Growing Up Quotes

They sealed this promise by hooking pinkies, the way they used to, long ago, when promises didn't hurt as much.

~ Alice Hoffman

The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our chilhood behind.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

And if I sit in that room at the top of the house and I think about my life and if I shut my eyes from time to time and imagine being warm in the summer and I hear the bees buzzing and for a moment I truly am Alice in Wonderland, do you have the heart to tell me I am not?

~ John Logan

Mam said I was growing up. I felt that I was dying.

~ Delia Sherman

Weird how I can feel so frail and tiny sometimes, and other times so brave and bold and reckless and free, and . . . Does everybody feel the same? When people get grown-up, do they always feel grown-up and sensible and sorted out and . . . And do I want to feel grown-up? Do I want to stop feeling . . . paradoxical, nonsensical? Do I want to stop being crackers? Do I want to be destrangified? O yes, sometimes I want nothing more - but it only lasts a moment, then O I want to be the strangest and crakerest of everybody.

~ David Almond

He was thirteen that year, the age when children splinter off and abandon the old loves.

~ Mark Costello

The energy you drew on so extravagantly when you were a kid, the energy you thought would never exhaust itself - that slipped away somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four, to be replaced by something much duller, something as bogus as a coke high: purpose, maybe, or goals, or whatever rah-rah Junior Chamber of Commerce word you wanted to use. It was no big deal; it didn't go all at once, with a bang. And maybe, Richie thought, that's the scary part. How you didn't stop being a kid all at once, with a big explosive bang, like one of that clown's trick balloons. The kid in you just leaked out, like the air of a tire.

~ Stephen King

She tried so hard to be brave, to be fierce as a wolverine and all, but sometimes she felt like she was just a little girl after all.

~ George R.r. Martin

There are only two things that determine whether you're old enough to do something -- whether you understand what the hell you're getting yourself into -- and whether you're willing to accept responsibility for it if it blows up in your face.How many years you've been alive is ultimately meaningless -- except in as much as it gives parents a general sort of idea as to whether their child is likely to understand what they're getting themselves into. Small children, for instance, can't really comprehend shades of grey -- where a decision or choice can have different answers depending on the circumstances. For them, everything is black and white.

~ Midnight Blue

If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man.

~ Thomas Hardy

She knew him in that way you can only know a person as a child. Like if you cracked away the adult shell, you'd find that child, happily sitting inside, smiling at you.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

One of the greatest tragedies of growing up is the discovery that your parents- and your teachers, and your sports heroes, and your favorite actors, singers, YouTube sensations- are fallible. Adults don't know all, and what they do know, they often won't tell you- because they've got their own agendas, or because they want to shield you from the hard truths for your own good. Adults lie, they betray, they screw up in every way possible...

~ Robin Wasserman

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

This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal.

~ Ryū Murakami

I lost something magical in the process of growing up – my disillusionment.

~ Bauvard

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 wrote about ... my childhood, when dreams were small and attainable for all. When sweets were a penny and god was a rabbit.

~ Sarah Winman

Just because you're an adult doesn't mean you're grown up. Growing up means being patient, holding your temper, cutting out the self-pity, and quitting with the righteous indignation.''Why do so many people seem to love righteous indignation?''Because if you can prove you're a victim, all rules are off. You can lash out at people. You don't have to be accountable for anything.

~ Brandon Stanton

I was born with more power inside myself than I ever dreamed. But along with it there came no more sense than any other idiotic kid. Somewhere along in here I need to grow up into a man I can stand to live with. A man who doesn't just survive, but deserves to.

~ Orson Scott Card

It was an unfamiliar feeling, waking up with a place to go, a place I was actually beginning to comprehend and face without a sense of terror.More than that, I was even questioning the assumption that I was, in my bones, a scared and anxious and miserable person. It felt like the days were almost supernaturally good, that I could wake up without the usual wave of terror, that the days were admixed with some foreign substance dripping into them, some animating essence, like the dragonborn races of Endoria, dragonborn days. I felt like I'd stumbled on one of the open secrets of the world. Why hadn't I realized before that being a grown-up could be anything you wanted it to be?

~ Austin Grossman

And that is the last lesson of childhood: You spend all your years fighting against the injustice of big folk and their big rules until you are ready to rule yourself.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Desert heat or not, the idea that my younger self was facing her last moments was a bucket of cold water in the face. I didn’t like her, but she appeared to have her shit together in a way I hadn’t for a long time, and she had, frankly, deserved better than me. I tried to wet my lips, had nothing to do it with and croaked, “Sorry.” “Don’t be sorry. Be good. Be right. Be a hero.

~ C.e. Murphy

If your gonna screw up, do it while you're young. Older you get, the harder it is to bounce back.

~ Winston Groom

Maybe I can learn to live in a way that makes it worth writing about, and maybe I can actually become something more than this empty shell.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

There’s no great dividing line between being a kid and an adult. We’re not all caterpillars turning into butterflies. You are what you are. When you grow up, you may be more careful than when you were a kid. You don’t say what you think as much as you once did. You learn to play nice. But you’re still the same person who did good things or rotten things when you were young. Whether you feel good about them or bad … whether you regret them. Well, that’s a different thing. But it’s not like they disappear forever.

~ Matthew Dicks

As he left Yata’s home that morning, he knew that a part of his life was complete and that whatever path he chose, he would experience the ache of unfulfilled dreams. For a moment he allowed himself to feel regret at the thought of never building a cottage by the river with Trevanion. Or living the life of a simple farmer connected to the earth. Or traveling his kingdom, satisfying the nomad he had become. To be Finnikin of the Rock and the Monts and the River and the Flatlands and the Forest. To be none of those at all.Yet he also knew that to lose her to another man would be a slow torture every day for the rest of his life.

~ Melina Marchetta

It wasn’t brave because he wasn’t scared: it was the only thing he could do. But going back again to get his glasses, when he knew the wasps were there, when he was really scared. That was brave.’ ‘Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.

~ Neil Gaiman

Life has a funny way of turning you into the one thing you don't want to be.

~ Jonathan Levine

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

~ C.s. Lewis

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

~ J.d. Salinger

Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.

~ Maya Angelou

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

It's about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone.. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out.

~ Jodi Picoult

You need not be sorry for her. She was one of the kind that likes to grow up. In the end she grew up of her own free will a day quicker than the other girls.

~ J.m. Barrie

Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them - a mother's approval, a father's nod - are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.

~ Mitch Albom

For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.You never bake bread, he wrote, and we were still joking.Then it's like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we won't be joking? And what would it look like? And how would that feel?When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.I spent my life learning to feel less.Every day I felt less.Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

~ Jodi Picoult

One of the oddest things about being grown-up was looking back at something you thought you knew and finding out the truth of it was completely different from what you had always believed.

~ Patricia Briggs

Growing up is hard, love. Otherwise everyone would do it.

~ Kim Harrison