Growing Up Quotes - Page 3

Everything was brighter and more colorful in those years, as if my childhood was ending in an explosion of unreal passion that made my life feel sacred and holy.

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.

I can do this… I can start over. I can save my own life and I’m never going to be alone as long as I have stars to wish on and people to still love.

I always envisioned myself as traveling the ocean of life in a rowboat where my mother was one oar and my father, the other. Having two good, solid oars made rowing much easier.

There is no night porter wandering about in King's. The authorities pay you the compliment, ugly gate-crasher, of treating you as a grown-up. And since we are not grown-up you and I, we will perform our midnight frolics as the inmates burn the midnight oil.

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.

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.

Growing up, imagination gave way to cynicism. Ignorance was traded in for world weariness. Fears remained, but they were the dull, suburban fears of illness, destitution, and death. The visceral terror of the unknown- of unseen things lurking under the bed or creeping out of the cupboard- became a fuzzy memory.

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.

Maybe it’s just getting older. You become so palpably aware this is not a dress rehearsal. There’s a big sign in blazing neon that says You Haven’t Got Long. But I think it takes a beat to learn that. Life has to knock you down in order for you to realise it, because when you’re a kid you think you’re immortal.

Growing up is like walking through glass doors that only open one way--you can see where you came from but can't go back.

I'll only tell you what matters. And the truth is, everything matters. Nothing is an accident, really.

Does our purpose on Earth directly link to the people whom we end up meeting? Are our relationships and experiences actually the required dots that connect and then lead us to our ultimate destinies?

Estragon: They're too bigVladimir: Perhaps you'll have socks some day

I lost my innocence very young and it had nothing to do with sex.

Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.

The older I get the more mixed up life seems. When you're little, it's all so plain. It's all laid out like a game ready to play. You think you know exactly how it's going to go. But things happen...

When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.

You know, people ask me. They say 'Dan, three years later do you really want to be drawing cat whiskers on your face?' but they don't understand. The cat whiskers, they come from within.

The only thing worse than not knowing where she belonged...was knowing where she didn't.

Jacen reflected bitterly that a large part of growing up seemed to involve watching everything change, and discovering that all changes are permanent. That nothing ever changes back. That you can’t go home again.

The first sound a child hears is very important. It determines character. A Muslim child always hears the Azan first. Words in praise of God. Words to live by.

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!

Sadness at that age had the pleasing texture of imprisonment: you reared and sulked against the bonds of parents and school and age, things that kept you from the certain happiness that awaited. When I was a sophomore in college, I had a boyfriend who spoke breathlessly of running away to Mexico - it didn't occur to me that we could no longer run away from home.

Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished.

I grew up in an era that was a golden age of the blockbuster, when something we might call a family film could have universal appeal. That's something I want to see again. In terms of the tone of the film, it looks at where we are as a people and has a universality about human experience.

Jocelyn did not want to always remain the same. Where was the adventure in that?

Suddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you're young enough, you don't know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair. A dandelion growing out of a crack in the side walk outside your front door is a garden. You could believe that a song your partner was singing in the evening was the most tragic opera in the world. It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you

Where'd the days go, when all we did was play? And the stress that we were under wasn't stress at all just a run and a jump into a harmless fall

I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

Despite the fact that I have no regrets about how things turned out in my life, I still can't help wanting to understand my intense relationship with Leo, as well as that turbulent time between adolescence and adulthood when everything feels raw and invigorating and scary-and why those feelings are all coming back to me now.

Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician. Maybe an artist. I'd dress in black turtlenecks and smoke Gitanes. I'd listen to cool jazz in clubs, getting up to read devastating truths from my notebook, leaning against the microphone, cigarette dangling from my hand.

As you grow older, start using your brains, energy, and the means available to you, however little they may seem, to go after what you need to get better, so that you can have what you want to live the the life you desire.

James, you’d like Lou Reed,” Michael insisted. “He was bisexual.”Their laughter turned to coughs. They were all staring at me when I turned around. I told myself to relax.“Oh, yeah?” I said. “He doesn’t sound bisexual.”Michael just shook his head, but Ronan and Glenn smiled.“They did electroshock therapy on him when he was a teenager,” Michael said.“Electro-what?” said Glenn. “They electrocuted people?”“Kind of. They zapped their brains to alter their personalities. That’s how they tried to make gay people straight back then.”They all looked at me for a response.I shrugged. “So, he was bisexual? It worked halfway?

Some days, Kaylin fervently wished that she had already passed Adult 101 and could get on with being the person she wanted to be.

I am a free soul, singing my heart out by myself no matter where I go and I call strangers my friends because I learn things and find ways to fit them into my own world. I hear what people say, rearrange it, take away and tear apart until it finds value in my reality and there I make it work. I find spaces in between the cracks and cuts where it feels empty and there I make it work.

...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.

I was going to be a memory when I grew up.

Your "scared" and my "scared" are two different things.''What's that supposed to mean?' she asked.'As you get older, you don't recover from things so easy.''As you get older, you also get tired?''Yeah,' I said, 'you get tired.

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

At a certain point you have to leave childish things behind, and one of the childish things is a sense that 'Wow, I can draw' or in my case 'Wow, I can read'... You feel you have what's called a talent, but as you become an adult, if you hope to make things, you have to give up the preoccupation with talent otherwise you'll spend your life painting beautiful pictures of fruit bowls that look like fruit bowls.

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.

That was the problem, wasn't it? You left home. But you never did become an adult. Not really. You just fucked up in different and more complicated ways.

Let us not be bored

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

God is Santa Claus for Grown-Ups.

You’re a teenager. It’s all complicated.

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.

But babies become children, and they go to elementary schools that indoctrinate them on how to overthrow governments, and they get interested in boys and girls, or they don't, and anyway they change.

I want to be the best version of myself for anyone who is going to someday walk into my life and need someone to love them beyond reason.

My dreams are going through their death flurries. I thought they were all safely buried, but sometimes they stir in their grave, making my heartstrings twinge. I mean no particular dream, you understand, but the whole radiant flock of them together—with their rainbow wings, iridescent, bright, soaring, glorious, sublime. They are dying before the steel javelins and arrows of a world of Time and Money.

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

He nods, as if to acknowledge that endings are almost always a little sad, even when there is something to look forward to on the other side.

I'm seventeen today and dressed for a party. But I can't move. I can't think, much less move. I can't breathe, much less think. This is the moment when my life will change forever.

Despite how lonely or broken down you might feel, we need you with us helping to make the world better, kinder and safer, especially for the little girls coming up.

FORKED BRANCHESWe grew up on the same street,You and me.We went to the same schools,Rode the same bus,Had the same friends,And even shared spaghettiWith each other's families.And though our roots belong toThe same tree,Our branches have grownIn different directions.Our tree,Now resembles a thousandOther treesIn a sea of a trillionOther treesWith parallel destiniesAnd similar dreams.You cannot envy the branchThat grows biggerFrom the same seed,And you cannotBlame it on the sun's direction.But you still compare us,As if we're still those twoKids at the parkSlurping down slushies andEating ice cream. Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun (2010)

I feel a resurgence of my 6-year-old self… that little warrior, goddess of a girl reminding me of who I was when I was little, before the world got its hands on me.

Because of the consequences of trying to be heard as a child, many adults are unable to take the risk of telling as adults. The fear of the consequences is almost debilitating. The abusers and controllers know that; they rely on it.

You battled monsters. You sweat and cried your way to this one prolific moment where you finally realize that those dark days and sleepless nights were pre-requisites to your becoming.

We're about to hit that age when we'll be too exhausted to maintain friendships, and the days of hanging out will be long behind us.