Coming Of Age Quotes - Page 2

Sometimes I get the feeling [my parents have] asked me to hold this big invisible secret for them, like a backpack full of rocks--all these things they don't want to know about themselves. I'm supposed to wear it as I hike up this trail toward my adulthood. They're already at the summit of Full Grown Mountain. They're waiting for me to get there and cheering me on, telling me I can do it, and sometimes scolding and asking why I'm not hiking any faster or why I'm not having more fun along the way. I know I'm not supposed to talk about this backpack full of their crazy, but sometimes I really wish we could all stop for a second. Maybe they could walk down the trail from the top and meet me. We could unzip that backpack, pull out all of those rocks, and leave the ones we no longer need by the side of the trail. It'd make the walk a lot easier. Maybe then my shoulders wouldn't get so tense when Dad lectures me about money or Mom starts a new diet she saw on the cover of a magazine at the grocery store.

He looked at me, that first day, like he had just found something he’d lost a thousand years ago.

@mink: Well, you’re in luck, if you pick another movie. My hair is clean, I usually eat dinner around eight, and I’m currently single. Not that it matters.

Lucille, please make them go away!” she moaned, her voice muffled.t“Do you think I am a divine being sent from the celestial realm to guard you from the harsh punishment of rousing from your slumber?” t“Is that a yes?”t“I am surrounded by idiots.

The combination of razor-sharp wit (completely real) and his credentials (completely fake) had won them over in the end.

He’s so powerful. Who knows maybe he’s advanced past eating

Rough palms cradled my face while my fingers gripped the pillow on either side of his. Lips, teeth, tongue, mingled together. I ate him up and didn’t let go until I had to come up for air.

But like all moments trapped in time, that moment would end and Joey Boldt, as all the greats before him did, would begin to understand that clinging too tightly to anything results in Time and Fate shaking you until you can't hold on any longer. And then, when you are knocked for a six and lose your grip, they allow you to spiral into a freefall where men are broken and legends are made.

It was the year Frankie thought about the world. And she did not see it as a round school globe, with the countries neat and different-colored. She thought of the world as huge and cracked and looseand turning a thousand miles an hour.

Marika could feel herself cocking the trigger of a loaded gun and pointing it at herself, because the truth could be too shocking a revelation, something that would shake their lives to the core... but lies were just a dead-end alleyway that offered no way out.

I want to be the best version of myself for anyone who is going to someday walk into my life and need someone to love them beyond reason.

And I envy you. You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you.

I’m tired of justifying why I love someone. I’m done with the explaining.

And if revenge was all I had, then I was goddamned if it wouldn’t be enough.

The old you has been left behind to leave place for the new you. And it will be a new you that your new friends will admire, that your old friends will struggle to understand and that your true friends will learn to embrace.

This is a test. This is only a test. If this was my actual life I'd be famous, rich, and thin.

The kinds of jobs a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old can get are not worth doing. They pay shit and suck.

Making friends is not a big deal. Replacing me with them after talking to them for only one bloody day is a big deal.

Kayla,' I exclaim. 'There may be bad police officers out there, but I can assure you that there will be no harm towards you or anyone else. Like I said before, a policeman's job is to protect people. And if they can't, that's an issue for the officer. But for now, don't worry about it.

I can do this… I can start over. I can save my own life and I’m never going to be alone as long as I have stars to wish on and people to still love.

I had not expected the gentle, tentative surge of gratitude I began to feel...for St. Paul's School, the spring, and the early morning. I needed the morning light and the warbling birds. I needed to find a way to live in this place for a moment and get the good of it. I had tried to hold myself apart, and the aloneness proved more terrible than what I had tried to escape.

So you’re the little smart ass from Poleglass.”I wanted to point out he sounded like Dr. Seuss but bit my lip and remembered the warning the old lady gave me.

...ya can't get to Nevada on five bucks and a bad heart...

My name is Arianna Morganna Brittany DuLac--you can imagine why I went by the name Ryan.

This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt from American Honey)

In the end, every person's life is a tough act to follow.

As for learning to wear high heels, no need to worry. I've got no tolerance for those dreadful things. If God wanted us girls tottering around like a bunch of drunken sailors, we'd have been born wearing stilts!

I’m looking to make a miracle

It's funny, the roles we play, the way we have to give up the old ones before we have room for the new ones. The first-first love stuff never goes away in here" she said, pointing to her head. "It makes you who you are. But in here," putting her hand on her chest, "time lets that grow and change. You'll see

To prove to [her friend, Swedish diplomat Count] Gyllenborg that she was not superficial, Catherine composed an essay about herself, "so that he would see whether I knew myself or not." The next day, she wrote and handed to Gyllenborg an essay titled 'Portrait of a Fifteen-Year-Old Philosopher.' He was impressed and returned it with a dozen pages of comments, mostly favorable. "I read his remarks again and again, many times [Catherine later recalled in her memoirs]. I impressed them on my consciousness and resolved to follow his advice. In addition, there was something else surprising: one day, while conversing with me, he allowed the following sentence to slip out: 'What a pity that you will marry! I wanted to find out what he meant, but he would not tell me.

They stood in the courtyard of Swangard Palace, too cold to be comfortable despite the sun, and they looked fully on one another, knowing that they were friends, and would always be.A lot of water under this bridge too, Mark thought, with something like awe. He was growing older. Old enough to feel the current of what had been flowing under him, leading to his future. Old enough to look back over his shoulder, and see his past behind him, and grieve for what was gone, and honour its memory.He felt, suddenly, how much it would hurt him if Val died; felt an echo of that pain, knowing that the Valerian he had known, fluffy and peering and hapless and altogether wonderful: this Valerian was already dying. Not physically, of course, but the man he remembered from that first night in Swangard Palace would be gone the next time they met, though his ghost would linger on in Val forever, and in their memories.Three cheers for ghosts, Mark thought. Three cheers for the dead.Of course Val would be much the same: better, even. As full of wonder and delight, with big pockets full of puzzles and fascinating stories about the lives of ants and ingenious designs for windmills that would do your washing. And they would still be friends, excellent friends. It could even be better next time.But it would never be the same.

I am looking through a lace curtain at a dead man's feet. I am ten years old, the mist is rising on a fall morning in 1944 in Sawyer, Georgia, and I am standing on a front porch painted gray with white trim.

Logan must survive. That is the only truth. The only goal. My sole mission.

I took my friend’s hand as she helped me up. With our hands still linked and our flower crowns tangled in our hair, we danced, laughing with joy, through the rain and towards the school, the lightning showing us our path with its powerful light.

Jess is painfully aware of how young she is. Her shirtsleeves don't quite extend to her wrists; after a growth spurt last summer, her debate clothes don't fit as well as she thought. She feels as if she's playing dress-up.

By the second cycle of the solstice of the warm time, the One will face the enemy. And the One will unearth the Shield of the Northern Lights and smote the enemy with daring and intelligence. The heart of the One is pious and evil will cower. Couatl will rise.

My father's attitude was that this was but an inevitable phase of my growing up and he affected to take it lightly. But beneath his jocular, boys-together air, he was at a loss, he was frightened. Perhaps he had supposed that my growing up would bring us closer together— whereas, now that he was trying to find out something about me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me. And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitably undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgment, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.

I was the ref. I was the ref they didn’t know about. Deaf and dumb. Invisible as a wall. I wanted no one to win

As for me I will follow the path of the pink bunnies.

There were the signed, spiral-bound Spirit-in-the-Woods yearbooks from three summers in a row and the aerial photograph of everyone at camp the second summer. In it, Ethan's feet were planted on Jule's head, and Jule's feet were planted on Goodman's head, and so on and so on. And didn't it always go like that-body parts not quite lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.

She had not thought it would be so easy to slip into the old roles. Cambridge had changed her fundamentally and she thought she was immune. No one in her family, however, noticed the transformation in her, and she was not able to resist the power of their habitual expectations.

As with all young ones, a deeper perception comes clearer with time... Roe'vaash recieved the grace to release the anger and pain he had carried and suffered for so long...

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.

This very easy divorce had become very difficult. I thought I was in the express lane and it was all fast tracks from there. Think again.

I journeyed alone for almost ten years before I found home. Adoptions are like very delicate gardening with transplants and grafts. Mine took hold, rooted, and bloomed, even though there were inevitable adjustments to the new soil and climate. Yet I have not forgotten where my roots started.

If the future of the free world depends on me, please accept my apology in advance

Maybe I’d lost something. Maybe I’d lost a lot—more, even, than I could suffer—but I still had my own self. And lonesome as I might be, wasn’t no force on Earth or from above what could make me less.

Belonging to a place isn't nearly as necessary as belonging to people you love and who love you and need you.

It was a sacrifice worthy of her and dreams are made to be killed.

He wanted revenge and I knew he would not stop until he got it. I had to hope he would run out of fuel.

The next thing Jordana says makes me realize that it's too late to save her. "I've noticed that when you light a match, the flame is the same shape as a falling tear." She's been sensitized, turned gooey in the middle. I saw it happening and I didn't do anything to stop it. From now on, she'll be writing diaries and sometimes including little poems and she'll buy gifts for her favourite teachers and she'll admire the scenery and she'll watch the news and she'll buy soup for homeless people and she'll never burn my leg hair again.

Be a team player, not a bandwagon jumper.

Oscar always said that books are truly our best friends. He said that they never think poorly of us and that they always have a shoulder for us to cry on or relieve stress. They take our minds away from the real world by telling us captivating stories. When we look back at our choice of books, we can nostalgically recall our younger years.

But when she looked at Prue tonight, she saw this was not now quite true of her. She was just beginning, just moving, just descending.

The river moves, but it follows a path. When it tires of one journey, it rubs through some rock to forge a new way. Hard work, but that's its nature.

I really believe that there is an invisible red thread tied between him and me, and that it has stretched and tangled for years — across oceans and lifetimes. I know that it won’t break because our souls are tied.

I know that the future seems hard and scary, but it will get better, I promise. It's time for you to move on. Get going.

He had not been sleeping well over Christmas. Actually, he hadn’t been doing anything well over Christmas – eating, sleeping, exercising, talking, looking after himself, laughing, crying… No, he hadn’t really been crying despite all the pain he felt. It was just tearing him up inside, quietly. It was like his insides were being ripped up by an angered tiger.

Don’t matter none how bad it gets sometimes. You can always turn this shit around.

But clearly life took people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once known them well. Still, there was power in once having known someone.