Growing Up Quotes

“I’ve always seen this in you, ever since you were a little girl — this hunger to love other people into their highest selves and it’s what has made me irreversibly and just so forever in love with you.”
― Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl

“I reckon responsible behavior is something to get when you grow older. Like varicose veins.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

“Please… Whoever you are, whatever you are… I believe in you even though I don’t completely understand you. I feel you around me even though I can’t exactly describe what I’m feeling. Sometimes things happen to me and I know that you’re there and I’m humbled by the lack of coincidence that exists in the world. Whatever you want from me, it’s yours — just please help me. You know how I get when I lose control, and I find myself constantly being pulled back there these days.”
― Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl

“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

“This is your life – not your parents’, teachers’ or significant other’s. If you ever find yourself on a path that just doesn’t feel safe anymore, you have every right to stop the car, get out – change your shoes and start walking.”
― Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl

“The moment you realize that life will hurt more than your death. While existing, we're forced to become acquainted with sadness. There's no antibiotic for the ridding of distress, and no alleviation of these intervals of pain we must encounter. Behind our eyes, are all these things: our stories, our dreams, our deficiencies, and our scars. Today would leave a scar.”
― Crystal Woods, Write like no one is reading

“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

“On occasion, it occurs to adults that they are allowed to do all the things that being a child prevented them from doing. But those desires change when you're not looking. There was a time when your favorite color transferred from purple to blue to whatever shade it is when you realize having a favorite color is a trite personality crutch, an unstable cultivation of quirk and a possible cry for help. You just don't notice the time of your own metamorphosis. Until you do. Every once in a while time dissolves and you remember what you liked as a kid. You jump on your hotel bed, order dessert first, decide to put every piece of jewelry you own on your body and leave the house. Why? Because you can. Because you're the boss. Because . . . Ooooh. Shiny. ”
― Sloane Crosley, How Did You Get This Number: Essays

“Life has a funny way of turning you into the one thing you don't want to be.”
― Jonathan Levine, The Wackness

“If I don't see the reason of someone being my friend, chances are, we are just floating and I need a ship to set sail.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes

“I never want you to deny anything about yourself because you have grown up thinking it’s unacceptable or inconvenient for the people around you.”
― Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl

“My dreams are going through their death flurries. I thought they were all safely buried, but sometimes they stir in their grave, making my heartstrings twinge. I mean no particular dream, you understand, but the whole radiant flock of them together—with their rainbow wings, iridescent, bright, soaring, glorious, sublime. They are dying before the steel javelins and arrows of a world of Time and Money.”
― Barbara Newhall Follett

“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

“It took me ages to grow into being a woman, into being happy with it.”
― Helena Bonham Carter

“Maybe all people have that feeling deep down, that your hometown is something you can never really escape, but can never really go home to, either. Because it’s not home anymore. We’re not trying to make peace with it. Not with the streets and bricks of it. Just with the person we were back then. And maybe forgive ourselves for everything we thought we would become and didn’t.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Deal of a Lifetime

“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

“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

“Resting on the roots of this old oak I lean back against his knotted trunk, shine my granny smith on my sleeve And ponder the days…”
― Kellie Elmore, Magic in the Backyard

“I need to be willing to play the game. I need to be willing to put myself out there, and be vulnerable, and take chances, even though I might lose.”
― Rachael Lippincott, The Lucky List

“I don't know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I'm pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Life's full of chances to hurt yourself or someone else [...] In the next few days, you'll have more chances to hurt yourself than most men get in a lifetime. It's learning things and doing things right that make it worthwhile, make a man easy with himself. When I was young, nobody could tell me anything. I knew it all. It took a lot of mistakes to teach me that I didn't know goose shit from tapioca.”
― Peter Benchley, The Deep

“Since my earliest memory, I imagined I would be a chef one day. When other kids were watching Saturday morning cartoons or music videos on YouTube, I was watching Iron Chef,The Great British Baking Show, and old Anthony Bourdain shows and taking notes. Like, actual notes in the Notes app on my phone. I have long lists of ideas for recipes that I can modify or make my own. This self-appointed class is the only one I've ever studied well for.
I started playing around with the staples of the house: rice, beans, plantains, and chicken. But 'Buela let me expand to the different things I saw on TV. Soufflés, shepherd's pie, gizzards. When other kids were saving up their lunch money to buy the latest Jordans, I was saving up mine so I could buy the best ingredients. Fish we'd never heard of that I had to get from a special market down by Penn's Landing. Sausages that I watched Italian abuelitas in South Philly make by hand. I even saved up a whole month's worth of allowance when I was in seventh grade so I could make 'Buela a special birthday dinner of filet mignon.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, With the Fire on High

“He told me that if I hung up, he'd do it. He would commit suicide. He told me that if I called the cops he would kill every single one of them and I knew that he had the potential and the means to do it”
― Sierra D. Waters, Debbie.

“Do not let the world tell you not to bloom
Just because they aren't ready for you
Just because few days after they bloomed
They died on a barren land, in the rain

You may face the same fate
But deep down you would know
It's better to die blooming
Than choosing to never grow...”
― Sanhita Baruah

“Yes, September, We have all of us got it jumbled up. You never feel so grown up as when you are eleven, and never so young and unsure as when you are forty. That is why time is a rotten jokester and no one aught to let him in to dinner.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home

“Everyone should have the experience of getting lost in life at least once. Part of growing up is learning how to tolerate uncertainty, and when the time is right, to find or create a new path for yourself.”
― Cole Todd, Burn Out of a Fairy Godmother

“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

“People always say to me
"What do you think you'd like to be
When you grow up?"
And I say, "Why,
I think I'd like to be the sky
Or be a plane or train or mouse
Or maybe a haunted house
Or something furry, rough and wild...
Or maybe I will stay a child.”
― Karla Kuskin, Dogs & dragons, trees & dreams: A collection of poems

“Until she had had children of her own she had not been able to contemplate the death of either of her parents; when the subject had arisen, in conversation or in her own imagining, she had said only: I just don't know what I'd do.”
― Sebastian Faulks, On Green Dolphin Street

“I read that beauty has historically demanded replication. We make more of anything we find aesthetically pleasing, whether it's a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We reproduce it in order to keep it, extend it through space and time. To gaze at what pleases -- a fresco, a peach-red mountain range, a boy, the mole on his jaw, -- is, in itself, replication -- the image prolonged in the eye, making more of it, making it last. Staring into the mirror, I replicate myself into a future where I might not exist.

...Because his offering extended me into something worthy of generosity, and therefore seen. It was that very moreness that I wanted to prolong, to return to.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous