Growing Up Quotes

“So many people will tell you ”no”, and you need to find something you believe in so hard that you just smile and tell them ”watch me”. Learn to take rejection as motivation to prove people wrong. Be unstoppable. Refuse to give up, no matter what. It’s the best skill you can ever learn.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“I feel a resurgence of my 6-year-old self… that little warrior, goddess of a girl reminding me of who I was when I was little, before the world got its hands on me.”
― Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl

“If ever I was running, it was towards you.”
― Jennifer Elisabeth

“I love him in ways that I can’t explain to other people. They don’t understand… it’s not their fault.”
― Jennifer Elisabeth

“Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realise that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [...] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our licence to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“I could watch him do this until morning — never asking questions and never interrupting his work. I worship quietly — his intense focus and attention to detail and then, out of no where, I realize the inconvenient, inappropriate truth: ‘I love this man… and it has swallowed me.”
― Jennifer Elisabeth

“I’m going to follow this invisible red thread until I find myself again… until I finally figure out… who I’m meant to be.”
― Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl

“I just want your voice aimed at me again. I want to absorb the direction of your eyes…”
― Jennifer Elisabeth

“I know that this process of ‘me changing my life’ doesn’t just end once I set fire to this list of things I hate about myself. Tonight isn’t as much of a new beginning as it is a violent end and I know the real work hasn’t even started yet.”
― Jennifer Elisabeth

“Everything hurts right now and nothing is helping because as the pain is getting worse — so is the love.”
― Jennifer Elisabeth

“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

“Before you know it you'll be my age telling your own granddaughter the story of your life and you wanna make it an interesting one, don't you? You wanna be able to tell her some adventures, some excitements, some something. How you live your life, little one, is a gift for those who come after you, a kind of inheritance.”
― Cristina Garcia, I Wanna Be Your Shoebox

“Every day you say something or do something that challenges me, changes me.”
― Kiera Cass, Happily Ever After

“To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.”
― Adam Phillips, Equals

“Adulthood is accretive by nature, a thing which arrives in ragged stages and uneven overlaps.”
― Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis

“Can you identify the source preventing you from feeling good every single day, from loving yourself unconditionally and making your dreams come true? Is it a voice in your head or a gut wrenching ache that compromises your inner peace and doesn’t allow you to accept the love around you? Is there one thing, or maybe many things, keeping you from forgiving your past and moving forward, tormenting you with lies like “You don’t deserve real love so just settle for whatever you can get,” “You’re not smart enough to achieve your dream so don’t even try,” or “Look at your past… you should hate yourself way more than you actually do!”?

Welcome to your Little Monster.”
― Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl

“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

“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

“You used to be optimistic. You used to think that whatever we did would turn out well. Even after we came back from the north, you used to think that. Now you're cautious, you're anxious… You're pessimistic."

She knew he was right, but it wasn't right that he should speak to her accusingly, as if it was something to blame her for.

"I used to be young," was all she could find to say.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“A butterfly does not return to a caterpillar after it is mature. We must learn to grow and evolve into a stronger, wiser and better version of ourselves. Life occurs in stages and taking a step at a time is key to learning and growing.”
― Kemi Sogunle

“You grew up soft. Your tender heart would nurse a frightened field mouse rescued from a trap. Would make a splint. You'd try to help but always it would die. You gave them names. You were a friendless child, a barrel-chested, sturdy little thing who played alone.
You grew up soft, but still you learned to hide it. Piece by piece. The world's not built for soft and sturdy things. It likes its soft things small and white, defenceless. Princesses in castles. Maidens waiting for the perfect sword. You grew up soft, and piece by wounded piece you built a carapace around your body. Humans are peculiar little things.”
― Deirdre Sullivan, Tangleweed and Brine

“Even if we try to conform to ideals and strive for perfection, we will always be pulled back to our core identity because it’s the path of least resistance for our souls – an energy force that wants nothing more than for us to honor and accept who we are and discover what we’re meant to do in the world.”
― Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl

“Part of growing up is narrowing your life choices to a manageable size.”
― Amy E. Spiegel, Letting Go of Perfect: Women, Expectations, and Authenticity

“He was still so very young. Faeries—true faeries, not their changeling throwaways—live forever, and when you have an eternity of adulthood ahead of you, you linger over childhood. You tend it and keep it close to your heart, because once it ends, it’s over. Quentin was barely fifteen. He’d never seen the Great Hunt that came down every twenty-one years, or been present for the crowning of a King or Queen of Cats, or announced his maturity before the throne of High King Aethlin. He was a child, and he should have had decades left to play; a century of games and joy and edging cautiously toward adulthood.
But he didn’t. I could see his childhood dying in his eyes as he looked at me, silently begging me to answer for him.”
― Seanan McGuire, An Artificial Night

“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

“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

“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

“She was deemed an unfit mother, in spite of the fact that she goes to the gym every day,' Hal once told me.
. . .Beautiful people are often forgiven for many things--and maybe she's gotten through life that way, but I don't forgive her for anything--and I don't even know what awful things she's done other than showing a lack of parental fitness.”
― Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

“A flustered-looking woman hurries after him, but he doesn’t stop. I turn around to watch, silently rooting the kid on. I want to crouch down beside him and tell him to use the tunnel, to keep flying through the dark while he’s still allowed. “When’s the last time we did that?” I ask Lacey when we reach my car, and she shrugs. Then I’m starting the car and tears prick the backs of my eyes and I hate that so many Lasts happen when you aren’t paying attention.”
― Sarah Everett, No One Here Is Lonely

“Our Peter Pan generation is unhappy. All our lives, we want to grow up—
to be treated like adults, to have freedom to choose. Then we get here and
it turns out being an adult sucks. We pay the bills and taxes, watching others succeed while we are forever waiting for our turn.

We believe we are special, but nothing special has come our way.”
― Marcella Purnama, What I Wish I Had Known