Coming Of Age Quotes - Page 4

It scored a direct hit on my eardrum and rattled around in side my head

I feel like a paper cut just waiting to bleed.

Do I look like I want to be involved in your teen love saga? Ask someone who cares.

There was a dazzling intellect beneath the girl's sadness, she was sure - and it bothered Mallory to no end that it might go wasted on the world if Dawn could not be coaxed out of her melancholy.

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.

The Mozart sonata Dad picked out begins to play. When we hear the first note, we open the sacks and the ladybugs escape through the opening, taking flight. It's as if someone has dumped rubies from heaven. Soon they will land on the plants in search of bollworm eggs. But right now they are magic-red ribbons flying over our heads, weaving against the pink sky, dancing up there with Mozart.

Soon, he would become an adult. And when he did, there would be not going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about being a war hero: one you became one, you died one.

It's not about becoming a movie star. It's about the down-in-the-dirt art of inhabiting the person you aspire to be while carrying on your shoulders the uncertain and hungry man you know you are.

It's in a can. It's good forever.

It sounded bizarre and I was afraid of what awaited me. We entered a town called Dobbs Ferry in Westchester County. We drove up a long hill past some houses and past a sign that read “Welcome to Children’s Village.” ”Excerpts From: Life of a Bastard Vol. 1 By Damien Black

Whose little boy are you?

We are brilliant shades of light, we can not be contained"-Boys of the Fatherless-

It really is the best feeling in the world when everything that used to make you dizzy with desire becomes so wedged in your life that it changes from something you craved to something you belong in

And in this moment, I realize one reason it's so great to have a best friend is sometimes, like right now, Cal and I are thinking the very same thing.

She had a woman’s swagger at twelve-and-a-half. Hair: strawberry-blonde, and I vaguely recall a daisy in the crook of her ear. She was an inch taller than me, two with the ponytail; smooth cheeks and darling brown eyes that marbled in luscious contrast with her magnolia skin; cream, melting to peach, melting to pink. She beamed like a cherub without the baby fat; a tender neck; pristine lips that would never part for a dirty word. Her body--of no interest to me at the time--was wrapped from neck to toes with home-made footie pajamas, the kind they make for toddlers, but I didn’t laugh; the girl filled that silly one-piece ensemble as if it were couture.

I was surfing the Internet for a different sort of education. I surfed for photos of circus freaks and synonyms for the word intercourse and for answers to why staring at the stars in the evening tore my heart with longing.

Judge that boy if you must; for debauchery, for objectifying innocence... but before you finalize your verdict, oh innocent reader, I beg you to scan again that last stanza. What you and I overlooked in our cloud of perversion and nasty objectification was the unrestrained joy of a little girl playing dress-up for the very first time.

She had been waiting for someone to notice her, like, really notice her. She felt that that was the key, that she would go from the duck to the swan the minute someone recognized her potential. And they would look into her like they were trying to pierce her eyes with theirs, like they were trying to make her heart stop, and the whole world would become background noise and she would take her first breath after all of these years of nothing but existing. It would be like a coronation, or a star exploding, and then she would be born. She would be alive, and she would be loved.

That night I dreamed about flying turtles and forest fires and fucking the earth...The next morning I awoke and I listened to the tree company tearing away the woods and the timber. I heard the chainsaws ripping outside my open window and I heard the dynamite exploding all the mountain tops away for the black rock below. And instead of feeling sad like I did most mornings, I felt something else now. I found myself saying, 'Explode. Explode you mountains. Rip them down you fuckers. Take this stinking dirt and leave this land with hatred and death.

Turns out, most girls would rather put on lip gloss than play with sand toads.

In Venice, things not always as they first appear. I contemplate this observation from my post on the aft deck of one of Master Fumagalli’s gondolas, taking in the panorama of bridges, domes, bell towers, and quaysides of my native city. I row into the neck of the Grand Canal, and, one by one, the reflection of each colorful façade appears, only to dissipate into wavering, shimmering shards under my oar.

P.S. Please don't call me Isabella. That name belongs to a really pretty girl who never wrecks her clothes and who never gets dirt under her fingernails. That's definitely not me. My name is Izzy.

Answer me one thing,” she says in a rigidly controlled voice. “Do you love Logan?”Perhaps I should lie, but in that moment, after what I’ve just witnessed, I’m incapable of expressing anything but the truth of what’s in my heart. “With all my heart,” I sob.

Even though their marriage had been dead for over two years (her words, not mine), this put her in the role of the innocent. She was now a woman scorned. ~Shattered Reality

What a wonderful word, future. Of all the abstractions we can articulate to ourselves, of all the concepts we have that other animals do not, how extraordinary the ability to consider a time that's never been experienced. And how tragic not to consider it. It galls us, we with such a limited future, to see someone brush it aside as meaningless, when it has an endless capacity for meaning, and an endless number of meanings that can be found within it.

Once we were inside the walls of Rahway Prison the mood changed. We were patted down for weapons and given a tour. They showed us how to make improvised weapons that people would hide in their ass. The guards pointed out the young guys who had become someone’s bitch.”Excerpt From: Life of a Bastard Vol. 1 By Damien Black

...for they was never a young man yet who don't want to go out and right a wrong, or kill a man, or have to do something to earn his right to what is there for the taking, all along. Only he don't think he can ask, nor take, without earning it. Without no pain. Oftener than not, a young man's a regular fool.

I left Hairball to his manic mantric singing. I walked toward the house and stopped to rub some white pine needles on my fingers. The evergreen smelled fresh and alive. The needles were long and soft to the touch. I looked back at Hairball. The moon had risen higher and Little Meadow was even brighter. The windpicked up Hairball’s singing and blew it away. By the time I got up to the house he had become a silvery ghost dancing in the moonlight, a nowhere man longing to live on the moon.

You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else--an adult, an animal.

Me? I had no dreams. No longings. Dreams only set you up for disappointment. Plus, you had to have a life to have dreams of a better life.

When I grow up, maybe I will bethe first one to circle the sea.Or maybe I will just spend all my daydoing everything my way.Maybe I will be in a world of my ownI just hope not alone.I just know that whatever I doI will never, ever forget about you.

Sure, Bob Dylan had some good songs. But he could have been a doctor.

You go and do what you need to do, June," she says to me. "You go and find what you need. Your supper will be here, when you need it. Your supper will be warm. No matter where I am, that will be your home," she says.And I can't believe it, watching her. That look on her face. It is all the love that I didn't have growing up, making a face.

The morning after my mother’s death, I was surprised to see the sunrise. From behind the curtain of my bedroom window I was surprised to see the people leave their homes and begin the day. Downstairs, the hands of the grandfather clock continued to tick, marking each passing hour with a chime that echoed over the black and white chessboard tiles of the front hall. I was surprised to see the mail come at the same time as the day before and, later that evening, the sun set once more as it did since the beginning of time. My mother’s death did not disturb the planets in their courses. And, though everything kept moving like she never existed at all, my world erupted into chaos until the universe swirled around me like a whirlpool of scattering stars.

That last time you kissed me my heart slid past your teeth down into the center of your chest… trapping us both in a stainless cage.

I brooded over it. If it had been any other dream, I would have ignored it. But it was one of those dreams. One of those purple dreams. One of those dreams that had an unusual tendency to come true.

Hush now, ‘tis time to sleep and dream secrets of long ago.

You only go through High School once, but if you go through the way we did, that's enough.

It was not about the sea or the sand, but burying her feet there had seemed to cure what had worried her...

Who is old enough to ask, is old enough to know.

I wish on one of the stars for divine orchestration and save the rest of them for all of the other girls in the world who will feel like I do tonight.

Sometimes I think teachers like Ms. Harmer view creativity as something dirty and slightly embarrassing, and would prefer to turn kids into people who color inside the lines.Generally speaking, I don't care much for lines.

He looked along the line of children, exhibits A to C of his existence and heirs to the twisted throne of his corrupt genetics.

I stood at the grassy edge and tentatively dipped my toe into the water. I watched the ripple spread and break the perfect reflection before composing itself. The ripple then rushed towards a mass of rocks to one side.

I turn and run, watching my feet trample a massacre of weeds. I mourn them. The only thing that grows is dandelions in the cracks of the sidewalk and we always end up killing them.

Being married definitely took work. When we fought, I felt like I wanted to float away and drown, whereas before I knew I could walk away without any strings attached.

Sometimes we called one another by our future doctor names. We did it partly to be funny, but mostly because we liked it when people did it back to us.

She bought seeds and raided nurseries and mulched and composted and spent full days with her hands full of earth, coaxing life our of the dry, dull grass my father had spent years pushing a mower over.

I just wish that God or my parents or Sam or my sister or someone would just tell me what's wrong with me. Just tell me how to be different in a way that makes sense.

I wonder if he’d been as beautiful as Dante. And I wondered why I thought that.

Every time I think about that girl, my mind commits a sin.

Unfortunately, I am only myself. I am scared and alone and unsure, but I am practicing. I am scared and alone and unsure, but that doesn't mean I always will be.Like AJ repeating words, I can repeat being me, until I start to believe it.

I was physically attacked by a woman who didn’t even know me. Yes, my boyfriend was her former husband, but she tried to ruin me.

I just want to this about that.

It is hard to be true to yourself because it is hard to be yourself.

I wanted to have a good relationship. One that's romantic and dramatic, like in the movies. But I finally became a woman at 17 and learned that men aren't really that simple.

I had no intention of forsaking my wedding vows. I had strong morals and never could have imagined going against them. I was never even tempted to stray.

Patience is the virtue that forges great men.

His body had almost no hair and his naked little circumcised johnson was nearly as pale as the rest of him, white as a boy's - perhaps over time one's genitals emerge from the pots and bubbling vats of love permanently stained, like the hands of a wool dyer.

We screamed this primeval scream built on a base of freedom, raised from beauty of a dying breed, and threw our heads back to laugh or cry, I'm not entirely sure which. But the scream shook the golden sunset, bringing it to its knees.