Adulthood Quotes

...because you are not trying simply to complete a set of books or toys or Weetabix cards, you are trying to complete yourself, to get back to the whole person you were before, as a child, before the obstructions and compromises of adulthood got in the way. And yet, all you are really doing is accumulating a pile of crap, souvenirs of the futility of the quest.

~ Neil Perryman

Being a child sucked. Being a teenager was worse. And being an adult seemed so far away that I had a better chance at swimming the length of the ocean than growing up.

~ Shannon A. Thompson

I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up 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

Soon, he would become an adult. And when he did, there would be not going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about being a war hero: one you became one, you died one.

~ Khaled Hosseini

Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.

~ Adam Phillips

Already, though, she understood the difference between being a child and being an adult. The difference is when someone says he can keep the bad things away, a child believes him.

~ Joe Hill

You love because you want to need someone the way you did when you were a child, and have them need you too. You eat well because the intensity of taste reminds you of a need satisfied, a pain relieved. The finest paintings are nothing more than the red head of a flower, nodding in the breeze, when you were two years old; the most exciting film is just the way everything was, back in the days when you stared goggle-eyed at the whirling chaos all around you. All these things do is get the adult to shut up for a while, to open for just a moment a tiny sliding window in the cell deep inside, letting the pallid child peep hungrily out and drink the world in before darkness falls again.

~ Michael Marshall Smith

Bloom of adulthood. Try a whiff of that. On your back in the dark you remember. Ah you remember. Cloudless May day. She joins you in the little summerhouse. Entirely of logs. Both larch and fir. Six feet across. Eight from floor to vertex. Area twenty-four square feet to the furthest decimal. Two small multicoloured lights vis-a-vis. Small stained diamond panes. Under each a ledge. There on summer Sundays after his midday meal your father loved to retreat with Punch and a cushion. The waist of his trousers unbuttoned he sat on the one ledge and turned the pages. You on the other your feet dangling. When he chuckled you tried to chuckle too. When his chuckle died yours too. That you should try to imitate his chuckle pleased and amused him greatly and sometimes he would chuckle for no other reason than to hear you try to chuckle too. Sometimes you turn your head and look out through a rose-red pane. You press your little nose against the pane and all without is rosy. The years have flown and there at the same place as then you sit in the bloom of adulthood bathed in rainbow light gazing before you. She is late.

~ Samuel Beckett

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

~ Robert Charles Wilson

Adulthood’s full of ghosts... High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.

~ Emily St. John Mandel

Defining yourself in terms of how you rank is always dangerous and ultimately immature. It doesn't matter whether the rank has to do with your grades, your weight or where you finished in the 800 meter race. Becoming a mature adult means, among other things, that you define yourself relative to your own potential, not relative somebody else's standard.

~ Leonard Sax

‎With adulthood comes responsibility.

~ Mary Lydon Simonsen

It’s adult swim time and I’m diving in here at the shallow end.

~ Suzanne Finnamore

I mean, all I do here is do the work that my bosses tell me to do the way they tell me to do it. I don't have to think at all. It's like I just put my brain in a locker before I start work and pick it up on the way home. I spend seven hours a day at a workbench, planting hairs into wig bases, then I eat dinner in the cafeteria, take a bath, and of course I have to sleep, like everybody else, so out of a twenty-four-hour day, the amount of free time I have is like nothing. And because I'm so tired from work, the 'free time' I have I mostly spend lying around in a fog. I don't have any time to sit and think about anything. Of course, I don't have to work on the weekends, but then I have to do the laundry and cleaning I've let go, and sometimes I go into town, and before I know it the weekend is over. I once made up my mind to keep a diary, but I had nothing to write, so I quit after a week. I mean, I just do the same thing over and over again, day in, day out.

~ Haruki Murakami

But as you get older, your courage attracts gunk and crusty things and dirt and fear and knowing how bad things can get and what pain feels like. By the time you're half-grown, your courage barely moves at all, it's so grunged up with living. So every once in a while, you have to scrub it up and get the works going or else you'll never be brave again. Unfortunately, there are not so many facilities in the world that proveide the kind of services we do. So most people go around with grimy machinery, when all it would take is a bit of spit and polish to make them paladins once more, bold knights and true.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they'd be different

~ Tana French

I kept thinking there were two kinds of adults: There were...miserable creatures who scoured the earth in search of something to hurt. And then there were people like my parents, who walked around zombically, doing whatever they had to do to keep walking around.

~ John Green

She had the feeling, the tingling, lingering sense that something or someone life altering was just over the horizon. She had no idea what it was, but she wanted to rush headlong to bring it to her.

~ Mandy Nachampassack-Maloney

...when it comes to defining adulthood, nothing has made me feel more grown-up than knowing that one of the two people in the world who loved me the most, without condition, was no longer in the world.

~ Jean Hannah Edelstein

...being around him wasn’t good for Quentin. He could feel himself regressing in the direction of an adolescent tantrum—it was like trying to talk to his parents. He lost all perspective on who he was and how far he’d come.

~ Lev Grossman

In the book, you lost your powers. In the movie, you chose not to use them as much. I guess I did a little of both.

~ Mara Wilson

Because of the consequences of trying to be heard as a child, many adults are unable to take the risk of telling as adults. The fear of the consequences is almost debilitating. The abusers and controllers know that; they rely on it.

~ Darlene Ouimet

No one explains this to you, he thought. That there are so many things without solution.

~ Jesse Ball

He knew he could never jingle change in his pocket or park his car like a confident adult, he was the Adrian he had always been, casting a guilty look over a furtive shoulder, living in eternal dread of a grown-up striding forward to clip his ear.But there again, when he sipped at the whiskey his eyes failed to water and his throat forgot to burn. The body shamelessly welcomed what once it would have rejected. At breakfast he demanded not Ricicles and chocolate spread, but coffee and unbuttered toast. And if the coffee was sugared he leapt from it like a colt from an electric fence. He ate the crust and left the filling, guzzled the olives and spurned the cherries. Yet inside he remained the same Adrian who fought down the urge to stand and shout 'Bullocks' during church services, smelt his own farts and wasted hours skimming through National Geographic on the off-chance of seeing a few naked bodies.

~ Stephen Fry

Teenagers - tired of being hassled by your parents?Act now!Move out, get a job, pay your own bills.....while you still know everything.

~ James Hauenstein

It may have been my youth that forged my heart but it is my adulthood that defines me now. ~quote by Roe'vaash in Then'diel's HEART

~ K. Farrell St. Germain

The last remnants of Deanna the child--the idealist, the sheltered elite--had been torn loose by tonight's tragedies, slain with the same bullet that had felled her would-be killer. She had no idea who the new person inhabiting this shell of her old self would become. The realization frightened her.

~ Leslie Ann Moore

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.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

I remember everything,' Bette Midler flatly notes. 'But you know how in life, you tend to hold grudges? Well, I don’t do that any more. Bad, bad stuff. I did as a young person, but it just wore me out. Oh, it really did! How many times can you wake up in the middle of the night gnashing your teeth? It’s so boring. Give it up!

~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

That was the problem, wasn't it? You left home. But you never did become an adult. Not really. You just fucked up in different and more complicated ways.

~ Mark Haddon

Magda looks at me as if I've gone mad. Or I've grown up. It's kind of the same thing.

~ Victoria Schwab

The onset of adulthood is an organic, creeping process. No one wakes up one day and decides, Lo, on this day I shall forever put away childish things and begin clipping coupons to go to Wal-Mart.

~ David Carr

Human Millipede 6 was the highest-grossing movie of the summer and returned Nicholas Cage to Oscar-winning status.

~ C.z. Hazard

Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn’t miss an appointment, it never has.

~ Juan Gabriel Vásquez

What happens to you when you get older? Do you just forget everything from before you turned eighteen? Do you make yourself forget?

~ Patrick Ness

The vast majority of incest begins years before the earliest conceivable age of consent. p4

~ Judith Lewis Herman

Above all, staring at my old bedroom ceiling, I feel safe. Cocooned from the world; wrapped up in cotton wool. No one can get me here. No one even knows I'm here. I won't get any nasty letters and I won't get any nasty phone calls and I won't get any nasty visitors. It's like a sanctuary. I feel as if I'm fifteen again, with nothing to worry about but my Homework. (And I haven't even got any of that.)

~ Sophie Kinsella

When we see an innocent child, this is an ordinary thing; but when we see an innocent adult, this is an extraordinary thing!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

He had always imagined that some sort of emotional mental equipment was meant to arrive, when he was forty-five, say, or fifty, a kind of kit that would enable him to deal with the impending loss of a parent. If he were only in possession of this equipment, he would be just fine. He would be noble and selfless, wise and philosophical. Perhaps he would even have kids of his own, and would presumably possess the kind of maturity that comes with fatherhood, the understanding of life as a process.

~ David Nicholls

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

~ Chad Harbach