Best 660 quotes in «coming of age quotes» category

Samir loves Joe’s face. He studies it every day in class: a face as old as his own but already, in eighteen years, the cli s and hills and odd proportions of its geography have been shaped by life’s weather. Samir likes to observe the ever-watchful green eyes, hidden in their shadowy alcoves over the at nose and cheekbones, and the heavy brow that scrunches up with Joe’s moods – all those sculptural planes could have been carved by Easter Islanders. en there’s the pout of his lips, the pucker of their concentration or the twist of their anger. But most of all, Samir examines the thoughts as they cross the wide-open landscape of the face. Tries hard to read their cloud shapes from the merest shadow.

Sarah hated school though not like most kids. It was more than a simple dislike for teachers and their boring lectures. No, she had a solid, strong, smothering hate for the institution. Dozens of teenagers in an enclosed space never had any good results.

Sarah watched her mother and felt guilt building in her stomach. Her parents argued about her a lot, but she didn't want to be the thing that came between them.

Say no! I thought. Say you want yourself all for your own self. Say that you have no specific country, say that you are important without any story from above, say that your home is with me and the other girls up in the sky.

SCORPIUS: The world changes and we change with it. I am better off in this world. But the world is not better. And I don't want that.

Seems a lot of men never saw one such as me. A girl what could keep up and fight and ride and curse with the best of them. A girl what ain’t trapped in some dress or some house or some bed. A girl what ain’t waiting on some man to do what she ought to her own damn self.

Seek your origins, embrace the unknown.

She had not thought it would be so easy to slip into the old roles. Cambridge had changed her fundamentally and she thought she was immune. No one in her family, however, noticed the transformation in her, and she was not able to resist the power of their habitual expectations.

She had a woman’s swagger at twelve-and-a-half. Hair: strawberry-blonde, and I vaguely recall a daisy in the crook of her ear. She was an inch taller than me, two with the ponytail; smooth cheeks and darling brown eyes that marbled in luscious contrast with her magnolia skin; cream, melting to peach, melting to pink. She beamed like a cherub without the baby fat; a tender neck; pristine lips that would never part for a dirty word. Her body--of no interest to me at the time--was wrapped from neck to toes with home-made footie pajamas, the kind they make for toddlers, but I didn’t laugh; the girl filled that silly one-piece ensemble as if it were couture.

She had been waiting for someone to notice her, like, really notice her. She felt that that was the key, that she would go from the duck to the swan the minute someone recognized her potential. And they would look into her like they were trying to pierce her eyes with theirs, like they were trying to make her heart stop, and the whole world would become background noise and she would take her first breath after all of these years of nothing but existing. It would be like a coronation, or a star exploding, and then she would be born. She would be alive, and she would be loved.

She had wanted to behave like a fully grown woman and it had not come off.

She leans over the desk to write and even though I feel bad for doing it, I watch her body as she does. Her shirt lifts just a little as she’s bending over and whether she’s aware of it or not, her lower back is exposed. I’ve spent the last eight years ignoring this girl, but one small view of her back and it’s putting my body into overdrive. I’ve never wanted to kiss someone there so much in my life.

She left me ravenous and wishing upon fireflies for more. Limbs as puzzle pieces we fit together.

She’s done so much to care for others, whether it’s inviting inner city kids into her school to keep them out of trouble and away from gangs, or taking me and the others in every summer, or just doing so much to help her students with their dreams.", Loving Summer by Kailin Gow

She smoothes the front of the dress, looking down at her hands, at her bitten fingernails, at her big feet in the pointy-toes shoes. This is a woman's dress, she thinks, a young woman's dress. It is not a girl's dress. It is solidly on the other side of the line outside of girlhood. It is a dress that says something big in a very quiet way; it is a dress that is talking to Alice right now, a dress that is making her feel possibilities never before considered, the possibility of perfume and pretty and dancing and boys. This dress is who she might be, only more so.

She’s Summer. I love her more than any other girl I’ve ever met, and kissing her isn’t like kissing another girl. It isn’t casual. It means something. It means the world to me.", Loving Summer by Kailin Gow

She was neither white nor black, Fyre nor Aquanite; she was a dame of the White King, and it was up to her, and her alone, to choose what path her life would take.

She wasn't trying to overcome life, only to get along with it, to blend with the processes she could scarcely understand in a world that had permitted her no solid ground.

She was merely an actress who had been forced to perform her part on stage without fully knowing her lines. She was not real.

She was not in the body of a young woman but just as I remembered her: a little toddler with a beautiful smile. She reached out with her small hand, and I gripped her tiny fingers as I let go of the pain and sank deeper into the lake.

She watched him from afar and gave him the time and space to travel the emotional rollercoaster, commencing at stunned, progressing to upset and lurking at angry. Then he brooded and grieved for the end of his life as he knew it.

Siobhan wanted to be more like the heroines of the books she liked, about girl detectives and girl adventurers: tomboyish, scrappy, and resourceful, able to outsmart adults and survive without them, her body sun-brown and waiflike. She was, instead, a freckled, blue-eyed redhead, pale and dense as a block of shortening, who wasn’t allowed to use the stove.

Sitting in the wicker rocking chair with her interrupted work in her lap, Amaranta watched Aureliano José, his chin covered with foam, stropping his razor to give himself his first shave. His blackheads bled and he cut his upper lip as he tried to shape a mustache of blond fuzz, and when it was all over he looked the same as before, but the laborious process gave Amaranta the feeling that she had begun to grow old at that moment.

So many things in this life that you would consider trash are my personal diplomas, my favored scars, my most priceless junkyard. So many things that meant nothing to you are the encyclopedias to my whole, are the ticket fares to my soul, are the things that you repoed when I caught you dressed in black... wearing the things you've stolen, filling pockets of me, swollen.

So it was a crossroads summer, when the universe seemed to stand perilously still like an egg wobbling on a precipice, a regular rite of passage summer that saw us traverse the hazardous divide between the illusions of boyhood and the far more pernicious deceptions of maturity, et cetera.

So I drink just one more glass to get me through the night; I look at my lamp, my fan, all the pictures and posted on my wall and I know I have failed again. I have left things left unsaid, undone, unseen. With only my dreams to guide me. If I knew my greatest sins were behind me, and not only something I felt, I would feel safe alone in my flawed arms, hoping to touch something purer and lovelier than me, so I think of you. I know what hopes are left to you, I know what pressure they bring and I still feel them because if anything hopes are wasteless. They are the infinite until we become the finite. I know I should not be scared of them, I know that they could be false, but dreams themselves are only false when the individual is false. I am false. I am hope. I am all the things I wish I could be but never see. So I see you, beautiful, long black hair, I say: God let this all be for something. And you sit there with your brown questioning eyes, you smile and I think again: God let this all be for something.

Somehow, we both got carried away. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but before long, I knew nothing was ever going to be the same.

Something I learned when I got older; your actions have a permanence. Delineations from the perfect line. Some mistakes can last a lifetime like the first brush of death. Some beliefs are worth tearing fabric for like perfect lines. It does not matter where a person has been but what they have done. There are people that can still be shallow no matter how much they travel or what they see.

Something—he wondered later if it was simply his youth—something that had weighed upon him until that moment broke off him, the way a piece of rock slides slowly into the sea and disappears in a spray of foam.

Some secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew up with a deep sense of poverty that was mostly emotional but that they imagined as material long after they clambered into the middle class, and so they were more like a pair of rivalrous older siblings than parents who see their children as extensions of themselves and their hopes. They were stuck in separateness. I didn't realize anything was odd until I was already on my own and found out that not everyone's parents cut them off financially as soon as the law allowed. I tried to leave home unsuccessfully at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and did so successfully at seventeen, heading off to another country, as far away as I could go, and once I got there I realized I was more on my own than I had anticipated: I was henceforth entirely repsonsible for myself and thus began a few years of poverty.

Sometimes being vulnerable as a child is not knowing what lies ahead. We think our choices will make a huge difference in our lives because our parents and other elders spend so much time making sure we think before we act and make our minds up about what we want to be “when we grow up”. Some are already at that stage early on, some are not. We learn the ways of the world all in good time, but being vulnerable is to be human. We never stop.

Sometimes I think teachers like Ms. Harmer view creativity as something dirty and slightly embarrassing, and would prefer to turn kids into people who color inside the lines. Generally speaking, I don't care much for lines.

Sometimes I get the feeling [my parents have] asked me to hold this big invisible secret for them, like a backpack full of rocks--all these things they don't want to know about themselves. I'm supposed to wear it as I hike up this trail toward my adulthood. They're already at the summit of Full Grown Mountain. They're waiting for me to get there and cheering me on, telling me I can do it, and sometimes scolding and asking why I'm not hiking any faster or why I'm not having more fun along the way. I know I'm not supposed to talk about this backpack full of their crazy, but sometimes I really wish we could all stop for a second. Maybe they could walk down the trail from the top and meet me. We could unzip that backpack, pull out all of those rocks, and leave the ones we no longer need by the side of the trail. It'd make the walk a lot easier. Maybe then my shoulders wouldn't get so tense when Dad lectures me about money or Mom starts a new diet she saw on the cover of a magazine at the grocery store.

Sometimes it's the distance between us that keeps us close.

Sometimes the loneliest place you will ever be is in bed beside someone you cannot reach. There is no love in our love anymore.

Sometimes when all feels lost, when there seem to be no other apparent options, letting loose anything as an unknown variable is the only way to alter the course of your history.

Sometimes, when you were thinking about something, trying to understand it, it opened up in your head without you expecting it to, like it was a soft spongy light unfolding, and you understood, it made sense forever…

So much has been done to my body, and still, somehow, not enough.

Somewhere, a rattlesnake strike makes the dance begin. Three hawks float in the light blue sky overhead. Crows caw and the sweet seduction of lavender fills my head. And she waltzes through my thoughts.

So what did it matter where she came from? Who-or what-her parents were? Everyone's family was messed up in some way including my own. And she was still the same Ariane.

So you’re the little smart ass from Poleglass.” I wanted to point out he sounded like Dr. Seuss but bit my lip and remembered the warning the old lady gave me.

Successes are those highlights of life we look back on with a smile. But it's the day to day grind of getting them that defines the laugh lines etched until the end of time. Enjoy each moment along the way

Standing naked on the beach with all of my secrets between my legs, I look out into the water and up deep into the stars. I beg the sparkling lanterns of light to cure me of myself…

Sure, Bob Dylan had some good songs. But he could have been a doctor.

Summer had always had a crush on Nat, though, ever since she was five years old. No one, no boy had ever been able to shake her out of her crush on Nat, so at least that was a good thing about Drew. ", Loving Summer by Kailin Gow

Sunlight streamed in a steady flow, casting flecks of gold onto the floor, bathing my skin. I inhaled deeply. Already, the air inside my bedroom had been perfumed with nature. A breeze whispered softly and breathed carefully onto my skin.

That last time you kissed me my heart slid past your teeth down into the center of your chest… trapping us both in a stainless cage.

That amazing time in our lives is gone, and will never return. All the beautiful possibilities we had then have been swallowed up in the flow of time.

That could also be because at one point during the film, our hands found each other. And when I felt Michael's middle finger caress the inside of my palm, it sent a tickle up my spine, and the fingers of my right hand were soon exploring his left hand, and we each took turns tracing the contours of the other's hands.

That night I dreamed about flying turtles and forest fires and fucking the earth...The next morning I awoke and I listened to the tree company tearing away the woods and the timber. I heard the chainsaws ripping outside my open window and I heard the dynamite exploding all the mountain tops away for the black rock below. And instead of feeling sad like I did most mornings, I felt something else now. I found myself saying, 'Explode. Explode you mountains. Rip them down you fuckers. Take this stinking dirt and leave this land with hatred and death.