Best 4519 quotes in «growing up quotes» category

I liked being with the books: they reminded me of how many ways of thinking existed outside my own - how small and fleeting my pulse was when set alongside those ageing spines.

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

Illusions must be put to death. That is the cruelty of growing up.

I'll tell you something,' Arthur said. 'Until a certain age, everyone thinks their parents are heroes. Then they grow up a little, start to understand a little more of the world, and they realize their parents are just people. It destroys them, just a little bit. But it's part of becoming an adult. Everyone goes through it. You, on the other hand--your parents really are heroes, at least to everyone else. It's a bit remarkable, really. You never went through that disappointment of finding out your parents are just people.

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

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

I love him in ways that I can’t explain to other people. They don’t understand… it’s not their fault.

I made him walk on a lead and he jumped for joy, the way creatures do, and children do and adults don't do, and spend their lives wondering where the leap went.

Imagination grows in the lonliest of soils

I may be a little like the grown-ups. I must have grown old.

I mean, I really liked him to the point where being around him was sort of wonderful and painful all at the same time, you know?

I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.' ... We sat there, side by side, on the old wooden bench, not saying anything. I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children books hidden in the middle of dull, long books. The kind with no pictures or conversations.

I’m going to follow this invisible red thread until I find myself again… until I finally figure out… who I’m meant to be.

I'm not a grownup, just a kid who has been around for a while.

I’m not everything I want to be, but I’m more than I was, and I’m still learning.

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

I’m not too big for this town, Dad. I never will be.

I'm saying that children are not supposed to get along with their parents. Your parents are not supposed to be your best friends. There's supposed to be some element of rebellion. That's how you define yourself as a person.

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.

I’m tired of justifying why I love someone. I’m done with the explaining.

I'm still not totally sure I know what's true about me.

I’m trying to be an adult. I’m trying to be responsible. I’m trying not to call home crying. But it’s hard. It’s hard when every morning feels like a hangover. It’s hard when I hear voices every time I go to sleep. It’s hard when the only thing that would make me feel better is to crawl in bed with the one person who truly knows me, but I’m more afraid of her than the bears or the perverts or whoever the hell visits her when I’m away.

In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light. Then the old folks will remember the children and they won’t talk anymore that day. And when light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that every time this happens he’s moved just a little closer to that darkness outside. The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It’s what they’ve come from. It’s what they endure. The child knows that they won’t talk any more because if he knows too much about what’s happened to them, he’ll know too much too soon, about what’s going to happen to him.

In a desperate attempt to stay young forever we have achieved eternal childishness, rather than eternal youth.

In a way it scared me, having a summer of experiences and feelings that belonged to me alone. What happened in front of my friends felt read. What happened to me by myself felt partly dreamed, partly imagined, definitely shifted and warped by own fears and wants. And who knows? Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.

In a way, losing hope and losing importance are the same thing. It is that youthful vibrance, that eternal longing and believing, that makes youth so important--if you grow old and lose that without finding another way to be important, you will slip away, fall into insignificance, like one sheet of paper. You may be useful, but you will never stand out from the crowd. You cannot look at a piece of paper and say, "I remember you." You never can.

I never grew up all at once. I did it one place and another along the way.

I never grew beyond that man; I just hid him away.

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

In my experience, the biggest reason people struggle to get where they want to be is guilt. Guilt that they have let someone down, and also guilt that they are about to leave someone they love ...behind.

I never really grew up until I had kids.

I never want a girl to lose all hope that her life can’t completely turn around, even if she feels that she is at the edge, standing on one foot, and ready to say goodbye.

I never want you to deny anything about yourself because you have grown up thinking it’s unacceptable or inconvenient for the people around you.

In his grief over the loss of a dog, a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood. After this most inconsolable of sorrows there is nothing life can do to him that he will not be able somehow to bear.

In my youth, the question chiefly important to me was—What sort of man shall I decide to be? At nineteen one asks oneself this question; at thirty-nine we say, “I wish Fate hadn’t made me this sort of man.

I nodded again, but I knew I would not grow up to drive a bulldozer. It would be awful to be dirty all day like these men. I didn't say it, but at best I would keep one in the backyard, like a goat.

I never said it was easy to find your place in this world, but I’m coming to the conclusion that if you seek to please others, you will forever be changing because you will never be yourself, only fragments of someone you could be. You need to belong to yourself, and let others belong to themselves too. You need to be free and detached from things and your surroundings. You need to build your home in your own simple existence, not in friends, lovers, your career or material belongings, because these are things you will lose one day. That’s the natural order of this world. This is called the practice of detachment.

In the boundaryless forests, there’re dancers of nude. Yet in the confines of pasture, there’s promise of food. On which is your side? Ô, but tarry and bide, ere you decide, in both do confide.

In some ways, forcing me to leave was the best thing that could have happened to me. In other ways, it was a disaster. I'm still glad they did it though, because I think I might have just died if I had stayed at the coast. Although I ended up there a couple years later, when my mother relapsed on a whim, I think I needed that two years away from that horrible little coastal town where time is frozen and ideas creep forward too slow to notice any progress.

In the book, you lost your powers. In the movie, you chose not to use them as much. I guess I did a little of both.

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure, death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing, the world lies waiting.

In the old days, when travelers would get lost, they would follow the stars and I love that idea. I wish that I could rely on something as simple and magnificent as a star for all of my aching questions.

Intimidated, old traumas triggered, and fearing for my safety, I did what I felt I needed to do.

In Woody Allen movies people stood in line for Ingmar Bergman films or Holocaust documentaries talking up media theory to pass the time. At 16 that was my idea of fun. Now that I live in New York I can tell you that people lined up for tickets don't debate theory. They talk about cute guys at the gym or whether or not they live within walking distance of a Krispy Kreme. I was such a young fogy that growing up involved becoming less mature.

I realized if I didn’t just go, I’d never go. Going was the key. It didn’t matter where I was headed just as long as I was headed somewhere. ~ Ben Davis

I once made a solemn vow that I could not keep... I am from this world. Even with all its failures and suffering it is still worthy of my best efforts... and wishing it was otherwise does not make it so." Eiij'lam told the king.

I realize now, I was learning how to walk as well. I haven’t mastered the steps, I fall too. But im on my path, my path... and one day that path... will take me to her.

I remembered learning from my favorite professor at Belmont to “surround yourself with people who are better than you,” and I was now living that mantra.

I remember everything,' Bette Midler flatly notes. 'But you know how in life, you tend to hold grudges? Well, I don’t do that any more. Bad, bad stuff. I did as a young person, but it just wore me out. Oh, it really did! How many times can you wake up in the middle of the night gnashing your teeth? It’s so boring. Give it up!

I ruin everything. I think that a bullet must have passed through my heart when I was very young, causing me to bleed out slowly, over things and people and every white surface that I’d ever come across.