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Adulthood Quotes

Quotes tagged as "adulthood" Showing 31-60 of 637
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
“Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Peter    Cameron
“I always looked forward to being an adult, because I thought the adult world was, well—adult. That adults weren’t cliquey or nasty, that the whole notion of being cool, or in, or popular would case to be the arbiter of all things social, but I was beginning to realize that the adult world was as nonsensically brutal and socially perilous as the kingdom of childhood.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible.”
― Francis Weller

Richard Paul Evans
“Dance. Dance for the joy and breath of childhood. Dance for all children, including that child who is still somewhere entombed beneath the responsibility and skepticism of adulthood. Embrace the moment before it escapes from our grasp. For the only promise of childhood, of any childhood, is that it will someday end. And in the end, we must ask ourselves what we have given our children to take its place. And is it enough?”
― Richard Paul Evans, The Christmas Box Miracle: My Spiritual Journey of Destiny, Healing and Hope

“Relax. You will become an adult. You will figure out your career. You will find someone who loves you. You have a whole lifetime; time takes time. The only way to fail at life is to abstain.”
― Johanna de Silentio

Felicia Day
“When we graduate from childhood into adulthood, we're thrown into this confusing, Cthulhu-like miasma of life, filled with social and career problems, all with branching choices and no correct answers.”
― Felicia Day, You're Never Weird on the Internet

Sylvia Plath
“You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Victoria Schwab
“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

Joe  Hill
“Already, though, she understood the difference between being a child and being an adult. The difference is when someone says he can keep the bad things away, a child believes him.”
― Joe Hill, NOS4A2

Katherine Dunn
“The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.
Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.”
― Katherine Dunn

Louise Glück
“We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory”
― Louise Glück

Stephanie Danler
“I thought that once I got to this city nothing could ever catch up with me because I could remake my life daily. Once that had made me feel infinite. Now I was certain I would never learn. Being remade was the same thing as being constantly undone.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

Michael Chabon
“We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared.”
― Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs

John D. MacDonald
“Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible.”
― John D. MacDonald, The Green Ripper

James Thurber
“In his grief over the loss of a dog, a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood. After this most inconsolable of sorrows there is nothing life can do to him that he will not be able somehow to bear.”
― James Thurber

Jirō Taniguchi
“Nobody truly becomes an adult. The child we have been is always there, deep inside of us. As time passes, we think we're growing, but maturity is only an illusion; a hindrance to our free child soul.”
― Jirō Taniguchi

Mary Lydon Simonsen
“‎With adulthood comes responsibility.”
― Mary Lydon Simonsen, The Perfect Bride for Mr. Darcy

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

Neil Gaiman
“Oh, monsters are scared', said Lettie. 'And as for grown-ups...' She stopped talking, rubbed her freckled nose with a finger. Then, 'I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.'
...
We sat there, side by side, on the old wooden bench, not saying anything. I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long books. The kind with no pictures or conversations.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Mitch Albom
“Never tell a child that something it’s too hard”
― Mitch Albom, For One More Day

Kelly Williams Brown
“You're a grown-up, and you get to decide what behaviors affect you for five minutes versus what behaviors change you as a person.”
― Kelly Williams Brown, Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps

F. Scott Fitzgerald
“The natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

“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

Jodi Picoult
“She had come to the clinic because she didn't want to be a little girl anymore. But it wasn't having sex that made you a woman. It was having to make decisions, sometimes terrible ones. Children were told what to do. Adults made up their own minds, even when the options tore them apart.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

Edmund Burke
“Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there is without...men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
― Edmund Burke

Stephanie Danler
“The vision that accompanied me on my drive was a girl, a lady actually. We had the same hair but she didn't look like me. She was in a camel coat and ankle boots. A dress under the coat was belted high on her waist. She carried various shopping bags from specialty stores and as she was walking, pausing at certain windows, her coat would fly back in the wind. Her boot heels tapped on the cobblestones. She had lovers and breakups, an analyst, a library, acquaintances she ran into on the street whose names she couldn't call to mind. She belonged to herself only. She had edges, boundaries, tastes, definition down to her eyelashes. And when she walked it was clear she knew where she was going.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“The individual psychological stages in the lives of most people are:

1. To be hurt as a small child without anyone recognizing the situation as such
2. To fail to react to the resulting suffering with anger
3. To show gratitude for what are supposed to be good intentions
4. To forget everything
5. To discharge the stored-up anger onto others in adulthood or to direct it against oneself”
― Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence