Growing Up Quotes

Ethan’s voice was choked. “I realize now, what my father felt. When I left home. He must have felt as if everything was ending. That everything he knew was finishing. I wasn't even aware of what he was going through, how it felt for him. I was so caught up in the excitement of moving out and having a job that would buy me a car. I was so eager to leave. His heart was breaking, and I totally missed it. I was completely unaware that his whole world was changing too. But for him it wasn't gaining, it was losing. He was losing part of himself. The part of his life that had focused on me and my mother for seventeen years was ending, and I never even noticed.”For a moment, Leo thought Ethan was about to ask him to stay. If he does, I will, Leo thought.Ethan took a deep breath. “But hard as it is. It can’t be stopped. Can’t be sidestepped. No matter how much we want to or how fearful the future looks, we can’t stay frozen in place. You can go forward or you can try to hold on. I've seen people that were afraid to let go, that never committed to their life. You can feel the desperate regret emanate from them. They know they missed something, but instead of jumping on the next train, they keep looking back for the one they missed.

~ Tom Deaderick

Your love life is insignificant when it comes to raising your children to be respectable human beings. The moment you see them suffer or lower their standards because of your selfishness, is the day you should realize that nothing matters more than them. You are not just the queen or king of your fairy tale. The real story of your life is the gift of time God gave you with them.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Stop using him, and start protecting him. I know he thinks he doesn't need it, but sometimes he does. Sometimes we all do.

~ Rachel Caine

Growing up, I believed in miracles. I guess I don’t anymore.

~ Stephanie Oakes

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

Home was not the place where you were born but the place you created yourself, where you did not need to explain, where you finally became what you were.

~ Dermot Bolger

She isn't like any of the girls I ever knew, or any of the girls I was myself.

~ L.m. Montgomery

I tried on different versions of myself. I was so many different girls...

~ Jennifer Elisabeth

I think about how maybe it's not things that change but people that change, and maybe that's the change everyone is really talking about.

~ Susan Pogorzelski

The tales lovers tell each other about how they met are hushed and secret things. They change year by year, for we all meet many times as we grow up and become different and new and exciting people--and this never stops, even for a minute, even when we are ninety.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Realizing that many you once thought the world of are nothing but glorified assholes means you've grown up. 

~ Crystal Woods

If you are to be, you must begin by assuming responsibility.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

My mother says it can't stay like this, but I believe it will. The Pants are like an omen. They stand for the promise we made to one another, that no matter what happens, we stick together. But they stand for a challenge too. It's not enough to stay in Bethesda, Maryland, and hunker down in air-conditioned houses. We promise one another that someday we'd get out in the world and figure some stuff out.

~ Ann Brashares

The only pressure I agree to, is my conscious and not peer pressure.

~ Unarine Ramaru

But for a long time, and probably far too long, I had a secret wish: the adolescently romantic idea that there was someone out there for me; someone I hadn't met yet who would ask me on a date and make sense of my life. I harbored the hope, I'm now embarrassed to admit, that like a girl in a Lifetime movie, I would look into someone's eyes and find a reflection of my inner life. But sometime between my teenage years and the first years in New York, that idea had pretty well evaporated. I'd grown up.

~ Diane Meier

God is Santa Claus for Grown-Ups.

~ Oliver Markus

It took me ages to grow into being a woman, into being happy with it.

~ Helena Bonham Carter

The Girl was gone, buried in the past. She never wanted to hear that name again. She was a woman for better for worse. Whatever the future might bring she could face it as a woman, Ned Ridley's woman.

~ Catherine Cookson

As we grow up we learn that even the person that wasn't supposed to ever let you down probably will. You will have your heart broken probably more than once and it gets harder every time. You'll break hearts too, so remember how it felt when yours was broken. You'll fight with your best friend. You'll blame a new love for things an old one did. You'll cry because time is passing too fast, and you'll eventually lose someone you love, so take many pictures, laugh too much and love like you've never been hurt because every sixty seconds you spend upset is one minute of happiness you'll never get back.

~ Andy Biersack

Growing up is made up of a million small moments in time, and one of the most painful is the moment you're severed from the whole, when you realise that your parent is complicated, and fallible and human.

~ Vikki Wakefield

I reached up with my finger and traced the scar over my eyebrow, remembering when that was the greatest hurt I'd ever known.

~ Sarah Dessen

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

How Horrid has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me as Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror--puberty, public disgrace--then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing.

~ Alison Bechdel

Some people grow up with issues because they did not have their parents around growing up, many others have issues because their parents were around growing up

~ Quetzal

Hello, my name is your potential. But you can call me impossible. I am the missed opportunities. I am the expectations you will never fulfill. I am always taunting you, regardless of how hard you try, regardless of how much you hope.

~ Nathan Filer

It doesn’t matter how many times you leave, it will always hurt to come back and remember what you once had and who you once were. Then it will hurt just as much to leave again, and so it goes over and over again. Once you’ve started to leave, you will run your whole life.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

I didn't grow up in a Norman Rockwell house... my house was more akin to Norman Lear.

~ Michael P Naughton

I'm working hard to have a good life.You don't need fancy things to feel good. You can hug a puppy. You can buy a can of paint and surround yourself with color. You can plant a flower and watch it grow. You can decide to trust people, the right people. You can decide to start over and let other people start over, too.

~ Joan Bauer

Being at home was like a mattress to fall back on with the smallest of peas on the bottom, just large enough to bother the princess. I was damn lucky that I had a place to call home, but I didn't like the feeling of stealing my parents food and being unable to tell them when I could ever afford my own.

~ Alida Nugent

One must always be aware, to notice—even though the cost of noticing is to become responsible.

~ Thylias Moss

If your life is a blank page, that only means you have room to write your story. You have the power to tell that story the way you want to.

~ Thea Harrison

He was surrounded by people who loved him, yet he had never felt lonelier.

~ Thea Harrison

Love is like a lion. It's fierce and strong. It conquers fear and uncertainties, and it knows how to fight. Love fights to win and keep its mate, to do the right thing, to give to others in service, no matter what the cost.

~ Thea Harrison

Dragos reached for his coffee cup. You are always going to be one of my highest priorities.

~ Thea Harrison

I don’t need anyone else to distract me from myself anymore, like I always thought I would.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

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

Jess is painfully aware of how young she is. Her shirtsleeves don't quite extend to her wrists; after a growth spurt last summer, her debate clothes don't fit as well as she thought. She feels as if she's playing dress-up.

~ C.b. Lee

There was no fear of sandpaper earth, no sense of danger from a bare-skinned spill, for the boy was a child—a six-foot, one-inch growing child who knew nothing of accident, injury, dismemberment, death—who would study those lessons tomorrow, thank you, but not today. Today, it would be sufficient to be wild and free.

~ Tony Taylor

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

When you think your life is falling apart, it's usually falling together in disguise.

~ Charlotte Eriksson