c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
When you're born a light is switched on, a light which shines up through your life. As you get older the light still reaches you, sparkling as it comes up through your memories. And if you're lucky as you travel forward through time, you'll bring the whole of yourself along with you, gathering your skirts and leaving nothing behind, nothing to obscure the light. But if a Bad Thing happens part of you is seared into place, and trapped for ever at that time. The rest of you moves onward, dealing with all the todays and tomorrows, but something, some part of you, is left behind. That part blocks the light, colours the rest of your life, but worse than that, it's alive. Trapped for ever at that moment, and alone in the dark, that part of you is still alive.
— Michael Marshall Smith, Only Forward
Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished.
— Lois McMaster Bujold
I used to think that when I grew up there wouldn't be so many rules. Back in elementary school there were rules about what entrance you used in the morning, what door you used going home, when you could talk in the library, how many paper towels you could use in the rest room, and how many drinks of water you could get during recess. And there was always somebody watching to make sure.What I'm finding out about growing older is that there are just as many rules about lots of things, but there's nobody watching.
— Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, Alice in Rapture, Sort of
They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. "I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't."Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. "You grew up, Alex," he said, "just like the rest of us.
— Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
This is growing up, having to stomp out love, this is how people turn terrible.
— Michelle Tea
Don't try to make me grow up before my time…
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
You’re a teenager. It’s all complicated.
— Jenny B. Jones, There You'll Find Me
You grow up the day you have your first real laugh -- at yourself.
— Ethel Barrymore
When you were too young and naïve to see the risks, I incurred your wrath to protect you. Scream at me for it if you must. Thank me for it when you finally grow up.
— Karen Marie Moning, Bloodfever
Maybe it’s just getting older. You become so palpably aware this is not a dress rehearsal. There’s a big sign in blazing neon that says You Haven’t Got Long. But I think it takes a beat to learn that. Life has to knock you down in order for you to realise it, because when you’re a kid you think you’re immortal.
— Tom Hiddleston
Out of curiosity, when do I grow up and become a fullfledgedman with a penis?”“When words like ‘hump day’ don’t make you giggle like atwelve-year-old,” he retorted, blowing smoke my way.“Wow, that long?
— Dani Alexander, Shattered Glass
Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they'd be different
— Tana French, In the Woods
I'm at that age where I watch such things with two minds, one that cackles at these capers and another that never gets much beyond a rather jaded and self-conscious smile, like the Mona Lisa.
— Alan Bradley, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag
It’s kind of sad, if you think about it. Like there’s no continuity in people at all. Like something ruptures when you hit twelve, or thirteen, or whatever the age is when you’re no longer a kid but a “young adult,” and after that you’re a totally different person. Maybe even a less happy person. Maybe even a worse one.
— Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall
You must pay the penalty of growing-up, Paul. You must leave fairyland behind you.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island
Such is life. We grow up. Planets like Tiny get new moons. Moons like me get new planets.
— John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson
Sometimes you have to grow up before you appreciate how you grew up.
— Daniel Black, Perfect Peace
The invention of the teenager was a mistake. Once you identify a period of life in which people get to stay out late but don't have to pay taxes - naturally, no one wants to live any other way.
— Judith Martin
I don't think I'd have been in such a hurry to reach adulthood if I'd known the whole thing was going to be ad-libbed.
— Bill Watterson, The Revenge of the Baby-Sat
The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself. I was a child then, I had no idea what the world would be like. I wished to trust myself on the waters and the sea. Everything was romantic in my imagination. The woods were peopled by the mysterious good folk. The Lords and Ladies of the last century walked with me along the overgrown paths, and picked the old fashioned flowers among the box and rose hedges of the garden.
— Beatrix Potter
Scott: I don't think I'm ready to be a grown-up.Kim: I don't think you are either, buddy. But hey, you'll get it. It just takes practice.
— Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim, Volume 6: Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour
In a desperate attempt to stay young forever we have achieved eternal childishness, rather than eternal youth.
— Daniel Prokop, Leaving Neverland: Why Little Boys Shouldn't Run Big Corporations
The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, Slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized.
— Richard Peck, A Long Way from Chicago
Part of growing up was learning not to be quite that honest - learning when it was better to lie, rather than to hurt someone with the truth.
— Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes
most of us, as we undergo the growing up process, do not get what we want or even what we should. We get what we have, and no more, and we find out how to make what we have work for us.
— Lilith Saintcrow
It must be lovely to be grown up, Marilla, when just being treated as if you were is so nice...Well, anyway, when I grow up, I'm always going to talk to little girls as if they were, too, and I'll never laugh when they use big words.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
He was an astronaut without a suit, but he was still breathing.
— John Corey Whaley, Highly Illogical Behavior
I kept thinking there were two kinds of adults: There were...miserable creatures who scoured the earth in search of something to hurt. And then there were people like my parents, who walked around zombically, doing whatever they had to do to keep walking around.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
I reckon responsible behavior is something to get when you grow older. Like varicose veins.
— Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
You can get what you want or you can just get old.
— Billy Joel
Growing up is such a barbarous business, full of inconvenience... and pimples.
— J.M. Barrie
It was a sign of growing up, when the dark made no more difference to you than the day.
— Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I can simply guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone?
— Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
Some days you go bear hunting and you get eaten. Some days you come home with a nice rug to roll around on, and bear steaks. What they don't tell you as a kid is that sometimes you get the rug and steaks, but you also get some nice scars to go with them. As a child you don't understand that you can win, but that's it's not always worth the price. Once you understand and accept that possibility you become a real grown up, and the world becomes a much more serious place. Not less fun, but once you realize what can go wrong, it's a lot scarier to go hunting "bears".
— Laurell K. Hamilton
Oh! Polly thought. Why aren't all girls locked up by law the year they turn fifteen? They do such stupid things!
— Diana Wynne Jones
It was strange walking through the empty apartment. My battered purple room was gone, Brittany’s bruised blue was gone. Two coats covered everything. It was like none of it had ever happened.
— Kimberly Novosel, Loved
hat's the worst of growing up, and I'm beginning to realize it. The things you wanted so much when you were a child don't seem half so wonderful to you when you get them.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
The truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing but does only and wholly what he must do.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like "What I'm Going to be If I Grow Up
— Lenny Bruce
To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.
— Adam Phillips, Equals
Isn't that the tragedy of growing up though? One day you wake up and realize that everything you are and everything you feel is not much different from what everyone else feels.
— Nadine Rose Larter, Coffee at Little Angels
Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.
— Ernest Hemingway, The Nick Adams Stories
Adulthood is accretive by nature, a thing which arrives in ragged stages and uneven overlaps.
— Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis
She had the feeling, the tingling, lingering sense that something or someone life altering was just over the horizon. She had no idea what it was, but she wanted to rush headlong to bring it to her.
— Mandy Nachampassack-Maloney, Autumnal Dancer
Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born.
— Ian McEwan, The Child in Time
They said growing up was watching your breasts grow, your waist widen and hairs sprout on your erogenous ones. You became aware of the warmness that spread in circles in your stomach when that fine boy smiled at you. But that was not growing to me. Growing up was watching Papa drift away from us, and Mama grow drastically older from frying Akara balls just to cater for our home.
— Ukamaka Olisakwe, Eyes of a Goddess
Part of growing up is narrowing your life choices to a manageable size.
— Amy E. Spiegel, Letting Go of Perfect: Women, Expectations, and Authenticity
Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear...Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
After it's all over, the early childhood, a chain of birthdays woven with candlelight, piles of presents, voices of relatives singing and praising your promise and future, after the years of schooling, fitting yourself into different size desks, memorizing, reciting, reporting, and performing for jury after jury of teachers, counselors, and administrators, you still feel inadequate, alone, vulnerable, and naked in a world that can be unforgiving and terribly demanding.
— V.C. Andrews, Into the Garden
When I was about nine, my siblings and I fell out of our moving van at an intersection. My dad didn’t notice for about five blocks. It was back before seat belts. It was also back before parents used any sort of common sense whatsoever. It was a time when you didn’t raise your children. You just fed them and they got bigger.
— Dina Kucera, Everything I Never Wanted to Be
I wish wearing flat-irons on our heads would keep us from growing up. But buds will be roses, and kittens, cats, - more's the pity!
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame...
— Henry Adams
Watching her, he saw again how she teetered between adolescence and adulthood, with a raw sensuality that had to deposit her in a kind of no-man's land--too much a woman for boys her own age, too young for fully adult men.
— Keith Ablow, Murder Suicide
I know it’s impossible for you to see peers this way, but when you’re older, you start to see them—the bad kids and the good kids and all kids—as people. They’re just people, who deserve to be cared for. Varying degrees of sick, varying degrees of neurotic, varying degrees of self- actualized.
— John Green, Paper Towns
Adults tend to repress their pleasure. Sad to say, I think we become adults only through disappointment, grief, and lies. So of course gradually we become tough, less sensitive.
— Jean-Louis Gassee
So her safe little world would never be safe again... She knew that the nurturing hand also held the knife, and that was very unsettling.
— Mercedes Lackey, Beauty and the Werewolf
Wow you've grown!" Yeah, that tends to happen...
— Janelle Cooper
His sixth year, it seemed to him, had lasted a remarkably long time and there were points at which he frankly wondered whether he would ever turn seven. But now it was the night before his birthday, and barring some cosmic disaster, the advent of some unexpected black hole into which the earth might be sucked, with the attendant reversal or suspension of time, in very few hours he would be waking up to a world in which he was numbered among the seven-year-olds.
— Alexander McCall Smith, Bertie's Guide to Life and Mothers
Maybe I've moved to the dark side, but it's clean and nice and we never run out of toilet paper.
— Jen Lancaster, Jeneration X: One Reluctant Adult's Attempt to Unarrest Her Arrested Development; Or, Why It's  Never Too Late for Her Dumb Ass to Learn Why Froot Loops Are Not for Dinner
Everyone always knows what they're doing," he says abruptly, still not looking up from his hands, the little plastic pot and the old tattoo and the new white dressing on his left wrist. "You know what you're doing, you got your work and your friends and everything and miserable headfucky little teenage girly boys think you're amazing and, I don't know, you might've saved my life, who knows? I might be dead if it weren't for you and Olly but people can't keep looking after me all the time cos that ain't healthy neither, that's just as bad as people not giving a fuck at all. And, like... I'm trying to sort my head out and be a proper grown-up and get my degree and go to work and look after them kids and make sure my dad ain't kicking my sister round the house like a football but it's just so hard all the time, and I know I ain't got no right to complain cos that's just life, ain't it? Everyone's the same, least I ain't got money worries or nothing. I just don't know what I'm doing, everything's too hard. I can try and try forever but I can't be good enough for no one so what the fuck's the point?
— Richard Rider, 17 Black and 29 Red
Most of our parents wanted the best for us, I knew, but we also wanted the best for them.
— Deb Caletti, The Six Rules of Maybe
We live in an adolescent society, Neverland, where never growing up seems more the norm than the exception. Little boys wearing expensive suits and adult bodies should not be allowed to run big corporations. They shouldn’t be allowed to run governments, armies, religions, small businesses and charities either and just quietly, they make pretty shabby husbands and fathers too. Mankind has become Pankind and whilst “lost boys” abound, there is also an alarming increase in the number of “lost girls.
— Daniel Prokop, Leaving Neverland: Why Little Boys Shouldn't Run Big Corporations
A dim antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty: and when it passed, cloudlike, leaving his mind serene and dutiful towards her again, he was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives.
— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
This memory was both happy and sad: happy because it was so pleasant, and sad because it made Penelope think about how much she missed Swanburne--the girls, the teachers, Miss Mortimer. Or perhaps it was her own much younger self, that pint-sized person whom she could never be again, whom she missed. It was hard to say.
— Maryrose Wood, The Mysterious Howling
It wasn't until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison cell that it really hit home that he was vanishing out of our lives and into his own.
— Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away
I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.
— John Green, Turtles All the Way Down
I never left because a part of me will always be in that house...
— J.X. Burros
That boy made me realize, for a while at least, that my parents were wrong, and I didn't have to be like them.
— J.X. Burros
I felt for the first time, maybe ever, how much harder it was to be the adults. And I wasn't sure I could do that when it was my turn.
— Barbara Hall, Tempo Change
One longs and longs to be grown up, doesn't one?," she said, "I dreamed of being eighteen and having a Season and meeting handsome gentlemen even apart from Dominic and falling in love with them and marrying him and living happily ever after. But life is not nearly as that simple when one finally does grow up.
— Mary Balogh, The Devil's Web
I never tired of picturing sharks.
— Eileen Granfors, Flash Warden and Other Stories
Being a kid has always been about being watched.
— Lauren McLaughlin, Scored
It's easy to grow old if you haven't grown up
— John Hively
I suppose I was artistic as a child. Our house was so full of art and artists that it never occurred to me not to be constantly making things. I just assumed that all kids liked to work with their hands as much as I did. I was an only child so I did have a lot of time to be creative by myself and with my parents.
— Wendy Froud
It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized you could buy a packet of cereal with a free gift and then just stick your hand in and root around in the packet until you found the free thing. It seems a much simpler way. But that took me about fifteen years to work out.
— Eddie Izzard, Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens
Maybe that was what growing up was, understanding where the real magic lived in this world. Inside our very own hearts.
— Gina Linko, Flower Moon
I held on to the hope that one day I would grow up and have all the answers, just like my parents. As I look over at Arnold and then at Father Mike, I realize that adults are just as fucked as the rest of us. No one really grows up. No one unravels all of life's many mysteries. They just grow older and become better liars.
— Shaun David Hutchinson, The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley
...when it comes to defining adulthood, nothing has made me feel more grown-up than knowing that one of the two people in the world who loved me the most, without condition, was no longer in the world.
— Jean Hannah Edelstein
Some old-school Madonna and Beyoncé and everyone in the room went from being eighteen-year-olds to being twelve-year-olds to seven-year-olds and back again, each song belonging to an age they had all shared.
— Laleh Khadivi, A Good Country
Jess is too big for her skin, as if she might float away in the exhilarating possibility of the moment.
— C.B. Lee, Not Your Sidekick
Taking a lifetime to grow up.
— Larry Smith, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure
I scan the room. Bunnies are always the most plentiful in Canadian cities so I'm not shocked that the Vancouver hotel bar is flooded with them. A very cute blonde smiles when our eyes meet. I raise my beer at her as a hello but cut off any further interaction by turning back to Jordan. "I've probably fucked half this room already," I reply since I recognize a few of the pretty faces. "I'm just taking a breather right now. I'm sure one day soon I'll feel like conquering the other half."He chuckles and shakes his head. "And here I was thinking maybe our little Alex was growing up.
— Victoria Denault, Game On
The British boy suffers the greatest restraint during the period when the call of nature, the instincts of play and adventure, are most urgent. Naturally, he looks eagerly forward to the time of escape, which he fondly imagines will be when his boyhood is over and he is free of masters.
— William Henry Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago
Nobody could hold the same place in your heart as your sister. Love or hate her, she was the only person who grew up exactly like you, who knew the secrets of your household—the laughter that only the walls of your house contained or the screaming at a level low enough the neighbors couldn’t hear, the passive aggressive compliments or the little put-downs. Only your sister could know how it felt to grow up in the house that made you you.
— Jessica  Taylor, A Map for Wrecked Girls
And not one person would notice the grey parts of her until it was too late, because everyone falls for a pretty face.
— R. Y.S. Perez, I Hope You Fall in Love: Poetry Collection
I know who I want to be and I want you by my side as I become that person.
— Katie McGarry, Red at Night
Growing up she had become used to allowing men the ability to curve themselves into question marks around her and hold her desperately as if she were the answer. She had become afraid to admit that she is not.
— R. Y.S. Perez, I Hope You Fall in Love: Poetry Collection
Like it or not, a caterpillar must first live as a chrysalis before becoming a butterfly. Maybe I remember those days because I am going through a chrysalis stage.
— Isao Takahata
Nothing special has happened today; no one can say she was more provoked than usual. It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman. Step by step until it is done.
— Naomi Alderman, The Power
Childhood introduces children to the wounds of the world.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Otis Grows is a kid’s book that looks at adult problems. It playfully engages us all to consider: what’s tough, what’s inherent, but most of all, what’s possible.
— Kathryn Hast, Otis Grows
I think I may have to grow up without growing old. I think we're going to have to define differently what I'm going to be. We're going to have to define my growing up differently.
— Mattie Stepanek
Is this what all the years of schooling were for? To prepare me for this Sense of being stuck in the middle?What was the point? No one said I was going to be this sad.No one said I would still be crying.
— Samantha Schutz, I Don't Want To Be Crazy
Thats the trick of growing up. Nothing stays the same." Hook sounded oddly sympathetic. "You see the faults in everything. Including yourself.
— Austin Chant, Peter Darling
I wonder if all mothers feel like this the moment they realize their daughters are growing up- as if it is impossible to believe that the laundry I once folded for her was doll-sized; as if I can still see her dancing in lazy pirouettes along the lip of the sandbox. Wasn't it yesterday that her hand was only as big as the sand dollar she found on the beach? That same hand, the one that's holding a boy's; wasn't it just holding mine, tugging so that I might stop and see the spiderweb, the milkweed pod, any of a thousand moments she wanted me to freeze? Time is an optical illusion- never quite as solid or strong as we think it is. You would assume that, given everything, I saw this coming. But watching Kate watch this boy, I see I have a thousand things to learn.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
She saw clearly a boy and a man fighting for control of the same face.
— Stephen King, The Stand
It's what you do when you grow up, apparently, face up to things you'd rather not and accept the fact that nobody is who you thought they were, maybe not even close.
— Jenny Valentine, Me, the Missing, and the Dead
Please do not blame the story.The story cannot help itself. We do not realize it at the time, but sometimes the story we are all a part of is not just a story about Vikings and islands and dragons. It is a story about growing up.And one of the things about growing up, one of the inescapable, inevitable laws, is that one day...One day... one day... It is going to happen. I am sorry, but it's true.
— Cressida Cowell, How to Steal a Dragon's Sword
She looked for any sign of the boy who'd taught her to whistle a hornpipe, who could palm an ace of hearts and make it reappear from her sleeve, but failed to find even a glimmer of him. Instead she saw Ida taking on a second life in the features of her only son, and for a quick heartbeat Jo was almost grateful for the scar tissue dimpled across her cheek, forehead, and chin. No one would ever be able to invade her face, she realized. She would always simply be herself, whether she liked it or not.
— Tiffany Baker, The Gilly Salt Sisters
We are always growing up. I'm growing up as I type this. An eighty-seven-year-old woman is still technically growing up. So be as immature as you want. Right now, you are the youngest you you're ever going to be.
— Mamrie Hart, You Deserve a Drink: Boozy Misadventures and Tales of Debauchery
Perhaps they never die at all. I quite believe that myself, and it is a comfort, don't you think? That there is a place where no one ever grows old?
— Megan Shepherd, The Secret Horses of Briar Hill
We're growing up," Betsy said aloud. She wasn't even sure she liked it. But it happened, and then it wasn't irrevocable. There was nothing you could do about it except try and see that you grew up into the kind of human being you wanted to be. "I'd like to be a fine one," Betsy thought quickly and urgently.
— Maud Hart Lovelace
...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.
— Lev Grossman, The Magician King
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.
— Carrie Vaughn, After the Golden Age
The most valuable thing [Anton LaVey] did that day was to help me understand and come to terms with the deadness, hardness and apathy I was feeling about myself and the world around me, explaining that it was all necessary, a middle step in an evolution from an innocent child to an intelligent, powerful being capable of making a mark on the world.
— Marilyn Manson, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell
It has started to snow. We all ran out when it began, and played at catching flakes as we used to when we were children. But it was cold, and our boots and gloves and cloaks were soon wet - you feel these things more when you are grown-up.
— Natasha Farrant, The Secret Diary of Lydia Bennet
Americans are children who must go somewhere else to grow up, and sometimes die.
— Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
... I guessed that when you are nearly a man, you have to learn to put up with a lot of aggravation from little old bitty kids.
— Fred Gipson, Old Yeller
And to Tiger Lily he suddenly, inexplicably, seemed older than her, and wiser, and the thought hit her hard that it wasn't fair, because she'd suffered, and there he was, looking like he knew so much more than she ever would.
— Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
Like a detective keenly searching for clues, our daughters are solving the mystery of womanhood itself.
— Melia Keeton-Digby, The Heroines Club: A Mother-Daughter Empowerment Circle
I don't know why I didn't have this sixth sense or whatever it is all along, but part of me thinks maybe it means I'm growing up, evolving into a real superhero. Like maybe the world knew I couldn't handle it before, but now, now I'm finally becoming me an the world know sit -- or maybe I'm just learning to listen to myself.
— Kelly Thompson, The Girl Who Would Be King
I was sixteen, and I honestly believed that I was due a love story.
— Sara Barnard
Maybe growing up was just about becoming closer to the person you always were.
— Cecily von Ziegesar, I Will Always Love You
Today she’s walking down the driveway to get on the school bus. Tomorrow she’s going off to college. Don’t blink.
— levi paul taylor
I do not believe any person is born knowing how to be human. Everyone has to learn their letters and everyone has to learn how to be alive.. . . .Maybe it's not a lesson so much as it's a magic trick. You can make a little girl into anything if you say the right words. Take her apart until all that's left is her red, red heart thumping against the world. Stitch her up again real good. Now, maybe you get a woman. If you're lucky. If that's what you were after. Just as easy to end up with a blackbird or a circus bear or a coyote. Or a parrot, just saying what's said to you, doing what's done to you, copying until it comes so natural that even when you're all alone, you keep on cawing __hello, pretty bird__ at the dark.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White
Maybe in the future when life sees that we are ready for love we will meet up or stumble upon each other and it will ignite the light inside of us that we are craving right now.
— Alex Guidroz
She raised her hand, bony fingers spread. “Don’t worry. She is supposed to cry. Her life will never be the same. You can’t give her everything.” I realized what Rajima meant. Until that moment, I had been almost exclusively providing everything Krishna could want or need. I was her sole succor and haven. But her needs were changing. She would now need sustenance from the earth, from Mother Nature, from the world, or at least Whole Foods. She would need more than what I could give her from my own body. We
— Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
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.
— Mara Wilson, Where Am I Now?
Elizabeth ran her finger along the windowsill, gathering dust. The view was almost exactly the same as from her own bedroom, only a few degrees shifted. She could still see the Rosens' place, with its red door and folding shutters, and the Martinez house, with its porch swing and the dog bowl. She'd heard once that what made you a real New Yorker was when you could remember back three laters -- the place on the corner that had been a bakery and then a barbershop before it was a cell-phone store, or the restaurant that had been Italian, then Mexican, then Cuban. The city was a palimpsest, a Mod Podged pileup or old signage and other people's failures. Newcomers saw only what was in front of them, but people who had been there long enough were always looking at two or three other places simultaneously. The IRT, Canal Jeans, the Limelight. So much of the city she'd fallen in love with was gone, but then again, that's how it worked. It was your job to remember. At least the bridges were still there. Some things were too heavy to take down.
— Emma Straub, Modern Lovers
I never grew up all at once. I did it one place and another along the way.
— Stephen King, The Gunslinger
I was eleven, the idea of two identical digits in my age still new and spectacular and heartbreaking. The girls must have felt this. They must have known. Where had ten, nine, eight, and seven gone?
— Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn
We'd drifted too far to rely on the old boyhood telepathy anymore.
— Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing
For so long I'd thought about myself as a girl who'd walked away from her mother's life that it would be a long time before I would start to think about the other part of the bargain, how easily she'd let me go.
— Anna Quindlen, One True Thing
I wonder if all mothers feel like this the moment they realize their daughters are growing up—as if it is impossible to believe that the laundry I once folded for her was doll-sized; as if I can still see her dancing in lazy pirouettes along the lip of the sandbox. Wasn't it yesterday that her hand was only as big as the sand dollar she found on the beach? That same hand, the one that's holding a boy's; wasn't it just holding mine, tugging so that I might stop and see the spiderweb, the milkweed pod, any of a thousand moments she wanted me to freeze? Time is an optical illusion—never quite as solid or strong as we think it is.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
Your own life starts the moment you're born. Before that, even.""I just, I feel like as long as I live with you, I won't... I'm not... It's like George Jefferson.""From the TV show?""Right. George Jefferson. As long as he was on 'All in the Family', he was just somebody who made Archie Bunker's story more interesting. He didn't have anything of his own. He didn't have a plot or supporting characters. I don't know if you ever even got to see his house. But after he got his own show, George had his own living room and kitchen... and bedroom, I think. He even had his own elevator. Places for him to exist in, for his story to happen. Like this apartment. This is something that's mine.
— Rainbow Rowell, Attachments
You'll never have to fend for yourself like that, Lincoln. You never have to be alone. Why would you want to?"He leaned back against his bedroom wall and slunk down until he was sitting on the cast-iron radiator. "I just...," he said. "Just?""I need to live my life.""You aren't living your own life now?" she asked. "I certainly never tell you what to do.""No, I know, it's just...""Just?""It doesn't feel like I'm living my own life.""What?""It feels like, as long as I stay home, I'm still living your life. like I'm still a kid.""That's silly," she said."Maybe," he said.
— Rainbow Rowell, Attachments
What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just play-ground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn't be, could it? It was too horrible to think about.
— Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis/Misery
Fathers were supposed to be invulnerable - but that attitude was childish, he now saw. Irritatingly, he might have to change his outlook. He could no longer be merely indignant and resentful. He was not the only sufferer. Dad had hurt him, but he had hurt Dad as well, and they were both responsible. Feeling responsible was not as comfortable as feeling outraged.
— Ken Follett
I'm not perfect and the older I get the more I realise that.
— Graham Speechley
I knew that I had reached the end of childhood once I realized that adults in my life didn't know anymore than I did.
— Matthew Quick, Every Exquisite Thing
Childhood anxieties, childhood fears, never disappear entirely. They fade, but not away.
— Lauren Bacall, By Myself and Then Some
That's the worst of growing up, and I'm beginning to realize it. The things you wanted so much when you were a child don't seem half so wonderful to you when you get them
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Growing up is like walking through glass doors that only open one way--you can see where you came from but can't go back.
— Meg Medina, Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass
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.
— Darlene Ouimet, Emerging from Broken: The Beginning of Hope for Emotional Healing
One thing you learn early growing up a girl--people always talk, whatever you do,' Glain said. 'What bliss it must be to be male.
— Rachel Caine, Paper and Fire
Everyone was doing that in their own way, rejecting things and moving on. It's just a part of discovering who you are; it's nothing special.
— David Byrne, How Music Works
I am almost dizzied by a sudden knowledge, as cold as snow down my spine; that I, too, will grow up one day like everyone else, and look back and miss the years gone by, and the things I could have done, should have done. And growing up is suddenly not something to be impatient for, not all jam and buns and doing as one pleases. It is precisely the opposite.
— Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic
That story you heard? About how we were all created by a super-powerful dude named God who lives up in the sky? Total bullshit. The whole God thing is actually an ancient fairy tale that people have been telling one another for thousands of years. We made it all up. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.Oh, and by the way... there's no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. Also bullshit. Sorry, kid. Deal with it.
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Life would not be the same ever again. I would laugh again like a happy man would, seemingly with few worries in the world, yes, for memories fade, even of a deed like the one I had committed. However, the knowledge was there, sad and lingering, and I knew I had lost something.
— Alaric Longward, The Oath Breaker
Generally speaking, I resolve to change my life on average maybe thirty to forty times a week, usually at about two a.m, drunk, ore early the next morning, hungover.
— David Nicholls
How shall I tell you of the world you faceStrident with sound of weapons and of hate,Make you aware now of the narrowing spaceBetween the hope of mortal and his fate?
— Frances Rodman
Stil it takes you strange walking in your old foot steps like that. Putting your groan up foot where your chyld foot run nor dint know nothing what wer coming.
— Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker
It occurred to her that nobody really knew what anybody else was upset about, and that seemed like a terrible thing.
— Kate DiCamillo, Raymie Nightingale
No one explains this to you, he thought. That there are so many things without solution.
— Jesse Ball
We fall asleep to fairy tales, and the world rotates and revolves and time passes and we grow up and we understand that they are false. There are not heroes and princesses and villains. It's not that easy.
— Amy Zhang
But maybe that was what it meant to grow up and have the seemingly infinite possibility of childhood vanish in an instant. You had to press on, no matter how dark and narrow the path ahead seemed.
— Martha Brockenbrough, The Game of Love and Death
Growing up seemed to mean that the only kind of pretending that was still safe was pretending we could do without it.
— Saleema Nawaz, Bone & Bread
Sometimes or most of the time, we need to remind ourselves that we're not a KID anymore.
— B.C. Yaras
I’ve always known my circumstances were far, far from the worst, but I truly believe that just the slightest misalignment in our upbringings can have such a dramatic knock-on effect on our lives.
— K.A. Hill, The Winners' Guide
In the beginning of his sleep, he cried out, "Flag!"It was not his own voice that called. It was a boy's voice. Somewhere beyond the sink-hole, past the magnolia, under the live oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever.
— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Isn't it weird how people grow up when you're not looking?
— Ann Benjamin, Life After Joe
Sometimes or most of the times, we need to remind ourselves that we're not a KID anymore.
— Bernie Yaras
As life runs on, the road grows strange	With faces new, and near the end	The milestones into headstones change,	’Neath every one a friend.
— James Russell Lowell, Anthology of American Literature, Volume 1: Colonial through Romantic
The second hardest part about growing up is trying to figure out who you are. The hardest part comes after you've figured it out and the rest of the world wants to pull you in a different direction.
— Jen Malone, Map to the Stars
Charlotte looked up doubtfully, wondering why, as she got older, she seemed to be more afraid of things, not less.
— Penelope Farmer, Charlotte Sometimes
It's very important my parent's don't think I'm starting to fall in love with people, because then they might notice that I'm growing up, and I'm kind of trying to keep it a secret. I think it will cause an incident
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
The enormity of this started to sink in and I all but collapsed back into my chair. This, here, was life. This was life beginning for us: weddings and families and deciding to step up and be a man for someone. It wasn't about the fucking jobs we had or the random thrills we sought or any of that. Life was built from the bricks of these connections and milestone and moments where you tell your two best friends that you're about to have a child.
— Christina Lauren, Beautiful Player
He knew he could never jingle change in his pocket or park his car like a confident adult, he was the Adrian he had always been, casting a guilty look over a furtive shoulder, living in eternal dread of a grown-up striding forward to clip his ear.But there again, when he sipped at the whiskey his eyes failed to water and his throat forgot to burn. The body shamelessly welcomed what once it would have rejected. At breakfast he demanded not Ricicles and chocolate spread, but coffee and unbuttered toast. And if the coffee was sugared he leapt from it like a colt from an electric fence. He ate the crust and left the filling, guzzled the olives and spurned the cherries. Yet inside he remained the same Adrian who fought down the urge to stand and shout 'Bullocks' during church services, smelt his own farts and wasted hours skimming through National Geographic on the off-chance of seeing a few naked bodies.
— Stephen Fry, The Liar
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.
— Sarah Vowell
He could add something to the list of things you weren't supposed to do. Don't get hurt, don't get dirty, don't get drunk, don't get scared, don't count on it. You ended up doing all of them.
— Virginia Euwer Wolff
Teenagers - tired of being hassled by your parents?Act now!Move out, get a job, pay your own bills.....while you still know everything.
— James Hauenstein
Why is it when people are proud of me that my life sucks?”“Because growing up means making tough choices, and doing the right thing doesn’t necessarily mean doing the thing that feels good.
— Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits
But babies become children, and they go to elementary schools that indoctrinate them on how to overthrow governments, and they get interested in boys and girls, or they don't, and anyway they change.
— Joseph Fink, Welcome to Night Vale
I think modern education over-emphasizes the intellect. I suppose that comes from the scientific trend of the times. You cannot obtain a useful citizen if you only develop his intellect. We take children from their parents because these cannot give them an intellectual training. So far, good. But we fail to give them that training in character which parents alone can give. Home influence, as Grace Aguilar conceived it " where has it gone? It strikes me that this is a grave danger for the future. We are rearing up a brood of crafty egoists, a generation whose earliest recollections are those of getting something for nothing from the State.I am inclined to trace our present social unrest to this over-valuation of the intellect. It hardens the heart and blights all generous impulses. What is going to replace the home, Mr. Keith?
— Norman Douglas, South Wind
It's true that I never wanted to grow up. But how important was it really — to have decided to be human?
— Rachel Klein, The Moth Diaries
That was my first real experience at feeling set apart. Not only did I not knock them dead, but rather it was I that died...acutely aware of being mutton dressed up as lamb. I exchanged my white tie and tails for a white waiter’s jacket and got back to my proper calling!
— Graham Kerr, Flash of Silver: ...the Leap That Changed My World
It is said with truth that every building is constructed stone by stone, and the same may be said of knowledge, extracted and compiled by many learned men, each of whom builds upon the works of those who proceeded him.
— George R.R. Martin
...the uncomfortable appearance of a girl who was rapidly shooting up into a woman and didn't like it.
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
No more dreamin about the whole adult gig,We’re no longer burnin’ toward nothing, dude. 	Just well on our way on a mythical ship, which no longer touches Land. God Bless the Cap’n.
— Alexej Savreux, Eat Me & Other Short Poems
No thanks. This is a lovely dream, but it's a child's dream. I know some who'd argue the point, but I grew up long ago. - Rose Red (Fables: Vol.21, Happily Ever After)
— Bill Willingham, Fables, Vol. 21: Happily Ever After
The problem is not that Santa stops existing but that we do. The children we are no longer exist, a fact we do not help through immersing ourselves in the repeating cycle of wake, work, dinner, internet, sleep.
— Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring
Your "scared" and my "scared" are two different things.''What's that supposed to mean?' she asked.'As you get older, you don't recover from things so easy.''As you get older, you also get tired?''Yeah,' I said, 'you get tired.
— Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
That's the downside of growing up. There's a lot of pretending involved. We frequently act like someone other than who we really are because we don't know or aren't comfortable with our true selves.
— Connor Franta
The only thing worse than not knowing where she belonged...was knowing where she didn't.
— Tessa Shaffer, Heaven Has No Regrets
Some days, Kaylin fervently wished that she had already passed Adult 101 and could get on with being the person she wanted to be.
— Michelle Sagara, Cast in Flame
It's true we all build imaginary prisons for ourselves. Believe that we are trapped behind the invisible bars of the lives we have somehow carelessly constructed for ourselves, despite our youthful promises to ourselves. We see adults who are stagnant and miserable as we grow up. They graffiti the walls behind them with their mistakes and we swear secret oaths that we will heed those warnings. We’re much too clever, we know all the shortcuts and the back alleys.
— Thomas Lloyd Qualls, Waking Up at Rembrandt's
Don't give up all your romance, Anne," he whispered shyly, "a little bit is a good thing - not too much, of course, but keep a little of it, Anne, keep a little of it.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
When they reached the top of the hill they turned and looked down at the valley. Moominhouse was just a blue dot, and the river a narrow ribbon of green: the swing they couldn't see at all. "We've never been such a long way from home before," said Moomintroll, and a little goose-fleshy thrill of excitement came over them at the thought.
— Tove Jansson, Comet in Moominland
Of all the Fairy strangeness she had known, this seemed suddenly both the strangest and least strange of all. How she would have liked to be looked after like that, cared for and watched over. And yet at the same time, she understood the Whelk, and wished she could grow big enough to hold on to everyone she loved at once. To keep them safe and with her always and know their secret needs well enough to answer them.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two