Growing Up Quotes - Page 2

He had a third martini. He looked at me intently and took hold of my arm. 'Look', he said. 'You're a fish in a pond. It's drying up. You have to mutate into an amphibian, but someone keeps hanging on to you and telling you to stay in the pond, everything's going to be all right.

I have hopein who I am becoming.I have belief in every scar and disgraceful wordI have ever spokenor been toldbecause it is still teaching meand I have hope in who I am becoming.They say it takes 756 days to run to someone you loveand they also say that the only romance worth fighting foris the one with yourselfand I know by nowthat they say a lot of things,people talking everywherewithout saying a word,but if it took me all those years to learn myselfor teach myselfhow to look into the mirrorwithout breaking itI know for a fact that it was a fight worth fighting.I stood up for my own head and so did my heartand we are coming to terms with ourselves.Shaking hands, saying ”let’s make this workfor we have places to goand people to seeand we will need each other”So I have hopein who I am becoming.It’s Julyand I have hope in who I am becoming.

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.

I have lost and loved and won and cried myself to the person I am today.

They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.

The joy of reading with our children doesn't stop as they, and we, get older; it simply changes.

I am almost dizzied by a sudden knowledge, as cold as snow down my spine; that I, too, will grow up one day like everyone else, and look back and miss the years gone by, and the things I could have done, should have done. And growing up is suddenly not something to be impatient for, not all jam and buns and doing as one pleases. It is precisely the opposite.

I was going to be a memory when I grew up.

There’s no magic ruler by which we’re all judged and weighed, not in this life. If you wait for someone to tell you it’s time to grow up, you’ll wait forever. Some people, quite happily, do just that. They don’t do anything until they’re forced to by circumstance

I thought I had found my true vocation and happiness, but in a strange way, they were just like my stepmother because they didn't want me to grow up either. This is really important you understand, Virginia, because I had gone from something very bad to something very good, but it was only halfway right. They loved me, but they wanted me to stay small like them.

I wonder if all mothers feel like this the moment they realize their daughters are growing up- as if it is impossible to believe that the laundry I once folded for her was doll-sized; as if I can still see her dancing in lazy pirouettes along the lip of the sandbox. Wasn't it yesterday that her hand was only as big as the sand dollar she found on the beach? That same hand, the one that's holding a boy's; wasn't it just holding mine, tugging so that I might stop and see the spiderweb, the milkweed pod, any of a thousand moments she wanted me to freeze? Time is an optical illusion- never quite as solid or strong as we think it is. You would assume that, given everything, I saw this coming. But watching Kate watch this boy, I see I have a thousand things to learn.

I ran a constant low fever waiting for my ride to come and take me away to something finer. I lay in bed at night, watching the red beacon on top of the water tower, a clear signal to me of the beauty and mystery of a life that waited for me far away, and thought of Housman's poem,"Loveliest of trees, the cherry nowIs hung with bloom upon the bough.It stands among the woodland ride,Wearing white for Eastertide.Now, of my three-score years and ten,Twenty will not come again..."and would have run away to where people would appreciate me, had I known of such a place, had I thought my parents would understand. But if I had said, "Along the woodland I must go to see the cherry hung with snow," they would have said, "Oh,no, you don't. You're going to stay right here and finish up what I told you to do three hours ago. Besides, those aren't cherry trees, those are crab apples.

It is so demanding to be born into a house full of women, where everyone loves you so overwhelmingly that they end up suffocating with their love; a house where you, as the only child, have to be more mature than all the adults around....But the problem is that they want me to become everything they themselves couldn't accomplish in life.....As a result, I had to work my butt off to fulfill all their dreams at the same time.

The Girl was gone, buried in the past. She never wanted to hear that name again. She was a woman for better for worse. Whatever the future might bring she could face it as a woman, Ned Ridley's woman.

And I realized that some things just don't work that way. Life isn't a fairy tail. And the person you fall in love with doesn't always love you back. But that's ok, because at the very least it makes you stronger. And brings you to a place where you can fall in love with yourself. And that to me is more important than finding someone that only makes you complete when they are around, It's really about Finding the person that will teach you ALL the lessons you need to know ...so that you feel complete all by yourself. 

When I say maturity, I mean an inner integrity. And this inner integrity comes only when you stop making others responsible, when you stop saying that the other is creating your suffering, when you start realizing that you are the creator of your suffering. This is the first step towards maturity: I am responsible. Whatsoever is happening, it is my doing.You feel sad. Is this your doing? You will feel very much disturbed, but if you can remain with this feeling, sooner or later you will be able to stop doing many things. This is what the theory of karma is all about. You are responsible. Don’t say society is responsible, don’t say that parents are responsible, don’t say the economic conditions are responsible, don’t throw the responsibility onto anybody. YOU are responsible.

Jenny remembers what it was like, all those years ago. It was never dolls for her, nothing so tangible as that. It was more of a feeling. As if, for the first several years of her life, everything held over her a sort of knowledge and insistence. Fence posts, wallpaper, the lawn at certain hours of the day. These things glowered at her, or smiled. Even something as ordinary as the blue rolling chair in her father's office had some hold on her, some whisper of a new dimension in its puffs of dust sent upward by her fists against its cushions. There was an intensity inherent in everything until, one day, there wasn't. The blue chair rolled on its wheels to the window when she pushed it. The rising dust was rising dust. And when it was gone, there was only a knot of longing somewhere deep inside of her, a vacant ache: adolescence. Boredom.It's why we fall in love, Jenny will tell June.We fall in love to get back to that dimension, that wonder.She goes to the laundry room, where, from a pile of clean clothes, she picks out a few articles of June's, folds them, then goes upstairs to knock on her daughter's door and tell her that this, this lost doll world, is the reason there is love.

I wonder if all mothers feel like this the moment they realize their daughters are growing up—as if it is impossible to believe that the laundry I once folded for her was doll-sized; as if I can still see her dancing in lazy pirouettes along the lip of the sandbox. Wasn't it yesterday that her hand was only as big as the sand dollar she found on the beach? That same hand, the one that's holding a boy's; wasn't it just holding mine, tugging so that I might stop and see the spiderweb, the milkweed pod, any of a thousand moments she wanted me to freeze? Time is an optical illusion—never quite as solid or strong as we think it is.

And why is it that so many years later it is so easy to distinguish the bullies from their prey? Adult bodies surrounding the children of long ago. The years have changed nothing.

Some people grow up with issues because they did not have their parents around growing up, many others have issues because their parents were around growing up

Stop using him, and start protecting him. I know he thinks he doesn't need it, but sometimes he does. Sometimes we all do.

Some days, Kaylin fervently wished that she had already passed Adult 101 and could get on with being the person she wanted to be.

I tried to push my body through his and completely disappear.

When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

After it's all over, the early childhood, a chain of birthdays woven with candlelight, piles of presents, voices of relatives singing and praising your promise and future, after the years of schooling, fitting yourself into different size desks, memorizing, reciting, reporting, and performing for jury after jury of teachers, counselors, and administrators, you still feel inadequate, alone, vulnerable, and naked in a world that can be unforgiving and terribly demanding.

Adults tend to repress their pleasure. Sad to say, I think we become adults only through disappointment, grief, and lies. So of course gradually we become tough, less sensitive.

When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser.

If a fight looks like a lot of fun, you should be suspicious. 'If you ain't scared of standing up for what's right, you ain't standing up for much.

How do you explain to a child who likes everyone in the world that adult life consists to a great extent of cutting people away?

They both looked at me in a way that was fast becoming familiar: two parts bafflement to one part awe at my talent for making a bad situation worse.

There’s a wound most troubled boys share, which, at its core, comes from the feeling that they don’t have their father’s unconditional love.

This is where the pivotal events of my childhood unfolded, while I ate banana and root beer Popsicles, two by two, tucking the sticks neatly under the skirt of the chair. It's where Sunnybank Lad met Lady, Ken met his friend Flicka, Atlanta burned, Manderley burned, Lassie came home, Jim ran away, Alice got small, Wilbur got big, David Copperfield was born, Beth died, and, on an endless gloomy winter afternoon, Jody shot his yearling.

The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, Slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized.

So her safe little world would never be safe again... She knew that the nurturing hand also held the knife, and that was very unsettling.

Your passions don’t have to connect to one another and no one needs to sign off on them. Passion isn’t logical… it’s only the fuel which keeps our souls alive. Let it be that simple.

It is not until you change your identity to match your life blueprint that you will understand why everything in the past never worked.

She told herself that she longed greatly to go back to those dear merry days when life was seen through a rosy mist of hope and illusion, and possessed an indefinable something that had passed away forever. Where was it now--the glory and the dream?

Maybe you never stop feeling like an eight-year-old in front of your parents. You resolve to be your mature self, to react in this considered way rather than that elemental way, to breathe evenly from the bottom of your stomach and to see your parents as equals, but within five minutes your intentions are blown to hell, and you're babbling and screaming in rage like an angry child.

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

It doesn’t matter how many times you leave, it will always hurt to come back and remember what you once had and who you once were. Then it will hurt just as much to leave again, and so it goes over and over again. Once you’ve started to leave, you will run your whole life.

It seems only yesterday I used to believethere was nothing under my skin but light.If you cut me I could shine.But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,I skin my knees. I bleed.

Suddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you're young enough, you don't know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair. A dandelion growing out of a crack in the side walk outside your front door is a garden. You could believe that a song your partner was singing in the evening was the most tragic opera in the world. It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you.

In Woody Allen movies people stood in line for Ingmar Bergman films or Holocaust documentaries talking up media theory to pass the time. At 16 that was my idea of fun. Now that I live in New York I can tell you that people lined up for tickets don't debate theory. They talk about cute guys at the gym or whether or not they live within walking distance of a Krispy Kreme. I was such a young fogy that growing up involved becoming less mature.

It's not very easy to grow up into a woman. We are always taught, almost bombarded, with ideals of what we should be at every age in our lives: "This is what you should wear at age twenty", "That is what you must act like at age twenty-five", "This is what you should be doing when you are seventeen." But amidst all the many voices that bark all these orders and set all of these ideals for girls today, there lacks the voice of assurance. There is no comfort and assurance. I want to be able to say, that there are four things admirable for a woman to be, at any age! Whether you are four or forty-four or nineteen! It's always wonderful to be elegant, it's always fashionable to have grace, it's always glamorous to be brave, and it's always important to own a delectable perfume! Yes, wearing a beautiful fragrance is in style at any age!

It made him wonder if all things taken from their home too soon lost some of their bloom.

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.

I could turn up the volume on their songs and that loudness matched all my panic and fear, anger and emotions that seemed up until that point to be uncontrollable, even amorphous.

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself. I was a child then, I had no idea what the world would be like. I wished to trust myself on the waters and the sea. Everything was romantic in my imagination. The woods were peopled by the mysterious good folk. The Lords and Ladies of the last century walked with me along the overgrown paths, and picked the old fashioned flowers among the box and rose hedges of the garden.

Oh God, I'm miss­ing the gene which makes you grow up and buy a flat in Streatham and start visiting Homebase every weekend. Everyone's moving on without me, into a world I don't understand.

Suddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you're young enough, you don't know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair. A dandelion growing out of a crack in the side walk outside your front door is a garden. You could believe that a song your partner was singing in the evening was the most tragic opera in the world. It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you

There’s a different flavor to children’s literature you read after you grow up than there was reading it as a child. Things that were sweet as a child become bitter once you grow up.

The monsters were never under our bed, but in the forest our future.

One of the greatest tragedies of growing up is the discovery that your parents- and your teachers, and your sports heroes, and your favorite actors, singers, YouTube sensations- are fallible. Adults don't know all, and what they do know, they often won't tell you- because they've got their own agendas, or because they want to shield you from the hard truths "for your own good." Adults lie, they betray, they screw up in every way possible...

Why is it when people are proud of me that my life sucks?”“Because growing up means making tough choices, and doing the right thing doesn’t necessarily mean doing the thing that feels good.

Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.

We are always growing up. I'm growing up as I type this. An eighty-seven-year-old woman is still technically growing up. So be as immature as you want. Right now, you are the youngest you you're ever going to be.

It’s hard to have done all one’s growing up since 33 — but that’s a damn sight better than not growing up at all.

I know it’s impossible for you to see peers this way, but when you’re older, you start to see them—the bad kids and the good kids and all kids—as people. They’re just people, who deserve to be cared for. Varying degrees of sick, varying degrees of neurotic, varying degrees of self- actualized.

When the most important things in our life happen we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is going on. A man does not always say to himself, "hullo! i'm growing up." It is only when he looks back that he realises what has happened and recognises it as what people call "growing up.