Best 660 quotes in «coming of age quotes» category

The abyss is black and eventually I know I will smile, laugh even knowing all I think I know, maniacally while I howl at anything I could see that would laugh, snarl and howl the way I do.

The biggest lie I ever told anyone was that I would not leave.

The bitterest of ironies is that the people who make us feel the most accepted, secure, and whole are the same people who make us feel the most rejected, unstable, and heart broken.

The bracelet and the first charm appeared the day I punched Austin Jackson in the nose. I didn't mean to slug him. His face just got in my way. It was a bruising end to a disastrous first month in middle school.

The combination of razor-sharp wit (completely real) and his credentials (completely fake) had won them over in the end.

The current's run is too wild, and we created it. A mermaid and mariner have so much romanticism, but too different of backgrounds. One breathes on grounded land, and one breathes above and below—fluidly. This is how she always gets stuck in their nets. They both try for the sake of fascination, but unlike the mermaid's lungs, fascination runs dry. So, they wave at the shoreline and go back to being whoever they were: half humans without each other.

The dark realization came to him that a difficult and miserable age had begun for him, and he couldn't imagine when it would end. [Puberty]

The damage and destruction from the soft brush of pen on paper, a minuscule twitch of muscles at the end of manicured fingers, and people's lives forever altered.

The days became for Christina endless preparation. Ceaseless winds tore through her massing battle ranks, the grey cold sun above marking the timeless date. With skies of blue and cloud overhead, driving, uncompromising time stood still, lingering, as if giving Christina precious eons to perfect her shaving straight razor cuts of mind and sword. She worked alone now, forging the essence of herself in the policies and ways of hammer and anvil, pounding away with the classic, living Japanese blade. Her deft hands spun dervishly, wroughting out the iron of her will, fashioning a blade-mind remade unto her. --Brickley, The Lady and the Samurai

The Fall will always be yours and mine…

The four of us stood in silence as we watched the surrounding girls play games or gossip. It was almost as if I did not belong here anymore. It was like I was peering in through a window from a completely different world.

The gods lie. They lie because it's the best they can do. We reach out for their lies and we keep on living.

The four of you have always felt like you’re mine anyway. I’m so proud of all of you.", Aunt Sookie in Loving Summer by Kailin Gow

The freedom of the open road is seductive, serendipitous and absolutely liberating.

The God of Imagination lived in fairytales. And the best fairytales made you fall in love. It was while flicking through "Sleeping Beauty" that I met my first love, Ivar. He was a six-year-old bello ragazzo with blond hair and eyebrows. He had bomb-blue eyes and his two front teeth were missing. The road to Happily Ever After, however, was paved with political barbed wire. Three things stood in my way. 1. The object of my affection didn't know he was the object of my affection. 2. The object of my affection preferred Action Man to Princess Aurora. 3. The object of my affection was a boy and I wasn't allowed to love a boy.

The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience.' But by the time we've got that we're no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.

The highway of grace will get you somewhere a whole lot faster then the freeway of spite.

The headlights of parked cars shone through the rain, and the sidewalks extended, empty, into the darkness. Underground, the sewers surged like rivers, and a few blocks away, sirens blared. He was no longer aware of his heart or thoughts, only the image of a sunken face staring up from a well, the paleness rising through the water like polished bone. A ringed hand reached toward it, but as the fingers approached, the face would sink away, its eyes opening, closing, and the droplets of red falling like leaves. He was a child running through an autumn cemetery, leaping over cast iron fences, the rain bleeding into the tombstones and the roofs of the mausoleums, his legs following the wings of a crow, flapping to the north. A hedge of withered roses stood between him and his childhood house. He tripped and grazed his cheek on a manhole, his red blooming in the water. The sun set behind the hill; the house turned black—abandoned and derelict—and Chris knew he had to keep running, ahead, into the unknown.

The high road of grace will get you somewhere a whole lot faster then the freeway of spite.

The hefty gang adored Big Nana: She was expressive and affectionate and bold, blustery and showy around them, applauding their girths and glutinous ways at the table. She pinched their cheeks and butts, other fleshy body parts, squeezed them to the edge of respiratory failure, kidded them about the pudgy Sicilian girls, and gave them hell for not fattening me up. They were well aware of what she did to Scarface.

The morning after my mother’s death, I was surprised to see the sunrise. From behind the curtain of my bedroom window I was surprised to see the people leave their homes and begin the day. Downstairs, the hands of the grandfather clock continued to tick, marking each passing hour with a chime that echoed over the black and white chessboard tiles of the front hall. I was surprised to see the mail come at the same time as the day before and, later that evening, the sun set once more as it did since the beginning of time. My mother’s death did not disturb the planets in their courses. And, though everything kept moving like she never existed at all, my world erupted into chaos until the universe swirled around me like a whirlpool of scattering stars.

The kinds of jobs a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old can get are not worth doing. They pay shit and suck.

The last step before death is the moment of its demise. The emptiness or the new life. But the last step is also a point of reference itself. The last step can last as short or as long as its creator defines it. The last step could be before death itself. It could be the middle of death. It could be the last goodbye or the last look before eyelids drop to a close like curtains.

The last declaration he'd made to me hung between us. The L word. The one that had nothing to do with like.

The light was not broken, but in the darkness it had a different kind of radiance. If I seek it, I’ll find it.

The more I learn about life and people, the more I realise that everyone has a story and everyone’s story is the biggest in their own mind.” - Laylla Jonson

The morning Mom tells me my skirt is too short, I find the lawn full of dead fledglings.

The music is happy; the laughter is happy. Everything feels ecstatic and desperate. Blurrily, I think of sex, and I think of death. I realize: Every moment of joyous celebration contains the seed of death.

The night seemed suddenly defiled by the absence of music, as if the silence itself was injecting a sickness that only another song could cure.

The night sky should not be scary, it should always be beautiful. I imagine my marriage will be like this and that of the void, that I will love my wife when she dies and that it will love me back long after mine. The blank night sky faces me, with my back flattened out by another blackness.

There comes a time in a girl’s life where she finds her heart broken, what matters is not the boy who broke it but the boy who stitches it back together

The old you has been left behind to leave place for the new you. And it will be a new you that your new friends will admire, that your old friends will struggle to understand and that your true friends will learn to embrace.

The principles of storytelling do not change. Going home. Coming of age. Sin and redemption. The hero. The journey, The power of love. They are hardwired into us, just like our taste buds process sweet, sour, bitter, and salt. Can a new voice come up with something startling and creative and unprecedented? Absolutely. Can they invent a fifth taste? No. No, they can’t. Can they make it so we don’t like sweet anymore? No, no they can’t.

The rain landed on my skin with a barely audible patter and changed the tempo of its repetitive dance, letting the wind change its course and angle. The cold soon seeped through my dress and into my bones. An iris from my garland fell in my lap.

There are two girls around my age, maybe a little older, checking them out. I can’t blame them, but they’re pretty obvious about it, just watching them and talking in low voices to one another. One, a dark-haired girl whose tight clothes do a lot to emphasize the curves she has, even comes over and pushes what looks like a slip of paper into Drew’s hand. They both walk off then, giggling. “What just happened?” I ask. Nat shakes his head with a smile. “Just the Drew effect. I’ll be back in a second. I just need one more ingredient.” He heads off, leaving me with Drew. I look at him. “The Drew effect? Seriously?” “I get it most places,” he says, starting to grin but then stopping himself. “Honestly, it can get pretty annoying.”, Loving Summer by Kailin Gow

There comes a time in everyone’s life—and I do mean in everyone’s life—when you ask yourself what it is that you’ve been doing with your life. Sometimes you even realize that whatever you’ve been doing all your life, you’ve been doing it wrong. Dead wrong… Son, you want that realization to hit you when you’re 70? Or 50? Or when you’re still young, with your whole life still ahead of you?

There exists an oasis where inspiration bursts forth like black gold from the fertile loam and every odd bellbird chirps a melody worth remembering. There’s no bloody map or nautical chart that can deliver you there, but you know the instant you’ve arrived because you never ever want to depart.

There is a secret layer of humanity that lies just beneath the surface of man, a secret layer where our fears and insecurities hide, that when touched in this secret place men and woman are somehow liberated.

There’s something simple about running with him along the beach, and it’s like I get to see the real Drew there too.", Loving Summer by Kailin Gow

There is no one to laugh with about his cookies and milk, to gush about the fact that he is eighteen like I am eighteen only he seems much older.

There's nothing that can't be made harder.

There's something about the thousands of glittering lights, the veil of nighttime that almost makes this place beautiful, especially in the reflection of the water. It makes everything askew, disoriented. There's more truth in a ripple of water than in a clear day.

There is no such thing as loving a child too much.

There was a dazzling intellect beneath the girl's sadness, she was sure - and it bothered Mallory to no end that it might go wasted on the world if Dawn could not be coaxed out of her melancholy.

There was a sudden flash of lightning which brightly illuminated our faces. I squinted against the harsh light. It was soon followed by the crack of thunder. The strong wind whipped our hair around our faces, and the younger girls squealed as they quickly ran across the grass to get inside the school. Rose and I sat up, smiles on our faces as we listened to the weather’s dangerous melody. The third flash of lightning finally ripped open the sky’s belly. Freezing rain cascaded out, drenching us in a matter of seconds, the flower garlands drooping and lying limp on our matted hair.

There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes...

There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes... He felt that it would take all time, more than he could ever spare, to glue these strange cumbersome pictures into the scrap-book of his life.

There were the signed, spiral-bound Spirit-in-the-Woods yearbooks from three summers in a row and the aerial photograph of everyone at camp the second summer. In it, Ethan's feet were planted on Jule's head, and Jule's feet were planted on Goodman's head, and so on and so on. And didn't it always go like that-body parts not quite lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.

There's something to say about inspiration - when it comes into your life...the feeling is insatiable.

These Aussie girls are free to set their own courses in the world, to meander and experiment. Their travels are not bumps along the road - they are life itself. See the world and then come home and decide who you want to be in it, not the other way around, as seems the general trajectory in the U.S.