Children’s and YA books are about being brave and kind, about learning wisdom and love, about that journey into and through maturity that we all keep starting, and starting again, no matter how old we get. I think that’s why so many adults read YA: we’re never done coming of age.

This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might not exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo’s sincerely godless generation, the question hasn’t come up. No one in his bright, plate-glass, forward-looking school ever asked him to pray, or sing...

Nobody truly becomes an adult. The child we have been is always there, deep inside of us. As time passes, we think we’re growing, but maturity is only an illusion; a hindrance to our free child soul.

We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that ‘our most precious resource is our children.’ But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how...

The child learns so easily because he has a natural gift, but adults, because they are tyrants, ignore natural gifts and say that children must learn through the same process that they learned by. We insist upon forced mental feeding and our lessons

All fathers are liars . . . If you want to be a father, you have to be prepared to become a liar.

The red firelight glowed on their two bonny heads and revealed their faces, animated with the eager interest of children; for, though he was twenty-three and she eighteen, each had so much of novelty to feel, and learn, that neither experienced nor evinced the sentiments of sober disenchanted maturity.

The whole time I pretend I have mental telepathy. And with my mind only, I’ll say — or think? — to the target, ‘Don’t do it. Don’t go to that job you hate. Do something you love today. Ride a rollercoaster. Swim in the ocean naked. Go to the airport and get on the next...

It’s strange how in childhood it feels like tomorrow won’t come until the end of forever, but in adulthood it feels like the end of forever could come tomorrow.

To both the racist and the puritan, childhood is not a time of life that we grow out of, as the life of the child grows out of the life of the parent or as a plant grows out of the soil, but a time and state of consciousness to be left behind, to cut...

But as you get older, your courage attracts gunk and crusty things and dirt and fear and knowing how bad things can get and what pain feels like. By the time you’re half-grown, your courage barely moves at all, it’s so grunged up with living. So every once in a while, you have to scrub...

When I was a kid ‘¦I liked burning ants with a magnifying glass ‘¦.but I think that progressed into adulthood where I now believe in aliens.

Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.

The adult world may seem a cold and empty place, with no fairies and no Father Christmas, no Toyland or Narnia, no Happy Hunting Ground where mourned pets go, and no angels – guardian or garden variety. But there are also no devils, no hellfire, no wicked witches, no ghosts, no haunted houses, no daemonic...

Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.

I’ve spent awhile trying to figure out where I’m going and the only thing I’ve come to realize is it doesn’t matter where, it’s how I get there.

The adult were once young.The young have not yet attained adulthood.The young must learn to appreciate the wisdom of elderly people and learn from their life experiences.

Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you’re ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can. Then, perhaps, you will come back to it when you’re older, and you will find the book has changed because...

If you manage to make it to some semblance of adulthood, just showing up turns out to be one of the kindest, most selfless things you can do for someone.

Inside my house, nobody was home, except everybody, but it was easy to feel like those were one and the same.

I can take care of myself, but I can’t take care of myself and a child. I’ve decided to give myself up for adoption.

Would it be possible for me to see something from up there?” asked Milo politely.”You could,” said Alec, “but only if you try very hard to look at things as an adult does.”Milo tried as hard as he could, and, as he did, his feet floated slowly off the ground until he was standing in...

It’s adult swim time and I’m diving in here at the shallow end.

When you’re finally a grown-up, one of the things you find is that there are no grown-ups.

As long as any adult thinks that he, like the parents and teachers of old, can become introspective, invoking his own youth to understand the youth before him, he is lost.

I am convinced that most people do not grow up…We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as...

Not to grow up properly is to retain our ‘caterpillar’ quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we...

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.