Coming Of Age Quotes

So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Children played guessing games, telling each other whether the gun fired was and AK-47, a G3, an RPG, or a machine gun.

~ Ishmael Beah

...ya can't get to Nevada on five bucks and a bad heart...

~ Dave Matthes

To all the boys, for when you become men: you'll leave women all throughout your life because they're holding you back, and even after she's gone she'll still weigh you down. To all the women: stay away from us men. We don't know anything about you, despite what we try to convince you of.

~ Dave Matthes

...people who don't live at least a little bit in fear, have nothing left to live for.

~ Dave Matthes

People will drive by their high school ten years down the road, just so they can pretend that thinking not much has changed is actually true. When really, everything has changed. The air smells the same, but the roads have cracked more. The roads have cracked so much they now look like the skin on a crocodile's back. And all the fields, green in the summers, golden in the autumns, have all been paved over with new reasons to never come back.

~ Dave Matthes

It's like I'm dreaming of the imaginary friend Katie and I had when we were little. She'd been so real to us as kids. We each remembered Anna, that's what we'd called her, just like we remembered bits of our parents. But now, in this dreamscape of Paradise Lost, our imaginary third twin has all grown up.

~ Beatrice Rose Roberts

Yet I had become very attached to George Roc. I liked him, not for the joy of playing with him, not for some talent that made him stand out from the rest, not even for his kindness: above all, I liked him because he was always sad and because the things he told me caused me a degree of pain.....George Roc was the first being that I'd met who saw and felt himself unhappy.

~ Joseph Zobel

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

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

Sometimes, when you were thinking about something, trying to understand it, it opened up in your head without you expecting it to, like it was a soft spongy light unfolding, and you understood, it made sense forever…

~ Roddy Doyle

I'm tired of their plastic pony show.

~ Randolph Randy Camp

When you find the one, when you share the spark of kismet, then it becomes inconceivable to walk through life with anyone else.

~ Karpov Kinrade

Dear God, please help me to be the kind of person who my dogs think I am.

~ Jerrie Brock

Thinking he knows can be a trap. An ex-professor once told him he had a diamond-hard intellect and he’d been flattered at the time. Now he considers the nature of diamonds. Although sharp and glittering and useful for cutting glass, they shine with reflected light only. They’re no use at all in the dark

~ Margaret Atwood

It’s not easy to be God.

~ Péter Zilahy

There's always one sure way of finding out that you're a misfit. When you're eleven years old, and your friends are telling you that they just sneaked into the theater to watch 'Twilight' and that it was sooooo emotional and sooooo terrifying and soooooo romantic! - but you've been spending the summer watching 'Rosemary's Baby' and 'Don't Look Now' and knowing the lines to all the Alfred Hitchcock films by heart - that's the moment you realize that you're a misfit.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

It is hard to be true to yourself because it is hard to be yourself.

~ Jenny Hubbard

When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

~ John Steinbeck

I don't know why I didn't have this sixth sense or whatever it is all along, but part of me thinks maybe it means I'm growing up, evolving into a real superhero. Like maybe the world knew I couldn't handle it before, but now, now I'm finally becoming me an the world know sit -- or maybe I'm just learning to listen to myself.

~ Kelly Thompson

Your own life starts the moment you're born. Before that, even.I just, I feel like as long as I live with you, I won't... I'm not... It's like George Jefferson.From the TV show?Right. George Jefferson. As long as he was on 'All in the Family', he was just somebody who made Archie Bunker's story more interesting. He didn't have anything of his own. He didn't have a plot or supporting characters. I don't know if you ever even got to see his house. But after he got his own show, George had his own living room and kitchen... and bedroom, I think. He even had his own elevator. Places for him to exist in, for his story to happen. Like this apartment. This is something that's mine.

~ Rainbow Rowell

I knew that I had reached the end of childhood once I realized that adults in my life didn't know anymore than I did.

~ Matthew Quick

The second hardest part about growing up is trying to figure out who you are. The hardest part comes after you've figured it out and the rest of the world wants to pull you in a different direction.

~ Jen Malone

Have you ever noticed how as an adult, all the bright colors go out of your life? Now that I’m not a kid anymore, things always look gray, like a clothesline draped with laundry that’s been washed too many times and left to stand in the wind. I guess that’s what growing up is… it’s a fading photograph.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

I learned that adults were not soaring gods, but rather back-yard birds with broken wingtips.When you are thirteen, about to free-fall into the real world, discovering the broken wingtips is terrifying.

~ Janet Turpin Myers

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

~ Caitlin Moran

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.

~ Jennifer Elisabeth

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.

~ Beverly Cleary

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 working in lumber camps and cleaning out rabbit hutches, and was so poor he lived in a tent in the summers to save money… All this is known, but unimaginable. Also I wish I did not know it. I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.

~ Margaret Atwood

But I can’t manage to grow up and change shape. I’m still tiny, and staying that way, perhaps because I know the secret that everyone pretends to be unaware of, perhaps because I know that deep down we’re all tiny.

~ Delphine De Vigan

Cry your guts out because nothing is sadder than an adult who forgets how to be a child.

~ Alison Espach

Why can't a girl just want to know stuff and not do stuff?

~ Ellen Mulholland

…girls were like poems: weird, incomprehensible and boring, but those “in the know” assured me that they were beautiful.

~ Jake Vander-Ark

What’s so beautiful about girls?” I would implore.And the secret society of adults would reply with a smirk and wink as if I was merely a boy who couldn’t possibly have the mental maturity to comprehend such grown-up concepts as love and bleeding vaginas; “You’ll understand someday, James.

~ Jake Vander-Ark

And then I know I'm being a man, not just some kid who's upset and wants it his way.

~ Angela Johnson

Partying and dancing have never been my thing, but drinking I could do with reasonable familiarity and skills. I decided to begin there.

~ Vann Chow

For the first time I realized adults could back themselves into corners so remote that love, or its memory, could no longer reach them.

~ Kirby Wright

Murphy's law inverted: What can go right, will go right. (Works if you're an optimist.)

~ Saloma Miller Furlong

Murphy's law inverted: What can go right, will go right.

~ Saloma Miller Furlong

Don't read their rubbish... Read mine ☺️

~ Jacqueline Creek