c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The nice thing about being an adolescent is being able to make mature decisions when you need them and being able to just flow alone with life when you don't.
— Michael A. Stackpole, Ruin (Dark Tide, #2)
Maturing is realizing how many things don’t require your comment.
— Rachel Wolchin
One day soon, she'd have to leave the beach behind and go and find her real life, out in the rest of the world. The beach would shrink and fade and become part of her discarded childhood. Sometimes she almost wishes her father had never brought them here to live. Why show her what it was like to live in Paradise when her only choice was to leave again?
— Cassandra Parkin, The Beach Hut
Oh bell-dumb heart, it makes you a fool to think you were ever closer to opening up the world — to art, to breaking it apart — than those who came before. But knowing that can't make you read or breathe more slowly. Since when did you listen to anyone? To give up on motivation is to give up on the work we do with alphabet and light. It's not enough to hunt or haunt our parents' hearts; we must occupy our own.
— Ander Monson, Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries
I used to joke that we had prepared ourselves for a time like this by living with Mother. The problem with such a state of affairs was not that you did not get to do what you wanted---sometimes you did---but the effort to appease or resist the reigning deities left you so exhausted that it prevented you from ever really having fun. To this day having fun, just plain enjoying myself, comes at the cost of a conviction that I have committed an undetected crime.
— Azar Nafisi, Things I've Been Silent About: Memories
She had gills while other people were breathing with lungs. There was, however, no point in dwelling on it, as it was too later to grow up differently.
— Sonja Yoerg, The Middle of Somewhere
It may have been my youth that forged my heart but it is my adulthood that defines me now." ~quote by Roe'vaash in "Then'diel's HEART
— K. Farrell St. Germain
Have you ever noticed how as an adult, all the bright colors go out of your life? Now that I’m not a kid anymore, things always look gray, like a clothesline draped with laundry that’s been washed too many times and left to stand in the wind. I guess that’s what growing up is… it’s a fading photograph.
— Rebecca McNutt, Smog City
Can I have a motorcycle when I get old enough?""If you take care of it.""What do you have to do?""Lot's of things. You've been watching me.""Will you show me all of them?""Sure.""Is it hard?""Not if you have the right attitudes. It's having the right attitudes that's hard.""Oh."After a while I see he is sitting down again. Then he says, "Dad?""What?""Will I have the right attitudes?""I think so," I say. "I don't think that will be any problem at all.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Growing older does not seem to make you more certain. It simply presents you with more reasons for doubt.
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
The Babies we were are buried, and their shadows are plodding on.
— Emily Dickinson
You'll have lots of questions to answer as you get older. Who you are. Who you want to be. What you think about things. Like politics. And romances. And whether you'll be able to speak out or keep your mouth shut. It's always a challenge to work out the best way to live your life, and as much as everyone tells you what to do, ultimately how you do things is up to you.
— Kate Jacobs
I knew that I did not want to go to that juvenile diversion program because I had an intuitive sense that it would turn me irrevocably into the kind of character that I was now only rehearsing to be.
— Gabrielle Hamilton
They both looked at me in a way that was fast becoming familiar: two parts bafflement to one part awe at my talent for making a bad situation worse.
— David Bennun, Tick Bite Fever
One can only hope that our horizons widen as we grow taller.
— J.R. Tompkins
We live through evolution ourselves, each of us, progressing through different apprehensions of the world, at each age forgetting the last age, every previous mind erased. We no longer see the same world at all.
— David Vann, Aquarium
He considered the hard times in his life. All the things he had been afraid of. All those years wasted, he told himself, because I was terrified of being different. That's why all us fifty-four-year-olds end up looking so much alike. All of us are terrified of being different.
— Stuart McLean
That's the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up. They forget.
I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
I’d ask you to be careful tomorrow, if I thought you’d listen to me,’ I said to him.He looked sympathetic but annoyed. ‘Mum, I’m not a baby anymore.’ Then sensing that I was on the verge of crying, he hugged me gently to his chest. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d hugged me this way. With my face pressed next to his heart I whispered softly, ‘You’ll always be my baby.’ The hug grew firmer and the teardrops began to fall freely.
— Teresa Schulz, Barbed Wire and Daisies
You move on. You move back. On because you're always getting older, back because there's always a set of habits and routines to catch you and suck you back in when your guard is down.
— Mike Carey, The Devil You Know
The last remnants of Deanna the child--the idealist, the sheltered elite--had been torn loose by tonight's tragedies, slain with the same bullet that had felled her would-be killer. She had no idea who the new person inhabiting this shell of her old self would become. The realization frightened her.
— Leslie Ann Moore, A Tangle of Fates
It turns out, after a lot of exploration, that I'm not really a princess. A swell gal, sure, but not a princess.
— Julie Klam, Please Excuse My Daughter: A Memoir
I learned that adults were not soaring gods, but rather back-yard birds with broken wingtips.When you are thirteen, about to free-fall into the real world, discovering the broken wingtips is terrifying.
— Janet Turpin Myers
The only thing that keeps me going, is the desire to get away as far as possible.
— Aleksandra Ninkovic, Write like no one is reading
I wonder how long it will take for me to feel as adult inside as I look outside.
— Maggie Stiefvater, The Scorpio Races
At some point, you're no longer growing up, you're aging. But no one can pinpoint that moment exactly.
— Richard Linklater
Growth is life, and life is for ever destined to make for light.
— Jack London, White Fang
You can hide things from the world, but you can never hide things from time.
— Kim Dong Hwa
I'll only tell you what matters. And the truth is, everything matters. Nothing is an accident, really.
— Crystal Woods, Write like no one is reading
As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that threaded their sound through all the fibers of the house, his occupation of the room down the hall was no more uncomfortable than the persistence of Rabbit's own childhood in an annex of his brain; but when the stuff with hormones and girls and cars and beers began, Harry wanted out of fatherhood.
— John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich
We really don't get to understand /why/ most of the time. It's true.
— Matthew Quick, Boy21
He knows that if his father had been a different man, or his mother another women, he would have been the same.   He would have lived all his years the same way. They played no part. Any combination would have produced the same result. The same man. 
— R.A.Lucas
I sobbed harder into Mom’s chest. I chose not to waste time explaining that it was okay—even fun—to play with Bran while we were in first and second grade. Now, the idea of hanging out with a short kid who always smelled like onions and went to school with cookie dough under his fingernails made me want to run and hide.
— Magaly Guerrero, Thorn in Red
Suddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you're young enough, you don't know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair. A dandelion growing out of a crack in the side walk outside your front door is a garden. You could believe that a song your partner was singing in the evening was the most tragic opera in the world. It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you.
— Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals
I thought I had found my true vocation and happiness, but in a strange way, they were just like my stepmother because they didn't want me to grow up either. This is really important you understand, Virginia, because I had gone from something very bad to something very good, but it was only halfway right. They loved me, but they wanted me to stay small like them.
— Kathryn Wesley
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.
— Makoto Shinkai, The Garden of Words
Did you never wonder why the old books are so full of dragons chasing after maidens? The serpents think the girls are orphans, and long to get them away in a lair so that they may grow up strong and tall.
— Catherynne M. Valente, In the Cities of Coin and Spice
A dragon looks like a girl when it is young.
— Catherynne M. Valente, In the Cities of Coin and Spice
Sometimes you really want to say "Duh," but you can't. It's a part of growing up, I guess.
— Adam Rex, The True Meaning of Smekday
Except that today, oblivious to everyone, there is a hair standing tall inside his shorts: a single hair: long, black and shining. Sprouting out of nowhere, it stands rebelliously erect on his tiny barren orb, not thwarted by the force of the cloth of his underwear, announcing its eventual arrival with élan.
— Mohit Parikh, Manan
It's really best not to tell people when you feel bad. Growing up is about keeping secrets, and pretending everything is fine.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl
I, on the other hand, still might not be considered a proper adult. I had been very grown-up in primary school. But as I continued through secondary school, I in fact became less grown-up. And then as the years passed, I turned into quite a childlike person. I suppose I just wasn't able to ally myself with time.
— Hiromi Kawakami, The Briefcase
Maybe you never stop feeling like an eight-year-old in front of your parents. You resolve to be your mature self, to react in this considered way rather than that elemental way, to breathe evenly from the bottom of your stomach and to see your parents as equals, but within five minutes your intentions are blown to hell, and you're babbling and screaming in rage like an angry child.
— Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia
It’s hard to have done all one’s growing up since 33 — but that’s a damn sight better than not growing up at all.
— H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters V: 1934-1937
This is the first fall that I haven't gone to school. Maybe that's why I feel weird all the time.
— Jennifer Close, Girls in White Dresses
Since when do you look out for me? You really have grown up.""Had to happen sometime," I say.
— Ashley Newell, Freakhouse
How do we deal with all the people we’ve been? What happens when we have to confront them?
— Rachel Kapelke-Dale, Graduates in Wonderland: The International Misadventures of Two (Almost) Adults
It was like adults had their own little world that we weren't allowed to be a part of, and it didn't make sense because we were part of the world, too.
— Susan Pogorzelski, Gold in the Days of Summer
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.
— Hilary Thompson, Justice Buried
Remember, it's still a mystery to be an adult. If you knew it all before eighteen, you'd have nothing to look forward to.
— Carew Papritz, The Legacy Letters: his Wife, his Children, his Final Gift
It was tough coming to the realization that I wasn’t interested in anything, though realizing it didn’t mean I could then immediately find something to engage my interest. I tried to think of something. Maybe I could study a foreign language or study abroad in Rome or somewhere? Or, more realistically, grab some guy I knew and have a destination wedding abroad. But everything I could think of was based on how envious it would make people, not on any genuine interest I might have.
— Shūichi Yoshida, Parade
We make people into Gods, desperate that they never leave us and hopeful that someday, if we ever deserve it, maybe they’ll love us back even half way.
— Jennifer Elisabeth
He broke off his explanation, seeing in his daughter's eyes the exact moment that a child first understands there are limits on what her parents can do, rather than just limits on what they choose to do. He knelt before her in a moment's silence, somewhat less than he had been just seconds before, and Emy a half step closer to the woman she would one day become.
— Mark  Lawrence, Prince of Thorns
It doesn't matter. I've moved on from something that was never there to begin with. That's one of the dire things about escaping from childhood. Eventually you grow up and realize the things you wanted when you were young weren't really yours to ask for. I know that now.
— T.J. Klune, The Art of Breathing
At seventeen, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you became as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked "this too shall pass" - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something that everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgettingone how painful it had been at the time.
— Jodi Picoult, The Pact
I don't really enjoy it, Mom.""And you've always felt this way?""I don't know. I guess I want a break.
— Julie   Murphy
Sometimes you’re 23 and standing in the kitchen of your house making breakfast and brewing coffee and listening to music that for some reason is really getting to your heart. You’re just standing there thinking about going to work and picking up your dry cleaning. And also more exciting things like books you’re reading and trips you plan on taking and relationships that are springing into existence. Or fading from your memory, which is far less exciting. And suddenly you just don’t feel at home in your skin or in your house and you just want home but “Mom’s” probably wouldn’t feel like home anymore either. There used to be the comfort of a number in your phone and ears that listened every day and arms that were never for anyone else. But just to calm you down when you started feeling trapped in a five-minute period where nostalgia is too much and thoughts of this person you are feel foreign. When you realize that you’ll never be this young again but this is the first time you’ve ever been this old. When you can’t remember how you got from sixteen to here and all the same feel like sixteen is just as much of a stranger to you now. The song is over. The coffee’s done. You’re going to breath in and out. You’re going to be fine in about five minutes.
— Kalyn Roseanne Livernois, High Wire Darlings
I guess that’s what growing up is. Saying good-by to a lot of things. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it isn’t. But it is all right.
— Beverly Cleary, The Luckiest Girl
Growing up feels like your skin no longer fits. Like you just want to crawl out of that thinly stretched space and lay down in the grass and sob for hours. Instead, I am in a cafe eating lunch and trying not to scream. Looking around wondering if anyone else in this building is doing the same thing, wondering if they ever have and, if so, how they got through it. Maybe I would calm down if I just had the assurance that other people have looked in the mirror and no longer recognized themselves. Maybe if I could sit across the table from an elderly woman and have her tell me that she lived through days where the covers over her head felt even better than an embrace and weeks where she drank her tears to keep from wetting her shirt sleeves, but that those years shaped her into an iron skeleton with a tender heart. That “worth it” was an understatement. Maybe then I would feel okay.
— Kalyn Roseanne Livernois, High Wire Darlings
Perhaps I just wanted to know what it was that I wanted. Maybe that is all that growing up means.
— Mark  Lawrence, King of Thorns
But, really, are there any guys out there who aren’t jerks? I don’t even know any grown-up men who aren’t jerks.
— Margaret Peterson Haddix, Don't You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey
Seniority has nothing to do with intellectuality, your individuality wins the majority or minority, simply because you maintained the status quo of your peculiarity.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
That’s the thing about being youngwe are textbook pagesof trial and errorfalling down and getting upnot by way of standing andbrushing off our jeansbuy by laying where we felluntil we were high enough to forget
— Kalyn Roseanne Livernois, High Wire Darlings
You learn, finally, that you'll die, and so you try to hang on to your own life, that gentle, naive kid you used to be, but then after a while the sentiment takes over, and the sadness, because you know for a fact that you can't ever bring any of it back again. You just can't.
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
I don't have to get married to grow up!
— Jum Jumms
My existence is young like the blossoming leaves. I have experienced nothing yet.
— Jasmine Sandozz, Thoughts of a Burning Heart
He left that morning, the last words still echoing in my head, and though he said he’d come back one day I know a broken promise from a right one for I have used them myself and there is no coming back. Minds like ours are can’t be tamed and the price for freedom is the price we pay.
— Charlotte Eriksson
How did I get to be a grown-up? At times, I find myself still sitting on the hillside, plotting revenge against the adult world.
— Erica Jong, Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir
The older I get the more mixed up life seems. When you're little, it's all so plain. It's all laid out like a game ready to play. You think you know exactly how it's going to go. But things happen...
— Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy and Joe
You don't grow up, she reasoned now, until you begin to evaluate yourself, to recognize your good traits and acknowledge that you have a few faults.
— Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy and Joe
If you happen to be white in a white country; pretty according to the dictates of fashion; rich in a country where money is adored, it’s almost impossible to grow up and to grow up honest inside. It is almost impossible. Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging. But to grow up, to take responsibility for the time you take up, and the space you occupy, to honor every living person for his or her humanity, that is to grow up.
— Maya Angelou
Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience.
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
She logged in and read a few of her old posts, smiling at the issues she had raged about and shaking her head at how some of the rants now seemed pretentious and judgmental. She had grown so much without even realizing she had. Mythili typed out the draft, spicing it up subtly and after a last read, she published it. Admiring the brand new post on her main page, she realized she missed writing. She had barely written anything since her last by-line. Typing this out, she felt like she was back with a long-lost friend who understood her. It was like snuggling up in a warm blanket when a thunderstorm raged outside.
— Shweta Ganesh Kumar, A Newlywed’s Adventures in Married Land
I know more about my father than I used to know: I know he wanted to be a pilot in the war but could not, because the work he did was considered essential to the war effort… I know he grew up on a farm in the backwoods of Nova Scotia, where they didn’t have running water or electricity. This is why he can build things and chop things… He did his high school courses by correspondence, sitting at the kitchen table and studying by the light by a kerosene lamp; he put himself through university by working in lumber camps and cleaning out rabbit hutches, and was so poor he lived in a tent in the summers to save money… All this is known, but unimaginable. Also I wish I did not know it. I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
— Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
Jacen reflected bitterly that a large part of growing up seemed to involve watching everything change, and discovering that all changes are permanent. That nothing ever changes back. That you can’t go home again.
— Matthew Woodring Stover
but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst. So how do you tell an adult that maybe everything wrong in the world stems from the fact that she’s stopped believing the impossible can happen?
— Jodi Picoult, Between the Lines
We all have days when we say that we are gown-ups, that we are mature, have a lot of experience and don't need advise from others.But it is our mom and dad we turn to when we're in trouble or can't find the answer to a question.
— Maurice J. Dubois
You think everyone will stay behind and do everything you did all over again, forever. You picture old geezers in jean jackets doing whip-its behind the plaza.
— Sam Lipsyte, Venus Drive
Young women dream of romance and passion as men dream of conquest because those dreams are necessary goads to leaving home and growing up.
— Erica Jong, Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir
Estragon: They're too bigVladimir: Perhaps you'll have socks some day
— Samuel Beckett
Jump, when they say, and ask, how high? It is the only way to truly fit in. And who would want to be any different?
— Amy L. Orr, I guess this is growing up
You never could tell when someone would stop growing old in Neverland. For Tik Tok, it had been after wrinkles had walked long deep tracks across his face, but for many people, it was much younger. Some people said it occurred when the most important thing that would ever happen to you triggered something inside that stopped you from moving forward.
— Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
Strangely enough, when you get older the things you didn't understand when you were a child start to make sense. "When this happened, I should have done that." "When that happened, I should have said this." those types of things. You start to understand rather than regret. It may be closer to repentance. So it may be that I do want to repent and erase the ignorant self from my childhood.
— Natsuki Takaya, Fruits Basket, Vol. 4
you know what her punishment is for tormenting you way back when?" he said.I looked at him.He said, "her punishment is being her,
— Curtis Sittenfeld, Sisterland
We realized that the version of the world [our parents] rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about lawns.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
I read once, somewhere, that the way you know you've grown up is when your future death becomes a stone in your shoe: when you feel it with every step.
— Matthew Woodring Stover, Blade of Tyshalle
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!
— Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mouth
We're growing up and I don't like it," said Tacy, as they say at Heinz's later, drinking coffee.
— Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy Was a Junior
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.
— K.D. Emerson, Holiday Keepsakes: A Collection of Stories, Poems and Memories
There’s no magic ruler by which we’re all judged and weighed, not in this life. If you wait for someone to tell you it’s time to grow up, you’ll wait forever. Some people, quite happily, do just that. They don’t do anything until they’re forced to by circumstance
— Heidi Cullinan, Love Lessons
Milena's eyes seemed to go hot and heavy. Praise made her heartsick; she was so unused to it, and needed it so badly.
— Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden
He looked, well, sturdier than he used to. His shoulders were square and, naturally, broader than before. His neck, a bit thicker. He probably had an Adam’s apple now too, like any man did. If he turned, would she see it starkly in profile, protruding awkwardly? And, then, he did turn, just a smidge, as he stifled a yawn, and there was nothing awkward about him.
— Victoria Kahler, Luisa Across the Bay
Unfortunately the ‘warrior’ archetype accidentally dropped the soap in the shower and he has been getting boned senseless by the ‘soldier/lobbyist archetype’ ever since.
— Daniel Prokop, Leaving Neverland: Why Little Boys Shouldn't Run Big Corporations
I went back to my cabin and lay down on my berth. Everything trembled as if it had a spring at its very center. I could hear the small waves lap-lapping around the ship. They made an unexpected sound, as if a vessel filled with liquid had been placed on its side and now was slowly emptying out.
— Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John
As much as childhood was the greatest thing that most of us have ever experienced, with it characterized by our care free attitude and our thirst and hunger to live life on each given day to the fullest. I love where my life is now, after all life was never intended for us to go backwards but simply for us to reminisce and keep moving forward.
— Njabulo P. Vilakazi
This funny thing happens when you graduate college. You hear so much about being an adult that you start to feel like you have to become a different person overnight, that growing up means being not you. And you concentrate so hard on living up to the term "adult" that you forget growing up happens by living, not by sheer force of will.
— Cora Carmack, Finding It
Growing up gorilla is just like any other kind of growing up. You make mistakes. You play. You learn. You do it all over again.
— Katherine Applegate, The One and Only Ivan
And thus it passed on from Candlemass until after Easter, that the month of May was come, when every lusty heart beginneth to blossom, and to bring forth fruit; for like as herbs and trees bring forth fruit and flourish in May, in like wise every lusty heart that is in any manner a lover, springeth and flourisheth in lusty deeds. For it giveth unto all lovers courage, that lusty month of May, in something to constrain him to some manner of thing more in that month than in any other month, for divers causes. For then all herbs and trees renew a man and woman, and likewise lovers call again to their mind old gentleness and old service, and many kind deeds that were forgotten by negligence. For like as winter rasure doth alway arase and deface green summer, so fareth it by unstable love in man and woman. For in many persons there is no stability; for we may see all day, for a little blast of winter's rasure, anon we shall deface and lay apart true love for little or nought, that cost much thing; this is no wisdom nor stability, but it is feebleness of nature and great disworship, whosomever useth this. Therefore, like as May month flowereth and flourisheth in many gardens, so in like wise let every man of worship flourish his heart in this world, first unto God, and next unto the joy of them that he promised his faith unto; for there was never worshipful man or worshipful woman, but they loved one better than another; and worship in arms may never be foiled, but first reserve the honour to God, and secondly the quarrel must come of thy lady: and such love I call virtuous love.But nowadays men can not love seven night but they must have all their desires: that love may not endure by reason; for where they be soon accorded and hasty heat, soon it cooleth. Right so fareth love nowadays, soon hot soon cold: this is no stability. But the old love was not so; men and women could love together seven years, and no licours lusts were between them, and then was love, truth, and faithfulness: and lo, in like wise was used love in King Arthur's days. Wherefore I liken love nowadays unto summer and winter; for like as the one is hot and the other cold, so fareth love nowadays; therefore all ye that be lovers call unto your remembrance the month of May, like as did Queen Guenever, for whom I make here a little mention, that while she lived she was a true lover, and therefore she had a good end.
— Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table
That was the problem, wasn't it? You left home. But you never did become an adult. Not really. You just fucked up in different and more complicated ways.
— Mark Haddon, A Spot of Bother
Boredom is a powerful reason, and the prospect of fun is a powerful draw - especially when you are young.
— Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Growing up is when you understand you get what you give, not what you're given.
— Guy Browning, Never Hit a Jellyfish With a Spade: How to Survive Life's Smaller Challenges
But I can’t manage to grow up and change shape. I’m still tiny, and staying that way, perhaps because I know the secret that everyone pretends to be unaware of, perhaps because I know that deep down we’re all tiny.
— Delphine de Vigan, No and Me
The trouble is I'm not very good at trusting my own instincts. I've been wrong before. A lot.""About what? You worry too much, about everything. You're to hard on yourself.""I was wrong about Rory -""You were twenty-five, twenty-six! Everyone's allowed to be in love with the wrong person at some point. In fact, its a mistake not to be.
— Harriet Evans, Happily Ever After
However, now she was a schoolgirl no longer. She had discovered how to manage her hair, had been to one or two parties and a night club, and laid on lipstick with the idea that each layer was a layer of sophistication.
— Monica Dickens, Mariana
To become a man is to carry out your word because you gave your word. And your word is you as a man." - The Legacy Letters, by Carew Papritz
— Carew Papritz
I wanted her and only her.I wanted to be a part of her storm. I wanted to feel my pulse against hers.I wanted the bitter on her sweet tongue. I wanted the sadness in her sweet syrup eyes. I wanted the silence in her screaming mind and the enigma that is really quite simple- a complicated happiness. I wasn't willing to let go. I was falling completely, forever, into solid fucking love that was swimming through my veins. I wanted to be the breath in her mouth and the rhythm in her chest that would beat only for me.
— Shey Stahl, Waiting for You
Because I was conceived and born and I grew up. I'm breathing and my heart is beating and as much as it hurts ― as much searing, monumental pain it causes me ― I have to exist.
— Brenna Yovanoff, Paper Valentine
Stephanie took another puff from her candy cigarette, reached into her purse, brought out the rest of the pack, and said, "Want one of these damned cigarettes?
— K. Martin Beckner, Chips of Red Paint
Cry your guts out because nothing is sadder than an adult who forgets how to be a child.
— Alison Espach
My parents say you’re no good, Elijah.” I exhaled and killed the cigarette in the grass.Laughing, Eli’s eyes went to my lips and his hands touched my bare midriff. “Really? And what do you say?”He had brought his lips so close to mine that it became hard to think about my next words when all I wanted to do was crush my mouth to his. I wanted him to completely consume me. “I think you’re broken,” I finally got out, and Eli arched a brow. “But I think I’m broken too. I just don’t know it yet.
— Nadège Richards, 5 Miles
I am what you made me, Father.
— Jamie Ford, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
Experience is like evidence. When you're young and don't have much experience yet, you don't have much basis for confidence. All you really have is hope, and that can get shaken pretty easily. But as years go by, you start to gather this evidence. You made it through this or that and you did okay, maybe not perfectly, but okay, so when you stumble, which you will, you can look back and say, 'Well, I survived that, so I can probably survive this.' Or there will be things you're really proud of, evidence of your abilities, and you can look back on those things and say, 'I did it then, I can do it again.' Right now, you're just building up those experiences.
— Charity Shumway, Ten Girls to Watch
This is where the pivotal events of my childhood unfolded, while I ate banana and root beer Popsicles, two by two, tucking the sticks neatly under the skirt of the chair. It's where Sunnybank Lad met Lady, Ken met his friend Flicka, Atlanta burned, Manderley burned, Lassie came home, Jim ran away, Alice got small, Wilbur got big, David Copperfield was born, Beth died, and, on an endless gloomy winter afternoon, Jody shot his yearling.
— Jo Ann Beard, In Zanesville
It's such a hopeful, almost utopian word, that word "phase." As if any minute, "we" would suffer some sort of Joad overload, come to "our" senses, and for heaven's sake, do something about our godforsaken shoes. But the book phase never ended. The book phase would bloom and grow into a whole series of seasonal affiliations including our communist phase, our beatnik phase, our vegetarian phase, and the three-year period known as Please Don't Talk to Me. Now that we are finishing up the third decade of the book phase, we ask ourselves if we have changed. Sure, we still dress in the bruise palette of gray, black, and blue, and we still haven't gotten around to piercing our ears. But we wear lipstick now, we own high-heeled shoes. Concessions have been made.
— Sarah Vowell, Take the Cannoli
We got a saying around here about our corn, ‘it grows knee-high by the Fourth of July.
— Richard Puz, The Carolinian
Since being back in London everything seemed greyer, but clearer. She couldn't explain it. The strangest thing was she couldn't recall her New York self. She wanted that part of herself back, but she couldn't remember what it was like to be that Elle. She would catch a whiff of it, like the snatch of a song that still won't lead you to the chorus, and then it would be gone.
— Harriet Evans, Happily Ever After
What if my boobs decide to grow WHILE I'm at school?
— Renata Suerth, New School & Other Stuff
Step-parents, those fairy tale villains,Have been given a bad name.They're easy targets.When the family goes awryHow easy to blame them.I was blessed by the right steps...
— Eileen Granfors
I think of me and Melanie when we were younger, on the high dive at the pool in Mexico. We would always hold hands as we jumped, but by the time we swam back up to the surface, we'd have let go. No matter how we tried, once we started swimming, we always let go. But after we bobbed to the surface, we'd climb out of the pool, clamber up the high-dive ladder, clasp hands, and do it again.  We're swimming separately now. I get that. Maybe it's just what you have to do to keep above water. But who knows? Maybe one day, we'll climb out, grab hands, and jumo again.
— Gayle Forman, Just One Day
Magda looks at me as if I've gone mad. Or I've grown up. It's kind of the same thing.
— Victoria Schwab, The Near Witch
Hm. Didn’t you use to be a lot smaller?”“Yes,” said Jinx. “Because I used to be six.
— Sage Blackwood, Jinx
It was such a strange tormenting feeling when your daemon was pulling at the link between you; part physical pain deep in the chest, part intense sadness and love. Everyone tested it when they were growing up: seeing how far they could pull apart, coming back with intense relief.
— Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass
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.
— Nadège Richards, 5 Miles
It's as if once you hit high school, you're programmed, like a robot, to be an asshole to your parents.
— Sara Zarr, How to Save a Life
When I was young, I used to wish I would fit in… I’m glad I didn’t get my wish.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
We can't go back, Alexa", he said. " We can't go back once we've started growing up, and the world can't be made simple again.
— Patrick Carman, The Tenth City
At fifteen, I have taken up the burdens of a woman, and have come to feel I am one. Furthermore, I am glad of it. For I now no longer have the time to fall into such sins as I committed as a girl, when hours that were my own to spend spread before me like a gift.
— Geraldine Brooks, Caleb's Crossing
As it turned out, almost every notion I had on my 13th birthday about my future turned out to be a total waste of my time. When I thought of myself as an adult, all I could imagine was someone thin, and smooth, and calm, to whom things... happened. Some kind of souped-up princess with a credit card. I didn't have any notion about self-development, or following my interests, or learning big life lessons, or, most important, finding out what I was good at and trying to earn a living from it. I presumed that these were all things that some grown-ups would come along and basically tell me what to do about at some point, and that I really shouldn't worry about them. I didn't worry about what I was going to do. What I did worry about, and thought I should work hard at, was what I should be, instead. I thought all of my efforts should be concentrated on being fabulous, rather than doing fabulous things.
— Caitlin Moran
Why can't a girl just want to know stuff and not do stuff?
— Ellen Mulholland, This Girl Climbs Trees
Oh God, I'm miss­ing the gene which makes you grow up and buy a flat in Streatham and start visiting Homebase every weekend. Everyone's moving on without me, into a world I don't understand.
— Sophie Kinsella
Learning is one letter short of maturity.
— Eddie Mhone
Oak, granite,Lilies by the road,Remember me?I remember you.Clouds brushingClover hills,Remember me?Sister, child,Grown tall,Remember me?I remember you.
— Gail Carson Levine, Ella Enchanted
It seems only yesterday I used to believethere was nothing under my skin but light.If you cut me I could shine.But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,I skin my knees. I bleed.
— Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
Reading all my old love letters was disorienting. You remember thinking the thoughts and writing the words but, man, you can't TOUCH those feelings. Its like they belonged to someone else. Someone you don't even know. I'm aware, in an intellectual way. That I felt all those things about him, but this emotions are far away now.What's so strange to me is that I can't even force my heart back to that place where I felt that all consuming passion. That makes me feel distant from myself. Who WAS I then? Will I ever be able to get back to that place? Reading the letters again made me wonder: Which is the real me? The one who saw the world in that emotionally saturated way, or the me who sees it the way I do now?
— Bill Shapiro, Other People's Love Letters: 150 Letters You Were Never Meant to See
I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
People always think something's all true. I don't give a damn, except that I get bored when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am, I really do. But people never notice. People never notice anything.
— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
It was too late. Maybe yesterday, while I was still a child, but not now. I knew too much, had seen too much, I was a child no longer now; innocence and childhood were forever lost, forever gone from me.
— William Faulkner, The Reivers
When we became teenagers boredom grew like a moth in a cocoon fighting to escape, and the peace created by our parents became a prison. We sought excitement and adventure. We sought anything but the sinless, pure, and average of the faux idyllic.
— Scott  Thompson, Young Men Shall See
And what other kind of man would you want leading you into battle?” he says, reading my Noise. “What other kind of man is suitable for war?”A monster, I think, remembering what Ben told me once. War makes monsters of men.“Wrong,” says the Mayor. “It’s war that makes us men in the first place. Until there’s war, we are only children.”Another blast of the horn comes roaring down at us, so loud it nearly takes our heads off and it puts the army off its stride for a second or two.We look up the road to the bottom of the hill. We see Spackle torches gathering there to meet us.“Ready to grow up, Todd?” the Mayor asks.
— Patrick Ness, Monsters of Men
nobody tells us as little girls that we may fall in love and have moments of hating our beloved, or have ridiculous arguments at 2 AM over something that neither person understands.
— S.A.R.K.
...TV was entertainment of the last resort. There was nothing on during the day in the summer other than game shows and soap operas. Besides, a TV-watching child was considered available for chores: take out the trash, clean your room, pick up that mess, fold those towels, mow the lawn... the list was endless. We all became adept at chore-avoidance. Staying out of sight was a reliable strategy. Drawing or painting was another: to my mother, making art trumped making beds. A third choir-avoidance technique was to read. A kid with his or her nose in a book is a kid who is not fighting, yelling, throwing, breaking things, bleeding, whining, or otherwise creating a Mom-size headache. Reading a book was almost like being invisible - a good thing for all concerned.
— Pete Hautman, Libraries of Minnesota
Maybe universal nostalgia doesn't exist. Maybe each of us carries our own personal version of the better times. It's at about twnety-two years that we all begin to think of our childhood as the good ol' days and everything afterwards exists as a slow-motion face plant. The fall continues, through marriage, through career building, through parenthood, through old age, until we finally touch nose to ground. At twenty-two years old, I've just started, but I think I can already smell my own grave.
— Caleb J. Ross, I Didn't Mean to Be Kevin
The people they had been last summer, the person she had been--Dicey guessed she'd never be afraid again, not the way she had been all summer. She had taken care of them all, sometimes well, sometimes badly. And they had covered the distances. For most of the summer, they had been unattached. Nobody knew who they were or what they were doing. It didn't matter what they did, as long as they all stayed together. Dicey remembered that feeling, of having things pretty much her own way. And she remembered the feelings of danger. It was a little bit like being a wild animal, she thought to herself. Dicey missed that wildness. She knew she would never have it again. And she missed the sense of Dicey Tillerman against the whole world and doing all right.
— Cynthia Voigt, Dicey's Song
Anna is part of a generation that often seems frozen in place by their unreleting sense of irony. Virtually everything people believe in can be exposed as possessing laughable inconsistencies. And so they laugh. And stand still.
— Scott Turow, Innocent
Because…sometimes I think you meet people and they make you better, even if you’re not with them forever.
— Kris Noel, Lionhead
She told herself that she longed greatly to go back to those dear merry days when life was seen through a rosy mist of hope and illusion, and possessed an indefinable something that had passed away forever. Where was it now--the glory and the dream?
— L.M. Montgomery
I didn't begin life hating my grandmother. Like every child, I adored her. Until I formed a brain and got to know her.
— Augusten Burroughs, Possible Side Effects
I think that's every unresolved person's dream, to wake up one day and know what they want to do the rest of their life.
— Ashley D. Wallis, Leaping
Don’t grow old to give up and don’t give up growing up
— Bernard Kelvin Clive
I jumped on Sinbad's bottle. Nothing happened. I didn't do it again. Sometimes when nothing happened it was really getting ready to happen
— Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
If I could have all of those things, I wouldn't mind if I touched her or not.
— Nick Hornby
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.
— Ted Hughes
Sometimes, life threw up problems that even the wisest, most trusted mentor couldn't solve for you. It was part of the pain of growing up.And having to stand by and watch was part of being a mentor.
— John Flanagan, The Siege of Macindaw
That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.
— Nick Hornby, About a Boy
I found myself suddenly jealous of the time when things were simple, when days centered on creek walks and tetherball, and your biggest worry was whether you'd have riding or sailing. There were no boys, there were no secrets or rumors, and there were no regrets. Not even fear of regret. There was just a best friend and endless hours to fill with Pixy Stix and laughing so hard you couldn't breathe.
— Kathryn Williams, The Lost Summer
…girls were like poems: weird, incomprehensible and boring, but those “in the know” assured me that they were beautiful.
— Jake Vander-Ark, The Accidental Siren
I focused on the passing houses filled with couples who’d somehow survived this teenage craziness of ‘he likes her but she likes him and he likes somebody else, you just can’t win.’ How did they do it? How did they end up in their golden, warm and cozy living rooms with their 2.3 children and dogs and cats? Because getting from where I was to where they were seemed millions of light years away.
— Sarah Strohmeyer, Smart Girls Get What They Want