Growing Up Quotes

I don't like being with grown-up people. I've known that a long time. I don't like it because I don't know how to get on with them.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

People keep asking what I do for a living and I keep saying that I don’t believe in making a living. That it’s a concept that has been twisted. I tell them I believe in making a life and money is a distracting object if there’s anything left at the end of the day and I just want to go on well. Make it through the day. So I smile and raise my glass and they laugh and take my hand, saying ”here’s to the youth”, pointing at me. And I might just be youngand naivefor I still believe in the freedom of choiceof how to spend your life.So they toast to the youth, who still think she’s free, and that’s all fine by me.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

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

If you look for endings you can always find one, but I truly felt as if I had used up the last of my youth, if youth is that finite stage of life when it all feels expeditionary, inexact.

~ Charles Finch

In a way, losing hope and losing importance are the same thing. It is that youthful vibrance, that eternal longing and believing, that makes youth so important--if you grow old and lose that without finding another way to be important, you will slip away, fall into insignificance, like one sheet of paper. You may be useful, but you will never stand out from the crowd. You cannot look at a piece of paper and say, I remember you. You never can.

~ Katherine Ewell

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

~ George Eliot

Ah man. I remember the days of lying to my mother about a boy. Once I had a boy hidden in the closet and of course Mom wouldn't leave, so I finally had to pretend to get sick to my stomach just to get her out of the room long enough for him to climb out the window and down the tree. He fell, broke his leg. Ah, to be young again.

~ Amy Sherman-Palladino

‎She was not a little girl heart-broken about him; she was a grown woman smiling at it all, but they were wet smiles.

~ J.m. Barrie

the much-sought prize of eternal youthIs just arrested growth.

~ Edgar Lee Masters

For me- and for everybody else, probably- this is my first experience growing old, and the emotions I'm having, too, are all first-time feelings. If it were something I'd experienced before, then I'd be able to understand it more clearly, but this is the first time, so I can't. For now all I can do is put off making any detailed judgments and accept things as they are. Just like I accept the sky, the clouds, and the river. And there's also something kind of comical about it all, something you don't want to discard completely.

~ Haruki Murakami

Remember, it’s still a mystery to be an adult. If you knew it all before eighteen, you’d have nothing to look forward to. Besides, to be wise and eighteen is as possible as catching lightning in a bottle…

~ Carew Papritz

You become a man when, in having children, you not only physically look after and protect them but also protect them with all the love and learning you have to give.

~ Carew Papritz

I knew that Jessie and I were going to be okay; I knew we were all going to be okay. And I had faith that wherever our individual paths led us would be exactly where we were always meant to be. For a girl that had never believed in anything, this realization meant everything.

~ Rose Fall

If a fight looks like a lot of fun, you should be suspicious. 'If you ain't scared of standing up for what's right, you ain't standing up for much.

~ Kenneth Logan

I mean, I really liked him to the point where being around him was sort of wonderful and painful all at the same time, you know?

~ Kenneth Logan

Please your mother: just lie around upstairs and smoke some pot. Be a revolutionary.

~ Kenneth Logan

She kissed me on the cheek, and my mom sang Theresa’s name from the open front door. She loves Theresa. I think she loves me more when I’m with her.

~ Kenneth Logan

I could feel his hand on my waist, his arms around me, feel the rise and fall of his chest next to mine as I held my breath, and wished the sun would drop out of the sky.

~ Kenneth Logan

It was duck apocalypse!

~ Kenneth Logan

Dude,” he said instead, “I’m flattered as hell.” And then he kicked my foot, lightly, twice. He was smiling.He couldn’t see the chasm that had opened behind my ribs.

~ Kenneth Logan

I've always wanted to wake up one day in a world where I liked the right people, and they lied me in return. I worry it'll never happen.

~ Kenneth Logan

I'm still not totally sure I know what's true about me.

~ Kenneth Logan

I do like the way people behave toward me and Theresa when we’re together-everyone’s voice changes to music, and we get all sorts of smiles.

~ Kenneth Logan

You can't make me be nice.You can't make me be good.You can't make me be

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Sometimes in storm weather the shore had fluttered with disabled swallows. They crouched lower for his approach, without strength to escape. In his hands they pulsed with that same pulse. He had taken a bird and warmed it between his hands or inside his jacket, brought the life back until it was able to fly. Sometimes, released from his hands, they circled once around him before flying away; in gratitude, or so the child had believed--and the belief had survived all the man's science.

~ Barry Unsworth

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

He had a third martini. He looked at me intently and took hold of my arm. 'Look', he said. 'You're a fish in a pond. It's drying up. You have to mutate into an amphibian, but someone keeps hanging on to you and telling you to stay in the pond, everything's going to be all right.

~ Jack Kerouac

When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it. They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could.

~ Heather O'neill

A child isn’t born bitter. I point no fingers as to who tainted the clean, pure pool of my childhood. Let’s just say that when I realized that I didn’t want to grow up, the damage was already done. Knowing that being grown up was no swell place to be means that you are grown up enough to notice. And you can’t go back from there. You have to forge another route, draw your own map.

~ Hiromi Goto

To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.

~ David Foster Wallace

They soon stopped being ten years old. But whatever age they were seemed to be exactly the right age for having fun.

~ Maud Hart Lovelace

Her childhood had been magical, hours spent in ecstatic loneliness in the apple orchard, dreaming of foreign lands and wild adventures. Everything was new, down to bird song and grass blades. By the time she had reached adulthood, the town around her was like a grandmother who had used up all her stories and now simply rocked on the porch. The same flowers, the same streets, year after year. She longed for someone more exotic. A prince. A pirate.

~ Kathy Hepinstall

Despite being what would now be called a deprived child in a one parent family, I did not grow up with an urge to smash windows or to bash old ladies over the head in order to steal handbags.

~ Eva Hart

Jenny remembers what it was like, all those years ago. It was never dolls for her, nothing so tangible as that. It was more of a feeling. As if, for the first several years of her life, everything held over her a sort of knowledge and insistence. Fence posts, wallpaper, the lawn at certain hours of the day. These things glowered at her, or smiled. Even something as ordinary as the blue rolling chair in her father's office had some hold on her, some whisper of a new dimension in its puffs of dust sent upward by her fists against its cushions. There was an intensity inherent in everything until, one day, there wasn't. The blue chair rolled on its wheels to the window when she pushed it. The rising dust was rising dust. And when it was gone, there was only a knot of longing somewhere deep inside of her, a vacant ache: adolescence. Boredom.It's why we fall in love, Jenny will tell June.We fall in love to get back to that dimension, that wonder.She goes to the laundry room, where, from a pile of clean clothes, she picks out a few articles of June's, folds them, then goes upstairs to knock on her daughter's door and tell her that this, this lost doll world, is the reason there is love.

~ Emily Ruskovich

Do you ever plan to grow up, Veltan?” he asked.“Not if I can avoid it, no.

~ David Eddings

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

It made him wonder if all things taken from their home too soon lost some of their bloom.

~ Dan Groat

The hardest part of being a Canadian kid is having to color in Nunavut with a crayon in school, hell on earth.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt