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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

Never tell a child that something it’s too hard

Above all, staring at my old bedroom ceiling, I feel safe. Cocooned from the world; wrapped up in cotton wool. No one can get me here. No one even knows I’m here. I won’t get...

If we can create habits at a young age, these habits will carry into adulthood.

On the other hand, when you grow up you will discover that some of the people in this world never passed beyond the stage of the cave-man.

When you’re a child the world forbears you, allows you your flights of imagination, your feelings of specialness. But sooner or later the privileges are withdrawn, and all you’re left with is a stunned bitterness...

Interesting, Miles thought. Like himself, Father Mark, as a child, had been reassured by the imagined proximity of God, whereas adults, perhaps because they so often were up to no good, took more comfort from...

Being a child sucked. Being a teenager was worse. And being an adult seemed so far away that I had a better chance at swimming the length of the ocean than growing up.

I want to know we’re not pushing children toward the traditions of life, but instead cultivating them to grow in their own specific purposes, and make the dreams of their youth become realities as they...

Eventually he understood that he was crying for himself. He was ashamed of the man whom he had become, mourning the man whom he had expected to be when he’d been a boy.

Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity...

I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally...

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.

Treasure the beauty of youthful life and the wisdom of adulthood.

Most insensible, corrupt, cheap, disrespectful young girls run after bad, rude, cocky, nonsensical boys, but a mature, educated, thoughtful, virtuos lady opts for a wise, well breed, experienced, humble, modest gentleman.

I once tried to give him a friendly little “drugs chat”. He politely corrected me on every single fact, then said he’d noticed I drank above the recommended guidelines of Red Bull and did I...

People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.

Being silly is still allowed, not excluded by adulthood. What’s excluded by adulthood is thoughtlessness, so be thoughtful and silly

Sum of life; Birth, childhood, youth, adulthood, parenthood, old age and death.

Yet there be certain times in a young man’s life, when, through great sorrow or sin, all the boy in him is burnt and seared away so that he passes at one step to the...

That was when it was all made painfully clear to me. When you are a child, there is joy. There is laughter. And most of all, there is trust. Trust in your fellows. When you...