Growing Up Quotes - Page 4

In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.

It occurred to her that nobody really knew what anybody else was upset about, and that seemed like a terrible thing.

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.

For all her faults, it was actually my mom who instilled in me a love of reading, and books, for which I will always be grateful. She’s a complete bibliophile, so I’ve pretty much grown up around libraries and books.

A dragon looks like a girl when it is young.

She wondered if old dreams could haunt rooms - if, when one left forever the room where she had joyed and suffered and laughed and wept, something of her, intangible and invisible, yet nonetheless real, did not remain behind like a voiceful memory.

The joy of reading with our children doesn't stop as they, and we, get older; it simply changes.

I am but the reflection in your eyes, the effect of your expressions, and the sum of your praise and criticism.

I’ve always known my circumstances were far, far from the worst, but I truly believe that just the slightest misalignment in our upbringings can have such a dramatic knock-on effect on our lives.

When you work on something that only has the capacity to make you 5 dollars, it does not matter how much harder you work – the most you will make is 5 dollars.

All seek perfection from our parents … Just wait till your parents start depending on you, that is when your own perfection, or lack thereof, will be apparent.

I'm not perfect and the older I get the more I realise that.

Then, when I've got a degree in maths, or physics, or maths and physics, I will be able to get a job and earn lots of money and I will be able to pay someone who can look after me and cook my meals and wash my clothes, or I will get a lady to marry me and be my wife and she can look after me so I can have company and not be on my own.

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.

Most people made comments on how I was the strongest woman they knew.That was before the title wave of disaster hit my charmed life.

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.

He’s completely blown through his younger years like his childhood was one big cigarette to smoke carelessly.

After months of separation her friends still catalyzed her thoughts and challenged her opinions and wrangled with her emotions, and she was relieved to see that they still slid into the familiar patterns, the comfortable ruts of long-established personalities. It was nice but it also worried her. Could there be room for growth? How could you change around the people that knew you best, who knew you backwards and forwards and knew you so well that they defined themselves by you and you by them? How could you possibly evolve, like really evolve and become a whole person all on your own, when your own makeup was inextricably intertwined with someone else’s perception of themselves?

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