Coming Of Age Quotes - Page 5

To live in this world, I realized, is to leave pieces of your heart in various places; and to move toward any place is to move away from another.

There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

High school will probably be better. I mean, some kids will still be jerks, but it's not so bad if you have at least one good friend. Someone who gets you.

Was still between Martha and Jane, then, I was. Between the girl I was and who I wanted to be.

what I like and what I need’s two different things.

So what did it matter where she came from? Who-or what-her parents were? Everyone's family was messed up in some way including my own. And she was still the same Ariane.

Almost everyone first realized they were becoming a grown woman when some dude did something nasty to them. ...It was mostly men yelling shit from cars. Are they a patrol sent out to let girls know they've crossed into puberty? If so, it's working.

He would say things like, “But you are my wife!” when I didn’t do something that he wanted me to do. His expectations were not realistic.

As we drifted away from the Tower Bridge, I saw a single silhouette standing against the bright lamplight. Even now when I was nearly asleep, I could recognise her. Her shoulders were hunched up as if she was upset. Whether she was upset that she had nearly killed me or that she had let me get away, I was unsure. Then she turned around and walked to join the other silhouettes standing in a group farther back. Now I could not see which one was Rose – they were all joint together to make one.

You'll get fired if anyone finds out about us!""So many rules in this century," Vane muttered.

Ryan had read half his book, listened to all his music, eaten two packets of biscuits and an apple, played seventy-two games of Donkey Kong, completing all the levels, and counted every Italian sports car they’d passed in the last hundred miles. Twenty-four hours of groggy sticky travel, twenty-four hours stuck in this overheated tin can on wheels, and he finally knew what it was like to be utterly and unendingly bored. He propped an elbow on the car window frame and stuck his arm out of the opening. Combing his hand through the slipstream, he let the cool air tickle his fingers as he watched the countryside stream past.

It's in those quiet little towns, at the edge of the world, that you will find the salt of the earth people who make you feel right at home.

The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience.' But by the time we've got that we're no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.

Life is a valuable and unique opportunityto discover who you are.But it seems as soon as you nearanswering that age-old question,something unexpected always happensto alter your course.And who it is you thought you weresuddenly changes.Then comes the frustrating realizationthat no matter how long life endures,no matter how many experiencesare muddled through in this existence,you may never really be ableto answer the question....Who am I? Because the answer, like the seasons,constantly, subtly, inevitably changes.And who it is you are today,is not the same person you will be tomorrow.

Don’t worry if people think you’re crazy. You are crazy. You have that kind of intoxicating insanity that lets other people dream outside of the lines and become who they’re destined to be.

Men cannot make good decisions about their lifelong mate when driven by the passions of youth. If Pakal is continuing to see this woman, I will immediately put this to an end." -- Sak K'uk, Queen Mother of Janaab Pakal, Ruler of Palenque.

Learning to think for yourself is how you separate yourself from your parents and make the transition from being a child to being an adult, though part of maturity is being able to take opposing viewpoints into consideration.

Ribs closing on his heart, Will battled internal sirens whose song he couldn’t yet decipher. During his childhood, ‘sin’ had been such an abstract word. It denoted getting your Sunday best dirty and torn, or lying to have your brother punished for things you’d done yourself. But now, on the cusp of adulthood, the word seemed to grow and change, to acquire terrifying shades of darkness. He was beginning to understand that there was more to it. That there were things the human body longed for that were infinitely worse than playing in mud and telling fibs.

How stupid that all I have to dois grow two squishy lumps and suddenlyI'm man's best friend

All I can think about is how I wanted to share those firsts with Logan and how I never knew it was an impossibility because it had already been taken away from me.

I just want to always be here. In this place. Right here, right now.

If ever I was running, it was towards you.

She was not in the body of a young woman but just as I remembered her: a little toddler with a beautiful smile. She reached out with her small hand, and I gripped her tiny fingers as I let go of the pain and sank deeper into the lake.

Bittersweet: it's what life tastes like. And if you can handle the bitter, the sweet will come later. ~ Klyde, in Piranhas Like S'mores.

I'm tired of their plastic pony show.

What in the world could this family have done to deserve a fate such as this?

Words are a weapon, and rotten kids like Tyler Jones get a free pass when it comes to using them because the marks they leave are invisible. Why don't more adults realize that?

The bracelet and the first charm appeared the day I punched Austin Jackson in the nose. I didn't mean to slug him. His face just got in my way. It was a bruising end to a disastrous first month in middle school.

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…

Pull back the curtain and jump down the rabbit hole.

...people who don't live at least a little bit in fear, have nothing left to live for.

Plus, I happened to be a history nerd. Why else would I be interested in a guy born in the year 519?

You push the TRUTH off a cliff, but it will always fly. You can submerge the TRUTH under water, but it will not drown. You can place the TRUTH in the fire, but it will survive. You can bury the TRUTH beneath the ground, but it will arise. TRUTH always prevails!

To be honest, I’ve always made films and I never really stopped, starting with little stop-motion experiments using my dad’s Super 8 camera. In my mind, it’s all one big continuum of filmmaking and I’ve never changed.

We love our partners for who they are, not for who they are not.

If I'm going to fail, I want to fail trying.

But for a long time, and probably far too long, I had a secret wish: the adolescently romantic idea that there was someone out there for me; someone I hadn't met yet who would ask me on a date and make sense of my life. I harbored the hope, I'm now embarrassed to admit, that like a girl in a Lifetime movie, I would look into someone's eyes and find a reflection of my inner life. But sometime between my teenage years and the first years in New York, that idea had pretty well evaporated. I'd grown up.

I rather miss my wild girl; but if I get a strong, helpful, tender-hearted woman in her place, I shall feel quite satisfied.

Cormag caught his hand and pulled him back until they were facing each other. “I think you're amazing,” he said, blurting the words out.Lachlan smiled, completely shocked and thrilled by how captivating he found him.He had never thought this could happen to him, that he would be attracted to another boy.He thought he knew himself so well.“I think you're smart, sexy, funny as hell. You have hidden depths, Lachlan. You only need the right person to coax you out of your protective shell,” he claimed.“Are you the right person?” Lachlan wondered, as he took a half step forward.Cormag took a deep breath and brushed at a strand of hair that was sticking out at a funny angle from behind the top of his ear. He tugged at his short hair every time he talked about his recent break up. He was such a dork.

It's great that you can listen and be a shoulder to someone, but what about when someone doesn't need a shoulder? What if they need the arms or something like that? You can't just sit there and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can't. You have to do things.

The night seemed suddenly defiled by the absence of music, as if the silence itself was injecting a sickness that only another song could cure.

Partying and dancing have never been my thing, but drinking I could do with reasonable familiarity and skills. I decided to begin there.

She was neither white nor black, Fyre nor Aquanite; she was a dame of the White King, and it was up to her, and her alone, to choose what path her life would take.

I don't know why I didn't have this sixth sense or whatever it is all along, but part of me thinks maybe it means I'm growing up, evolving into a real superhero. Like maybe the world knew I couldn't handle it before, but now, now I'm finally becoming me an the world know sit -- or maybe I'm just learning to listen to myself.

…girls were like poems: weird, incomprehensible and boring, but those “in the know” assured me that they were beautiful.

This is what I know about my parents. They spent the next several years trying to forget each other, and me.

Time is a funny thing. You can go through it and meddle with it, but nothing can stay permanent. So even if everything so far had not happened, time would still have managed to find a way to make all this happen.

The high road of grace will get you somewhere a whole lot faster then the freeway of spite.

not knowing what I needed to do or where I needed to go, I knew all the same that I was going in the right direction.

But wasn’t time for what was. Was time to settle up the future.

First of all, he was not my type. He was nice, considerate, unselfish and grounded; qualities I’d never experienced in a man. Usually, I went for the self centered, screwed up, “I’m lost, will you be my mother” type.

Samir loves Joe’s face. He studies it every day in class: a face as old as his own but already, in eighteen years, the cliffs and hills and odd proportions of its geography have been shaped by life’s weather. Samir likes to observe the ever-watchful green eyes, hidden in their shadowy alcoves over the at nose and cheekbones, and the heavy brow that scrunches up with Joe’s moods – all those sculptural planes could have been carved by Easter Islanders. en there’s the pout of his lips, the pucker of their concentration or the twist of their anger. But most of all, Samir examines the thoughts as they cross the wide-open landscape of the face. Tries hard to read their cloud shapes from the merest shadow.

She was merely an actress who had been forced to perform her part on stage without fully knowing her lines. She was not real.

As I watch Nicholas make his way back to his truck, I know one thing: this boy is going to make my life very interesting. I feel as if a fragment of the old me broke away tonight and disappeared, and I’m finally, truly beginning my new life.

Is the ash in trees, babies, flowers, and visions of Godbetter than the visions themselves? Then you think,none of this is tangible or concrete. So you have another cigaretteand think about the (not one) but many ghosts you keep tucked away,under sheets, under beds, in notes, within other ghosts.

Do you know what dead skin looks like when they take off a cast?That was my life, all that dead skin. It was strange to feel like the Ari I used to be. Except that wasn’t totally true. The Ari I used to be didn’t exist anymore. And the Ari I was becoming? He didn’t exist yet.

Children played guessing games, telling each other whether the gun fired was and AK-47, a G3, an RPG, or a machine gun.

I guess that’s what growing up is. Saying good-by to a lot of things. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it isn’t. But it is all right.

I could only defend myself so much. It was my word against his. There was no evidence, nor was there any proof. My word meant very little.

The second hardest part about growing up is trying to figure out who you are. The hardest part comes after you've figured it out and the rest of the world wants to pull you in a different direction.