Coming Of Age Quotes

Recalling his first dreams of flight when he was a small child, Max acknowledged that his entire existence had been building up to this tipping point where he could finally choose to release his self-imposedlimitations.

~ Sol Luckman

Patience is the virtue that forges great men.

~ Chris Vincent

These Aussie girls are free to set their own courses in the world, to meander and experiment. Their travels are not bumps along the road - they are life itself. See the world and then come home and decide who you want to be in it, not the other way around, as seems the general trajectory in the U.S.

~ Rachel Friedman

We can change in one day. We can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in one day.

~ Gayle Forman

When it was time to board my flight, I took one last glance back. I knew that I had everything with me so it was not a make sure I have everything glance. It was more like a parting glance to Philadelphia, my home, America- for I would not be coming back for ten months. (Ch 5- Twenty in Paris)

~ Andrea Bouchaud

Growing up, I never felt deprived. I was always happy. It seems only lately I've started seeing everything I didn't have.

~ Kasie West

I fall in love with Paraíso. It’s like a giant playground where I’m never scolded for running around recklessly, where I’m almost overwhelmed with the amount of attention and love I receive from Mami’s family. In New York, I’m invisible.

~ Raquel Cepeda

I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she'd tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you're ever going to. Look around. It's all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain.

~ Janet Fitch

When I was younger, my mom loved to garden. But the flowers would never grow. She kept planting seeds even thought nothing would grow. She just kept trying.''I don't understand.''Because you can't.''What does this have to do with anything?'I don't fiddle with my fingers and there's no apology on the tip of my tongue when I say, 'I am my mother's son.

~ Ellie Lieberman

Life is a valuable and unique opportunityto discover who you are.But it seems as soon as you nearanswering that age-old question,something unexpected always happensto alter your course.And who it is you thought you weresuddenly changes.Then comes the frustrating realizationthat no matter how long life endures,no matter how many experiencesare muddled through in this existence,you may never really be ableto answer the question....Who am I? Because the answer, like the seasons,constantly, subtly, inevitably changes.And who it is you are today,is not the same person you will be tomorrow.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

It was almost painful to be different.

~ Shannon A. Thompson

Is the ash in trees, babies, flowers, and visions of Godbetter than the visions themselves? Then you think,none of this is tangible or concrete. So you have another cigaretteand think about the (not one) but many ghosts you keep tucked away,under sheets, under beds, in notes, within other ghosts.

~ Derek Keck

wasn’t no bit of me willing to ride shotgun to my own funeral.

~ J.d. Jordan

I was the luckiest girl. Don’t you think because I didn’t have no proper man or husband I was anything else. Wasn’t no place I’d rather be than right there. Even now, I pine for that uncomfortable rock. Because he was watching over me and loneliness was some far off thing, echoing off the Rock from other folks. Wasn’t nothing could ruin it for me.

~ J.d. Jordan

Was still between Martha and Jane, then, I was. Between the girl I was and who I wanted to be.

~ J.d. Jordan

There were the signed, spiral-bound Spirit-in-the-Woods yearbooks from three summers in a row and the aerial photograph of everyone at camp the second summer. In it, Ethan's feet were planted on Jule's head, and Jule's feet were planted on Goodman's head, and so on and so on. And didn't it always go like that-body parts not quite lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.

~ Meg Wolitzer

She leans over the desk to write and even though I feel bad for doing it, I watch her body as she does. Her shirt lifts just a little as she’s bending over and whether she’s aware of it or not, her lower back is exposed. I’ve spent the last eight years ignoring this girl, but one small view of her back and it’s putting my body into overdrive. I’ve never wanted to kiss someone there so much in my life.

~ Melyssa Winchester

Adam stared down at me, his expression thunderous. “It was you. I know it was you.” My head was rocking side to side before I could stop it. “No.” I wrenched my hand free of his. “You’re wrong.”“I’m not!” Anger blazed hot behind his eyes as they burned into me. “Look at me, Kia! Look me in the eye and tell me you’re not her.

~ Airicka Phoenix

The damage and destruction from the soft brush of pen on paper, a minuscule twitch of muscles at the end of manicured fingers, and people's lives forever altered.

~ Jason Greensides

If you can keep your head when all about youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you,If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,But make allowance for their doubting too;!

~ Rudyard Kipling

Could a scar be like the rings of a tree, reopened with each emotional season?

~ Magenta Periwinkle

I am made of a thousand ghosts. Only you can shoot me down.

~ Bella James

Perhaps death is just a big lie.

~ Bella James

In the Empire, the Scholars are not allowed to read and, like so many bullies and power-seekers who hide behind ideologies to justify the terrible things they do, their oppressors wear masks. 'An Ember in the Ashes' suggests that such masks (literal or figurative) don’t work. Not forever, anyway. Masks only cover faces. It’s actions that show who we are.

~ Chelsey Philpot

Instead of a criminal or a drug addict, I was looking at a boy—just a boy.

~ Shannon A. Thompson

What can I do?” his gaze on me was intense, like I was some sort of love guru or something. I almost laughed out loud at how unqualified I was for that position.

~ Katrina Abbott

I was not a believer in instalove. So said the rational part of my brain.

~ Katrina Abbott

Whuppins were like kid taxes we paid with our behinds.

~ Terris Mcmahan Grimes

Well that’s open to debate,’ he said. 'It sounds like a recipe for disaster to me, and I hate the thought of you throwing yourself at guys just to try and get laid. Christ, I’d do you myself if I thought it would keep you safe.’‘Now that’s true friendship,’ I said, cracking under the severity of his tone.

~ Aurelia B. Rowl

In no mood for one of her silly games, I snatched it off her and scanned the page. It turned out to be a list of names, all of them boys, and some of whom I recognised. And then I noticed the title: ‘Operation: Popping the Cherry’. I leaped to my feet and fired a glare at each of them in turn, trying not to shout. ‘Are you shitting me?

~ Aurelia B. Rowl

Quick, somebody call the caretaker!’ Gemma’s stage voice rang out loud and clear. ‘There’s some trash here that needs to be taken out.’ She earned a chorus of laughs as she walked towards us, then came to a standstill right beside me. ‘Christ, it reeks, too,’ she said, pinching her nose. ‘What did you do, Malice? Douse yourself in the whole bottle? Oh, never mind. I don’t expect you to have heard of the adage “less is more”.

~ Aurelia B. Rowl

I push through physical pain. Life hurts. I enjoy the positives.

~ Carla J. Hanna

I'm not very good at being alive. Sometimes I despair of ever mastering it, getting it right. When I'm old, perhaps.

~ Tanith Lee

Some secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew up with a deep sense of poverty that was mostly emotional but that they imagined as material long after they clambered into the middle class, and so they were more like a pair of rivalrous older siblings than parents who see their children as extensions of themselves and their hopes. They were stuck in separateness.I didn't realize anything was odd until I was already on my own and found out that not everyone's parents cut them off financially as soon as the law allowed. I tried to leave home unsuccessfully at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and did so successfully at seventeen, heading off to another country, as far away as I could go, and once I got there I realized I was more on my own than I had anticipated: I was henceforth entirely repsonsible for myself and thus began a few years of poverty.

~ Rebecca Solnit

When I grow up, maybe I will bethe first one to circle the sea.Or maybe I will just spend all my daydoing everything my way.Maybe I will be in a world of my ownI just hope not alone.I just know that whatever I doI will never, ever forget about you.

~ Oliver Neubert

We screamed this primeval scream built on a base of freedom, raised from beauty of a dying breed, and threw our heads back to laugh or cry, I'm not entirely sure which. But the scream shook the golden sunset, bringing it to its knees.

~ Taylor Rhodes

This city is yawning before me, but I'm not tired.

~ Taylor Rhodes

Bill suited the action to the word, getting up and leaning over the handlebars and pumping the pedals at a lunatic rate. Looking at Bill's back, which was amazingly broad for a boy of eleven-going-on-twelve, watching it work under the duffel coat, the shoulders slanting first one way and then the other as he shifted his weight from one pedal to the other, Richie suddenly became sure that they were invulnerable...they would live forever and ever.

~ Stephen King

Was Jane now. All Jane. Come calamity or come calm, was myself and none else.

~ J.d. Jordan

Gloomy roomimmersed in a scentof modern cowardsfilled withshapeless creaturessitting in silencebecause they havenothing to sayFake plastic faceswith a grimaceof disappointmentpainted on themAre we stuck on holdexpecting our turnin a waiting roomof so-calledlost generation?

~ Asper Blurry