Growing Up Quotes

To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.

~ Adam Phillips

Isn't that the tragedy of growing up though? One day you wake up and realize that everything you are and everything you feel is not much different from what everyone else feels.

~ Nadine Rose Larter

Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Adulthood is accretive by nature, a thing which arrives in ragged stages and uneven overlaps.

~ Stephen King

She had the feeling, the tingling, lingering sense that something or someone life altering was just over the horizon. She had no idea what it was, but she wanted to rush headlong to bring it to her.

~ Mandy Nachampassack-Maloney

Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born.

~ Ian Mcewan

They said growing up was watching your breasts grow, your waist widen and hairs sprout on your erogenous ones. You became aware of the warmness that spread in circles in your stomach when that fine boy smiled at you. But that was not growing to me. Growing up was watching Papa drift away from us, and Mama grow drastically older from frying Akara balls just to cater for our home.

~ Ukamaka Olisakwe

Part of growing up is narrowing your life choices to a manageable size.

~ Amy E. Spiegel

Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear...Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world.

~ Jeanette Winterson

After it's all over, the early childhood, a chain of birthdays woven with candlelight, piles of presents, voices of relatives singing and praising your promise and future, after the years of schooling, fitting yourself into different size desks, memorizing, reciting, reporting, and performing for jury after jury of teachers, counselors, and administrators, you still feel inadequate, alone, vulnerable, and naked in a world that can be unforgiving and terribly demanding.

~ V.c. Andrews

When I was about nine, my siblings and I fell out of our moving van at an intersection. My dad didn’t notice for about five blocks. It was back before seat belts. It was also back before parents used any sort of common sense whatsoever. It was a time when you didn’t raise your children. You just fed them and they got bigger.

~ Dina Kucera

I wish wearing flat-irons on our heads would keep us from growing up. But buds will be roses, and kittens, cats, - more's the pity!

~ Louisa May Alcott

Watching her, he saw again how she teetered between adolescence and adulthood, with a raw sensuality that had to deposit her in a kind of no-man's land--too much a woman for boys her own age, too young for fully adult men.

~ Keith Ablow

I know it’s impossible for you to see peers this way, but when you’re older, you start to see them—the bad kids and the good kids and all kids—as people. They’re just people, who deserve to be cared for. Varying degrees of sick, varying degrees of neurotic, varying degrees of self- actualized.

~ John Green

Adults tend to repress their pleasure. Sad to say, I think we become adults only through disappointment, grief, and lies. So of course gradually we become tough, less sensitive.

~ Jean-Louis Gassee

So her safe little world would never be safe again... She knew that the nurturing hand also held the knife, and that was very unsettling.

~ Mercedes Lackey

His sixth year, it seemed to him, had lasted a remarkably long time and there were points at which he frankly wondered whether he would ever turn seven. But now it was the night before his birthday, and barring some cosmic disaster, the advent of some unexpected black hole into which the earth might be sucked, with the attendant reversal or suspension of time, in very few hours he would be waking up to a world in which he was numbered among the seven-year-olds.

~ Alexander Mccall Smith

Maybe I've moved to the dark side, but it's clean and nice and we never run out of toilet paper.

~ Jen Lancaster

Most of our parents wanted the best for us, I knew, but we also wanted the best for them.

~ Deb Caletti

We live in an adolescent society, Neverland, where never growing up seems more the norm than the exception. Little boys wearing expensive suits and adult bodies should not be allowed to run big corporations. They shouldn’t be allowed to run governments, armies, religions, small businesses and charities either and just quietly, they make pretty shabby husbands and fathers too. Mankind has become Pankind and whilst “lost boys” abound, there is also an alarming increase in the number of “lost girls.

~ Daniel Prokop

A dim antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty: and when it passed, cloudlike, leaving his mind serene and dutiful towards her again, he was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives.

~ James Joyce

This memory was both happy and sad: happy because it was so pleasant, and sad because it made Penelope think about how much she missed Swanburne--the girls, the teachers, Miss Mortimer. Or perhaps it was her own much younger self, that pint-sized person whom she could never be again, whom she missed. It was hard to say.

~ Maryrose Wood

It wasn't until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison cell that it really hit home that he was vanishing out of our lives and into his own.

~ Bill Bryson

I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.

~ John Green

I never left because a part of me will always be in that house...

~ J.x. Burros

That boy made me realize, for a while at least, that my parents were wrong, and I didn't have to be like them.

~ J.x. Burros

I felt for the first time, maybe ever, how much harder it was to be the adults. And I wasn't sure I could do that when it was my turn.

~ Barbara Hall

I never tired of picturing sharks.

~ Eileen Granfors

Being a kid has always been about being watched.

~ Lauren Mclaughlin

I suppose I was artistic as a child. Our house was so full of art and artists that it never occurred to me not to be constantly making things. I just assumed that all kids liked to work with their hands as much as I did. I was an only child so I did have a lot of time to be creative by myself and with my parents.

~ Wendy Froud

It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized you could buy a packet of cereal with a free gift and then just stick your hand in and root around in the packet until you found the free thing. It seems a much simpler way. But that took me about fifteen years to work out.

~ Eddie Izzard

Maybe that was what growing up was, understanding where the real magic lived in this world. Inside our very own hearts.

~ Gina Linko

I held on to the hope that one day I would grow up and have all the answers, just like my parents. As I look over at Arnold and then at Father Mike, I realize that adults are just as fucked as the rest of us. No one really grows up. No one unravels all of life's many mysteries. They just grow older and become better liars.

~ Shaun David Hutchinson

...when it comes to defining adulthood, nothing has made me feel more grown-up than knowing that one of the two people in the world who loved me the most, without condition, was no longer in the world.

~ Jean Hannah Edelstein

Some old-school Madonna and Beyoncé and everyone in the room went from being eighteen-year-olds to being twelve-year-olds to seven-year-olds and back again, each song belonging to an age they had all shared.

~ Laleh Khadivi

Jess is too big for her skin, as if she might float away in the exhilarating possibility of the moment.

~ C.b. Lee

Taking a lifetime to grow up.

~ Larry Smith

The British boy suffers the greatest restraint during the period when the call of nature, the instincts of play and adventure, are most urgent. Naturally, he looks eagerly forward to the time of escape, which he fondly imagines will be when his boyhood is over and he is free of masters.

~ William Henry Hudson

Nobody could hold the same place in your heart as your sister. Love or hate her, she was the only person who grew up exactly like you, who knew the secrets of your household—the laughter that only the walls of your house contained or the screaming at a level low enough the neighbors couldn’t hear, the passive aggressive compliments or the little put-downs. Only your sister could know how it felt to grow up in the house that made you you.

~ Jessica Taylor

And not one person would notice the grey parts of her until it was too late, because everyone falls for a pretty face.

~ R. Y.s. Perez