Best 294 quotes in «adulthood quotes» category

A big part of growing up is bringing all of yourself into a space, not just the parts of yourself that relate to the people in the room.

(About parenthood and BDSM) Note that a difficulty in shifting gears, or a struggle to find the time, is not the same thing as an ontological either/or.

Adulthood is an attempt to become the antithesis of the wounded child within us.

Adulthood is like looking both ways before you cross the street and then getting hit by an aeroplane.

ADULTHOOD: IT CAN EASILY BE missed, mishandled or WORSE mistaken FOR SOMETHING else

Adults, I understand, have many faults, they are not perfect—even though they have lived longer, even though they offer themselves as examples to children. They are larger, that is certain, and size has an unearned authority. But they are easily influenced, and they can be easily swayed.

Adulthood is like looking both ways to cross a street only to get hit by a falling object. Unpredictable and headache inducing." - fact of life.

Adulthood’s full of ghosts... High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.

Adults were constantly auditioning, but for what?

Above all, staring at my old bedroom ceiling, I feel safe. Cocooned from the world; wrapped up in cotton wool. No one can get me here. No one even knows I'm here. I won't get any nasty letters and I won't get any nasty phone calls and I won't get any nasty visitors. It's like a sanctuary. I feel as if I'm fifteen again, with nothing to worry about but my Homework. (And I haven't even got any of that.)

A child who grows up too closely aligned with adults assumes knowledge of a life she hasn’t yet experienced.

Adulthood is a wonderful thing and brief. You must be sure to enjoy it while it lasts. I believe the soul in Paradise must enjoy something nearer to a perpetual vigorous adulthood than to any other state we know.

Age is only a number. Keep an active life.

A life of dangerous adventures might seem worth it now, when you are young and seemingly invincible, but one day, you will have children, and you will not want that life for them.

Adulthood is just a number.

Adulting is too hard. Let's play something else.

A few years ago, I graduated college, diploma in one hand, margarita in the other, completely oblivious to the shit storm that was coming my way. Here's a preview: becoming a living, breathing, job-having, bill-paying, responsible adult? Really fucking difficult.

Although they had been honed like hawks toward the guns since early childhood, Cuthbert and Alain still carried an erroneous belief common to many boys their age: that their elders were also their betters, at least in such matters as planning and wit; they actually believed that grownups knew what they were doing.

All fathers are liars . . . If you want to be a father, you have to be prepared to become a liar.

A man that knows your worth doesn't need to be told how to treat you. That's a given! You won't have to question his feelings, his motives, nor his intentions. How will I know? You ask. See, he will freely show you how he feels and prove it consistently. If you're settling for anything less than what you deserve. Then, maybe you don't even know your worth.

All of the sudden, we were a grown-up married couple! Like little figures in a doll's house, we sat there dazed, in awe, wishing a chubby little arm would pass through a window and move us around, tell us what to do. We would have given anything for a magnificent child to show us how to be husband and wife.

And though our roots belong to the same tree, our branches have grown in different directions.

And what am I? I’m forever stuck in a nonexistent place where no time passes and I do so much and learn so much but I don’t grow. I’m still teenage me wanting more. Wanting less. Wanting anything and everything and I think I should grow up now. Grow out of childish anxiety and sorrows for all things past and everyone has moved on from schools and neighbourhoods and I moved first and swore the loudest on never coming back but now I dream about all things past. Going back. How do you transition from being a lost teenager, to one of those calm and serene souls of integrity and certainty? Because that’s what I must do, now, soon. Do others feel left behind too, or is it just me? Like the train left with everyone on it and I’m still standing on the platform trying to decide if I should watch the sky for another hour or go change my ticket. Maybe sometimes you need to just close your eyes and jump on the train without feeling ready, and grow your steady breath on the way. I think sometimes you don’t know how much you’re capable of until you’re forced to grow into it.

A preserved childhood is better than a repaired adulthood

And at twelve, heading for adulthood, a child fears that the way she is at that moment is all she's ever going to be.

As a man begins to understand the sacrifices he must make to live the life he dreams of, he often loses his courage for such a life.

Artillery has stopped for the moment, and the predawn fires inside the walls take on a steady middle life, an adulthood.

And why is it that so many years later it is so easy to distinguish the bullies from their prey? Adult bodies surrounding the children of long ago. The years have changed nothing.

As an adult I had mastered the art of looking without seeing and listening without hearing and eating without tasting and maybe even existing without living.

...because you are not trying simply to complete a set of books or toys or Weetabix cards, you are trying to complete yourself, to get back to the whole person you were before, as a child, before the obstructions and compromises of adulthood got in the way. And yet, all you are really doing is accumulating a pile of crap, souvenirs of the futility of the quest.

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.

Being an adult is only an illusion. When it comes down to it, I’m not sure any of us ever really grow up.

...being around him wasn’t good for Quentin. He could feel himself regressing in the direction of an adolescent tantrum—it was like trying to talk to his parents. He lost all perspective on who he was and how far he’d come.

But grownups were always in a turmoil, every possible action muddied over by thoughts of the consequences, by self-doubt, by selfimage, by feelings of love and responsibility. Every possible choice seemed to have drawbacks, and sometimes he didn't understand why the drawbacks were drawbacks. It was very hard.

But in the bleak light of full adulthood, which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: he's broke and unemployed.

Defining yourself in terms of how you rank is always dangerous and ultimately immature. It doesn't matter whether the rank has to do with your grades, your weight or where you finished in the 800 meter race. Becoming a mature adult means, among other things, that you define yourself relative to your own potential, not relative somebody else's standard.

Each year, more responsibility and freedom (they are companions) must be given to the child so that the final release in early adulthood is merely a small, final release of authority.

At thirty a man steps out of the darkness and wasteland of preparation into active life it is the time to show oneself, the time of fulfillment.

Being a child sucked. Being a teenager was worse. And being an adult seemed so far away that I had a better chance at swimming the length of the ocean than growing up.

Being an adult has been without a doubt, the most stupid dream I had as a child.

Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible.

Bloom of adulthood. Try a whiff of that. On your back in the dark you remember. Ah you remember. Cloudless May day. She joins you in the little summerhouse. Entirely of logs. Both larch and fir. Six feet across. Eight from floor to vertex. Area twenty-four square feet to the furthest decimal. Two small multicoloured lights vis-a-vis. Small stained diamond panes. Under each a ledge. There on summer Sundays after his midday meal your father loved to retreat with Punch and a cushion. The waist of his trousers unbuttoned he sat on the one ledge and turned the pages. You on the other your feet dangling. When he chuckled you tried to chuckle too. When his chuckle died yours too. That you should try to imitate his chuckle pleased and amused him greatly and sometimes he would chuckle for no other reason than to hear you try to chuckle too. Sometimes you turn your head and look out through a rose-red pane. You press your little nose against the pane and all without is rosy. The years have flown and there at the same place as then you sit in the bloom of adulthood bathed in rainbow light gazing before you. She is late.

But how was one to be an adult? Was couplehood truly the only appropriate option? (But then, a sole option was no option at all.) “Thousands of years of evolutionary and social development and this is our only choice?” he’d asked Harold when they were up in Truro this past summer, and Harold had laughed. “Look, Willem,” he said, “I think you’re doing just fine. I know I give you a hard time about settling down, and I agree with Malcolm’s dad that couplehood is wonderful, but all you really have to do is just be a good person, which you already are, and enjoy your life. You’re young. You have years and years to figure out what you want to do and how you want to live.

Camus-boy, you're always going to be the same you, just older. It's not like there's a moment when you wake up and go, Shit, I'm grown-up, I don't feel like myself anymore.' I don't tell him, but this is the scariest fucking thing I've ever heard in my life. Being grown-up should feel like a big transition. It can't be something that, despite my best efforts, I've been drifting closer and closer to every summer. It needs to be a shock. I need to know at what point to stop holding on. And that moment will suck, and probably every moment after that will suck, but at least I'll know that everything that came before really was valid. I really was young and innocent. I wasn't fooling myself.

Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood -- we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule.

Children need the lie to be brave enough to sleep in their beds; parents need it to be able to get up the next morning.

Children’s and YA books are about being brave and kind, about learning wisdom and love, about that journey into and through maturity that we all keep starting, and starting again, no matter how old we get. I think that’s why so many adults read YA: we’re never done coming of age.

Children take joy in their work and sometimes as adults we forget that's something we should continue doing.

children spend their time for they think they have more time; adults cry over their time for they see they have less time

Death to the young is more than that undiscovered country; despite its inevitability, it is a place having reality only in song or in other people's grief.