Coming Of Age Quotes - Page 3

Your personal truth is your gift to the world.

The principles of storytelling do not change. Going home. Coming of age. Sin and redemption. The hero. The journey, The power of love. They are hardwired into us, just like our taste buds process sweet, sour, bitter, and salt. Can a new voice come up with something startling and creative and unprecedented? Absolutely. Can they invent a fifth taste? No. No, they can’t. Can they make it so we don’t like sweet anymore? No, no they can’t.

Creativity is the catalyst to the future.

When left unsatisfied, lust becomes violence.

I kept waiting for the part where I’d finally know who I was — some flashing, neon moment of relief, but it never came.

It’s hard to describe, this feeling of seeing your kids spending time together like adults, meeting up again after being out there in the world like free agents. There’s something giddy and unreal about it. I knew that boy when he was afraid of strangers. I knew them both before they knew how to talk.

Stop trying to be less of who you are. Let this time in your life cut you open and drain all of the things that are holding you back.

In the old days, when travelers would get lost, they would follow the stars and I love that idea. I wish that I could rely on something as simple and magnificent as a star for all of my aching questions.

I may have smiled to myself as I watched the familiar pattern of the town pass, the bus cruising through shade to sunshine. I'd grown up in this place, had the knowledge of it so deep in me that I didn't even know most street names, navigating instead by landmarks, visual or memorial. The corner where my mother had twisted her ankle in a mauve pantsuit. The copse of trees that always looked vaguely attended by evil. The drugstore with its torn awning. Through the window of that unfamiliar bus, the burr of old carpet under my legs, my hometown seemed scrubbed clean of my presence. It was easy to leave it behind.

It seemed everyone knew their place in it, but I was in the mood where I would rather be alone and look a houseplants.

Never did the world make a queen of a girl who hides in houses and dreams without traveling.

So much has been done to my body, and still, somehow, not enough.

If there's something I'm not good at, it's usually because I just organically despise it. I can't help that. I'm fabulous at too many other things to waste my time faking it.

I've come to realize that love is tragic, somewhere down the line it's inevitable. Fight for it.

Successes are those highlights of life we look back on with a smile. But it's the day to day grind of getting them that defines the laugh lines etched until the end of time. Enjoy each moment along the way

And scars will lighten, they'll pale unless you keep rubbing at them...wait long enough, they'll fade.

The God of Imagination lived in fairytales. And the best fairytales made you fall in love. It was while flicking through "Sleeping Beauty" that I met my first love, Ivar. He was a six-year-old bello ragazzo with blond hair and eyebrows. He had bomb-blue eyes and his two front teeth were missing.The road to Happily Ever After, however, was paved with political barbed wire. Three things stood in my way.1. The object of my affection didn't know he was the object of my affection.2. The object of my affection preferred Action Man to Princess Aurora.3. The object of my affection was a boy and I wasn't allowed to love a boy.

We make people into Gods, desperate that they never leave us and hopeful that someday, if we ever deserve it, maybe they’ll love us back even half way.

He's got all the pains of being lost and all the benefits of being told where to go. He wants it the other way around.

His smile is beautiful. It's the kind of smile that can take away all nervousness and tension in a room, no matter how big. I have no choice but to smile back.

Yes, King Eirik, I can't do this alone. I'm not a knight or even a fighter for that matter. I'm just a normal boy, who is looking for his Grandfather.

My experience showed me an ugly side of our human nature. That if we are told it’s alright to step on someone, we will do so, in joy that we are not the one being stepped on. If we are told we can treat someone as lesser, we will do it, since it means we are more than they are.” -Norrie, Seeing Through Sampson's Eyes

If I had an .MP3 of your heartbeat… I might actually get some sleep.

Zachary smiles, and I wonder if he's felling different. Because standing out here waist deep in Gossimer Lake, next to my best friend, I'm feeling different-light and good and maybe even holy.

It's like I'm dreaming of the imaginary friend Katie and I had when we were little. She'd been so real to us as kids. We each remembered Anna, that's what we'd called her, just like we remembered bits of our parents. But now, in this dreamscape of Paradise Lost, our imaginary third twin has all grown up.

He’d used the amulet to read my thoughts again. I pictured smacking him in the face.

True friends don't come with conditions.

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.

What's all this nonsense about odd vision and not fitting in? There are plenty worse things in this world than not fitting in--like fitting in way too much. You strike me as a real original, Izzy Malone, in a world that loves carbon copies. If you think you beautified something, I believe you. I've never understood why folks love safe, neutral colors so much. Colors are what make this world worth living in.

Both the two of us knew it. We watched the lie go up big and slow between us, then it burst like a spit bubble. They always burst before too long.

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.

From this point forward, you don’t even know how to quit in life.”~ Aaron Lauritsen, ‘100 Days Drive

Vane’s lips tightened to suppress a smile. “Why so hostile, love?”“You whacked me on the head with a ball!”“You deserved it.

I had to get used to it because my life was no longer safe and I was no longer protected like I once was.

I work in a restaurant in an airport in Taiwan. I am eighteen years old and I don’t like my job because everyone gets on planes and leaves. And I want to leave too.

When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead"When you see millions of the mouthless deadAcross your dreams in pale battalions go,Say not soft things as other men have said,That you'll remember. For you need not so.Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they knowIt is not curses heaped on each gashed head?Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.Say only this, "They are dead." Then add thereto,"Yet many a better one has died before."Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should youPerceive one face that you loved heretofore,It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.Great death has made all his for evermore.

Perhaps that was the point; life, if you did it right, meant learning and changing. If you didn't, you died- or stopped growing - which amounted to more or less the same thing. So I would slide in and out of different roles until I discovered the one that fit me best.-Deuce, (183)

There is strange comfort in knowing that no matter what happens today, the Sun will rise again tomorrow.

Bill suited the action to the word, getting up and leaning over the handlebars and pumping the pedals at a lunatic rate. Looking at Bill's back, which was amazingly broad for a boy of eleven-going-on-twelve, watching it work under the duffel coat, the shoulders slanting first one way and then the other as he shifted his weight from one pedal to the other, Richie suddenly became sure that they were invulnerable...they would live forever and ever.

It's really best not to tell people when you feel bad. Growing up is about keeping secrets, and pretending everything is fine.

The freedom of the open road is seductive, serendipitous and absolutely liberating.

The stars twinkled high above and reflected onto the cold window. I blew on the frosty glass and watched my breath fog up. I traced my initials across the cold glass, the condensation trickling down the pane.

I don’t ever want to hurt anyone, but I really wish there was something like a reset button on my life.

Only half a page left now. Shall I fill it with 'I love you, I love you'-- like father's page of cats on the mat? No. Even a broken heart doesn't warrant a waste of good paper.

There's always one sure way of finding out that you're a misfit. When you're eleven years old, and your friends are telling you that they just sneaked into the theater to watch 'Twilight' and that it was "sooooo emotional and sooooo terrifying and soooooo romantic!" - but you've been spending the summer watching 'Rosemary's Baby' and 'Don't Look Now' and knowing the lines to all the Alfred Hitchcock films by heart - that's the moment you realize that you're a misfit.

Living with myself wasn’t all that easy. I was not the young girl I once was. Once upon a time when I looked in the mirror, I saw this happy glow. Now nothing glowed except the leftover face cream from the night before.

Be the time he finds his way out of the chamber and the planetarium, he has become me.

You are meant to be, despite how you got here; you’ll see someday.

When I was younger, I would cling to life because life was at the top of the turning wheel. But like the song of my gypsy girl, the great wheel turns over and lands on a minor key. It is then that you come of age and life means nothing to you. To live, to die, to overdose, to fall in a coma in the street... it is all the same. It is only in the peach innocence of youth that life is at its crest on top of the wheel. And there being only life, the young cling to it, they fear death… And they should! ...For they are 'in' life.

Love is my drug of choice, even if it comes laced with pain and disaster.

My mom says . . . there are bad people who hurt others for fun . . . and there are good people who do it by accident. Like, they make a mistake? I think you're a good person.

I'm working hard to have a good life.You don't need fancy things to feel good. You can hug a puppy. You can buy a can of paint and surround yourself with color. You can plant a flower and watch it grow. You can decide to trust people, the right people. You can decide to start over and let other people start over, too.

I have certainly heard of the Subtle Art of Shutting Up, but I can't say I've practiced it all that much. I greatly prefer the underappreciated genius of Speaking My Mind. I figure if someone doesn't like what I have to say, they shouldn't put their ears in close proximity to my mouth.

I met a boy whose eyes showed me that the past, present and future were all the same thing.

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.

He shook his head and thought about it for a second. “Maybe I'm not straight? Can I still be straight when I'm sitting here looking into your eyes?” he asked. Maybe it was the alcohol talking or maybe he wasn't as straight as he thought he was.“Yes. Absolutely.” Cormag nodded and watched him closely.“Even when I think they're so pretty? They are, you know. So many different shades of brown…and a little green. Just a touch; not a lot. So pretty.” He sighed happily, watching those dark eyes staring back at him in surprise. He lay his head on his arms, smiling at the way Cormag flushed in embarrassment and turned his full attention onto his bottle of beer.“Wow, you are super drunk.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there really is some goodness here in our world. But if goodness existed, that must mean that darkness existed as well.

Everyone's always scared for someone else's generation

There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes...

College isn't half as much fun as they told us it was going to be.""It's not one-hundredth as much fun.