Growing Up Quotes

Step-parents, those fairy tale villains,Have been given a bad name.They're easy targets.When the family goes awryHow easy to blame them.I was blessed by the right steps...

~ Eileen Granfors

I think of me and Melanie when we were younger, on the high dive at the pool in Mexico. We would always hold hands as we jumped, but by the time we swam back up to the surface, we'd have let go. No matter how we tried, once we started swimming, we always let go. But after we bobbed to the surface, we'd climb out of the pool, clamber up the high-dive ladder, clasp hands, and do it again. We're swimming separately now. I get that. Maybe it's just what you have to do to keep above water. But who knows? Maybe one day, we'll climb out, grab hands, and jumo again.

~ Gayle Forman

Magda looks at me as if I've gone mad. Or I've grown up. It's kind of the same thing.

~ Victoria Schwab

Hm. Didn’t you use to be a lot smaller?”“Yes,” said Jinx. “Because I used to be six.

~ Sage Blackwood

It was such a strange tormenting feeling when your daemon was pulling at the link between you; part physical pain deep in the chest, part intense sadness and love. Everyone tested it when they were growing up: seeing how far they could pull apart, coming back with intense relief.

~ Philip Pullman

I'm not sure I'll ever know the meaning of life or what comes for us after death, but I know it's more than the hysteria people make it out to be. It's about freeing your soul when no one else can; turning thirty and still feeling like you're seventeen. It's about taking chances on a whim, embracing the rain during the storm, and smiling so damn much that you start to cry. It's never regretting, never forgetting, and always being.It's kissing underwater and touching in the dark. Loving even when you think it's emotionally impossible and surviving someway and somehow. It's about living life with a full heart and an overflowing glass.I live life on the edge. I dream, I care, and I belong.I know there's a here and now.I know that I want it.

~ Nadège Richards

It's as if once you hit high school, you're programmed, like a robot, to be an asshole to your parents.

~ Sara Zarr

When I was young, I used to wish I would fit in… I’m glad I didn’t get my wish.

~ Steve Maraboli

At fifteen, I have taken up the burdens of a woman, and have come to feel I am one. Furthermore, I am glad of it. For I now no longer have the time to fall into such sins as I committed as a girl, when hours that were my own to spend spread before me like a gift.

~ Geraldine Brooks

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

~ Ellen Mulholland

Oh God, I'm miss­ing the gene which makes you grow up and buy a flat in Streatham and start visiting Homebase every weekend. Everyone's moving on without me, into a world I don't understand.

~ Sophie Kinsella

Learning is one letter short of maturity.

~ Eddie Mhone

Oak, granite,Lilies by the road,Remember me?I remember you.Clouds brushingClover hills,Remember me?Sister, child,Grown tall,Remember me?I remember you.

~ Gail Carson Levine

It seems only yesterday I used to believethere was nothing under my skin but light.If you cut me I could shine.But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,I skin my knees. I bleed.

~ Billy Collins

Reading all my old love letters was disorienting. You remember thinking the thoughts and writing the words but, man, you can't TOUCH those feelings. Its like they belonged to someone else. Someone you don't even know. I'm aware, in an intellectual way. That I felt all those things about him, but this emotions are far away now.What's so strange to me is that I can't even force my heart back to that place where I felt that all consuming passion. That makes me feel distant from myself. Who WAS I then? Will I ever be able to get back to that place? Reading the letters again made me wonder: Which is the real me? The one who saw the world in that emotionally saturated way, or the me who sees it the way I do now?

~ Bill Shapiro

I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.

~ Victor Hugo

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

People always think something's all true. I don't give a damn, except that I get bored when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am, I really do. But people never notice. People never notice anything.

~ J.d. Salinger

It was too late. Maybe yesterday, while I was still a child, but not now. I knew too much, had seen too much, I was a child no longer now; innocence and childhood were forever lost, forever gone from me.

~ William Faulkner

When we became teenagers boredom grew like a moth in a cocoon fighting to escape, and the peace created by our parents became a prison. We sought excitement and adventure. We sought anything but the sinless, pure, and average of the faux idyllic.

~ Scott Thompson

And what other kind of man would you want leading you into battle?” he says, reading my Noise. “What other kind of man is suitable for war?”A monster, I think, remembering what Ben told me once. War makes monsters of men.“Wrong,” says the Mayor. “It’s war that makes us men in the first place. Until there’s war, we are only children.”Another blast of the horn comes roaring down at us, so loud it nearly takes our heads off and it puts the army off its stride for a second or two.We look up the road to the bottom of the hill. We see Spackle torches gathering there to meet us.“Ready to grow up, Todd?” the Mayor asks.

~ Patrick Ness

nobody tells us as little girls that we may fall in love and have moments of hating our beloved, or have ridiculous arguments at 2 AM over something that neither person understands.

~ S.a.r.k.

...TV was entertainment of the last resort. There was nothing on during the day in the summer other than game shows and soap operas. Besides, a TV-watching child was considered available for chores: take out the trash, clean your room, pick up that mess, fold those towels, mow the lawn... the list was endless. We all became adept at chore-avoidance. Staying out of sight was a reliable strategy. Drawing or painting was another: to my mother, making art trumped making beds. A third choir-avoidance technique was to read. A kid with his or her nose in a book is a kid who is not fighting, yelling, throwing, breaking things, bleeding, whining, or otherwise creating a Mom-size headache. Reading a book was almost like being invisible - a good thing for all concerned.

~ Pete Hautman

Maybe universal nostalgia doesn't exist. Maybe each of us carries our own personal version of the better times. It's at about twnety-two years that we all begin to think of our childhood as the good ol' days and everything afterwards exists as a slow-motion face plant. The fall continues, through marriage, through career building, through parenthood, through old age, until we finally touch nose to ground. At twenty-two years old, I've just started, but I think I can already smell my own grave.

~ Caleb J. Ross

The people they had been last summer, the person she had been--Dicey guessed she'd never be afraid again, not the way she had been all summer. She had taken care of them all, sometimes well, sometimes badly. And they had covered the distances. For most of the summer, they had been unattached. Nobody knew who they were or what they were doing. It didn't matter what they did, as long as they all stayed together. Dicey remembered that feeling, of having things pretty much her own way. And she remembered the feelings of danger. It was a little bit like being a wild animal, she thought to herself. Dicey missed that wildness. She knew she would never have it again. And she missed the sense of Dicey Tillerman against the whole world and doing all right.

~ Cynthia Voigt

Anna is part of a generation that often seems frozen in place by their unreleting sense of irony. Virtually everything people believe in can be exposed as possessing laughable inconsistencies. And so they laugh. And stand still.

~ Scott Turow

Because…sometimes I think you meet people and they make you better, even if you’re not with them forever.

~ Kris Noel

She told herself that she longed greatly to go back to those dear merry days when life was seen through a rosy mist of hope and illusion, and possessed an indefinable something that had passed away forever. Where was it now--the glory and the dream?

~ L.m. Montgomery

I didn't begin life hating my grandmother. Like every child, I adored her. Until I formed a brain and got to know her.

~ Augusten Burroughs

I think that's every unresolved person's dream, to wake up one day and know what they want to do the rest of their life.

~ Ashley D. Wallis

I jumped on Sinbad's bottle. Nothing happened. I didn't do it again. Sometimes when nothing happened it was really getting ready to happen

~ Roddy Doyle

If I could have all of those things, I wouldn't mind if I touched her or not.

~ Nick Hornby

Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person's childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It's their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can't understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That's the carrier of all the living qualities. It's the centre of all the possible magic and revelation.

~ Ted Hughes

Sometimes, life threw up problems that even the wisest, most trusted mentor couldn't solve for you. It was part of the pain of growing up.And having to stand by and watch was part of being a mentor.

~ John Flanagan

That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.

~ Nick Hornby

I found myself suddenly jealous of the time when things were simple, when days centered on creek walks and tetherball, and your biggest worry was whether you'd have riding or sailing. There were no boys, there were no secrets or rumors, and there were no regrets. Not even fear of regret. There was just a best friend and endless hours to fill with Pixy Stix and laughing so hard you couldn't breathe.

~ Kathryn Williams

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

~ Jake Vander-Ark

I focused on the passing houses filled with couples who’d somehow survived this teenage craziness of ‘he likes her but she likes him and he likes somebody else, you just can’t win.’ How did they do it? How did they end up in their golden, warm and cozy living rooms with their 2.3 children and dogs and cats? Because getting from where I was to where they were seemed millions of light years away.

~ Sarah Strohmeyer

Hand, nobody told me about the weight. Why didn't our parents tell us about the weight?—What weight?—The fucking weight, Hand. How does the woman Ingres live? The one from Marrakesh? If we're vessels, and we are, then we, you and I, are overfull, and that means she's at the bottom of a deep cold lake. How can she stand the hissing of all that water?—We are not vessels; we are missiles.—We're static and we're empty. We are overfull and leaden.—We are airtight and we are missiles and all-powerful.

~ Dave Eggers

The boy and the man must be raised to see the possibility of self worth, then meet a few others who provide the vision of a road toward it, then spend a lifetime pursing that worth through action and relationship. One of the great tragedies in human life is to be born a male and not be guided toward the value of a man.

~ Michael Gurian