a more rewarding kind of love than the childish affection for stuffed toys, however soft and cuddly they may be.

~ Richard Dawkins

Not to grow up properly is to retain our 'caterpillar' quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our caterpillar nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists and quacks. The genius of the human child, mental caterpillar extraordinary, is for soaking up information and ideas, not for criticizing them. If critical faculties later grow it will be in spite of, not because of, the inclinations of childhood. The blotting paper of the child's brain is the unpromising seedbed, the base upon which later the sceptical attitude, like a struggling mustard plant, may possibly grow. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive scepticism of adult science.

~ Richard Dawkins

here was no way of knowing what path he would take from there, but in order to survive as a human being, he was sure to arrive at the fate of having to incur the dislike of other human beings. When that time came, he would probably clothe himself inconspicuously, so as not to attract attention, and beggarlike, linger about the market places of man, in search of something.

~ Sōseki Natsume

Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.

~ Dr. Seuss

For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.

~ John Connolly

I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.

~ Madeleine L'engle

People never grow up, they just learn how to act in public.

~ Bryan White

When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you

~ Gail Carson Levine

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

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia. Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.

~ Katherine Dunn

Yet there be certain times in a young man’s life, when, through great sorrow or sin, all the boy in him is burnt and seared away so that he passes at one step to the more sorrowful state of manhood

~ Rudyard Kipling

He considered himself, and the way he moved in reaction, like a pinball, from one thing to the next, as he was told, as was expected, as made the least friction, and he knew this was the lazy behavior of a scared boy.

~ Laleh Khadivi

They didn't really have a childhood. Just them and Mom and then her liver went and she died and it was just them. Except they never learned to be grown-ups. And they never learned to be just kids, either. Stuck in never-never land. Kinda sad.

~ Gerry Boyle

The most childish thing is to believe that you are an adult now...

~ Himanshu Bisht

Unresolved issues from childhood revisit us in adulthood.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

She would never, ever understand the idea that a child, especially an infant, was of more value than an adult who had already gained all the skills needed to benefit the community. The death of potential was somehow worse than a loss of achievement and knowledge was something she had never been able to wrap her brain around.

~ Becky Chambers

Childhood is an exploratory period of calculated investigation. The nagging feeling that a child’s life has not really began until he or she attains adulthood makes growing up both a whimsical and fretful time. Childhood is not all merriment since a child realizes that seamless youthful days are an experiment for adulthood.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Will the time ever come when I am not so completely dependent on thoughts I first had in childhood to furnish the feedstock for my comparisons and analogies and sense of the parallel rhythms of microhistory? Will I reach a point where there will be a good chance, I mean a more than fifty-fifty chance, that any random idea popping back into the foreground of my consciousness will be an idea that first came to me when I was an adult, rather than one I had repeatedly as a child?

~ Nicholson Baker

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. ... I wonderes 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.

~ Neil Gaiman

You see, I don't think age matters so much as people think. Parts of me are still 12 and I think other parts were already 50 when I was 12….

~ C.s. Lewis

Adults were constantly auditioning, but for what?

~ Alison Espach

They sealed this promise by hooking pinkies, the way they used to, long ago, when promises didn't hurt as much.

~ Alice Hoffman

Eventually he understood that he was crying for himself. He was ashamed of the man whom he had become, mourning the man whom he had expected to be when he'd been a boy.

~ Dean Koontz

Nobody truly becomes an adult. The child we have been is always there, deep inside of us. As time passes, we think we're growing, but maturity is only an illusion; a hindrance to our free child soul.

~ Jirō Taniguchi

Vivien thought how ugly adults could be, how weak. So used to getting what they wanted that they didn't know the first thing about being brave.

~ Kate Morton

If you can’t find any fun during childhood, you naturally won’t look for it as you grow up to maturity. You will grow ‘hard,’ and look upon fun as foolish. Also, if you don’t furnish fun for a child, don’t look for it to grow up bright, happy and loving. So, always put in a child’s path an opportunity to watch, talk about, and know, as many good things as you can.

~ Ernest Vincent Wright

Sometimes your kids will say the nastiest things, won't they, Rose? You want to ask,'Whose child is this?'Rose chuckled.But usually, they're just in some kind of pain. They need to work it out.

~ Mitch Albom