Unfortunately, some family members are so psychotic that no matter how hard you try to forge a healthy relationship, nothing will help. Now that you’re an adult, take refuge in the fact that some things are beyond your control. You owe it to yourself to steer clear of people who are harmful to your health.

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

I guess there’s a Use By date when it comes to blaming your parents for how messed up you are.I guess that’s what turning eighteen means.Time to own it.

The future isn’t written in the stars. There are no guarantees. So claim your adulthood. Be intentional. Get to work. Pick your family. Do the math. Make your own certainty. Don’t be defined by what you didn’t know or didn’t do.You are deciding your life right now.

If adults want to take such chances (with marijuana) that is their business

My father moved out a week later. I hugged him at our front door and couldn’t bear to watch him leave with so much luggage.

Isä ja äiti tekevät lapsia maailmaan josta eivät enää saa käsitystä ja jota eivät pysty ymmärtämään, heillä ei ole tarpeeksi järkeä tyytyäkseen toisiinsa, ainoaan mitä heillä on, rakkauteen jota kerran oli, olen varma että sitä joskus oli.

Vivien thought how ugly adults could be, how weak. So used to getting what they wanted that they didn’t know the first thing about being brave.

Children are the closest we have to wisdom, and they become adults the moment that final drop of everything mysterious is strained from them.

Like everyone I slipped into adulthood like a delinquent through the back door.

The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.

Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror...

So it was a crossroads summer, when the universe seemed to stand perilously still like an egg wobbling on a precipice, a regular rite of passage summer that saw us traverse the hazardous divide between the illusions of boyhood and the far more pernicious deceptions of maturity, et cetera.

You see, I don’t think age matters so much as people think. Parts of me are still 12 and I think other parts were already 50 when I was 12….

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

Young people must appreciate the beauty of old age. The old people were once young.

I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up in adult bodies, like children’s books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.

I didn’t grasp that desire and duty could rival each other, least of all that they most often did.

Adults were constantly auditioning, but for what?

He doesn’t want to step out of the present, this present. Because once he does, there will be college applications and college acceptances (just one will do) and the last of everything (last class, last party, last night, last day, last goodbye), and then the world will change forever and he will go to college...

Defining yourself in terms of how you rank is always dangerous and ultimately immature. It doesn’t matter whether the rank has to do with your grades, your weight or where you finished in the 800 meter race. Becoming a mature adult means, among other things, that you define yourself relative to your own potential, not...

A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.

The onset of adulthood is an organic, creeping process. No one wakes up one day and decides, “Lo, on this day I shall forever put away childish things and begin clipping coupons to go to Wal-Mart.

That was the problem, wasn’t it? You left home. But you never did become an adult. Not really. You just fucked up in different and more complicated ways.

A person can have a happy and fulfilling life without children.

You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

We were wiser as children if not for anything else but for our ability to always reflect. Reflection is a powerful tool to move forward into an enlightened stage of wisdom. Children reflect everyday about being reprehended, what made them happy, something new they discovered. This constant state of reflection is what makes them grow...

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options...

O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.

…because you are not trying simply to complete a set of books or toys or Weetabix cards, you are trying to complete yourself, to get back to the whole person you were before, as a child, before the obstructions and compromises of adulthood got in the way. And yet, all you are really doing is...

Forgiveness is what makes adults different to children: children just forget, adults forgive.

Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.

I mean, all I do here is do the work that my bosses tell me to do the way they tell me to do it. I don’t have to think at all. It’s like I just put my brain in a locker before I start work and pick it up on the way home. I...

The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child’s need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant...

Though I have been busy, perhaps overbusy, all my life, it seems to me now that I have accomplished little that matters, that the books have never come up to what was in my head, and that the rewards—the comfortable income, the public notice, the literary prizes, and the honorary degrees—have been tinsel, not what...

When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you

When I was a child, I thought like a child.When I became adult, I seek a deeper understanding of life.

Sometimes your kids will say the nastiest things, won’t they, Rose? You want to ask,’Whose child is this?'”Rose chuckled.”But usually, they’re just in some kind of pain. They need to work it out.

There was no starting point for the rebellion, but I could mark an arbitrary one: that a grown-up was someone who, first and foremost, could drink a Coke at whim.

In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.

In his grief over the loss of a dog, a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood. After this most inconsolable of sorrows there is nothing life can do to him that he will not be able somehow to bear.

You love because you want to need someone the way you did when you were a child, and have them need you too. You eat well because the intensity of taste reminds you of a need satisfied, a pain relieved. The finest paintings are nothing more than the red head of a flower, nodding in...

Relax. You will become an adult. You will figure out your career. You will find someone who loves you. You have a whole lifetime; time takes time. The only way to fail at life is to abstain.

Now, why did Kitty, who was the falsest thing on earth, who was in tune with every kind of falsity, by merely suffering somehow remind us of reality? Why did her tears reveal to me what I had learned long ago, but had forgotten in my frenzied love, that there is a draft that we...

Children take joy in their work and sometimes as adults we forget that’s something we should continue doing.

How can it be, after all this concentrated effort and separation, how can it be that I still resemble, so very closely, my own detestable mother?

One of the most jolting days of adulthood comes the first time you run out of toilet paper. Toilet paper, up until this point, always just existed. And now it’s a finite resource, constantly in danger of extinction, that must be carefully tracked and monitored, like pandas?

He was still a kid inside. His body had grown, stretched, towered, tanned its skin, hardened its muscle, darkened its tawny shock of long hair, tightened its lines around jaw and eyes, thickened fingers and knuckles, but the brain didn’t feel as if it had grown in sympathy with the rest. It was still green,...

Don’t you find it odd,” she continued, “that when you’re a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you’re older, somehow they act offended if you even try.

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.