I just want your voice aimed at me again. I want to absorb the direction of your eyes…

But I love you and I want you and I need you. Can’t you see that? This world has nothing to offer me if it doesn’t include you.

Sometimes, life threw up problems that even the wisest, most trusted mentor couldn’t solve for you. It was part of the pain of growing up.And having to stand by and watch was part of being...

The boy and the man must be raised to see the possibility of self worth, then meet a few others who provide the vision of a road toward it, then spend a lifetime pursing that...

I’m sorry you don’t like coming back here,” her mother often said, to cap whatever petty dust-up they’d had. How could Emily explain: it wasn’t her mother or Kersey she’d disowned, but her earlier self,...

My friend Madea has “attitude” that comes with wisdom. Back in our teens and twenties, we thought we knew everything and made all those foolish mistakes. Then, when we got a little older, at thirty,...

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

I reached up with my finger and traced the scar over my eyebrow, remembering when that was the greatest hurt I’d ever known.

Mamas are always crying about how one day they see you as a baby, and the next morning, they see you growed up.

No, you become a man when you first decide to put away the things of childhood, the talk of childhood, and the thoughts of childhood. You decide because you cannot be treated as both a...

Brushing my little teeth every morning of my childhood, I stood on my tippy toes, leaned over the sink and said to myself that when I am a big girl I will see from this...

When Uncle W. G. held out his hand to take my money, I dropped the dead mouse in his hand.

People keep asking what I do for a living and I keep saying that I don’t believe in making a living. That it’s a concept that has been twisted. I tell them I believe in...

Growing up is such a barbarous business, full of inconvenience… and pimples.

You’ll understand someday, James.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.” Perhaps the death of us all is called for in this time of emotional desperation. War is a product of the mind; only with the death...

Maybe that’s what growing up means, in the end – you go far enough in the direction of – somewhere – and you realise that you’ve neutered the capacity of the term home to mean...

Watching her, he saw again how she teetered between adolescence and adulthood, with a raw sensuality that had to deposit her in a kind of no-man’s land–too much a woman for boys her own age,...

As a man begins to understand the sacrifices he must make to live the life he dreams of, he often loses his courage for such a life.

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,...

The process of growing up was nothing more than figuring out what doors hadn’t yet been slammed in your face.

Your personal truth is your gift to the world.

Starting over can be the scariest thing in the entire world, whether it’s leaving a lover, a school, a team, a friend or anything else that feels like a core part of our identity but...

I don’t ever want to hurt anyone, but I really wish there was something like a reset button on my life.

When you were too young and naïve to see the risks, I incurred your wrath to protect you. Scream at me for it if you must. Thank me for it when you finally grow up.

When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our...

This is growing up, having to stomp out love, this is how people turn terrible.

…it’s been amazing- not perfect, but amazing. I’m actually glad of the nonperfection because that has made our relationship feel more grounded, solid, and real than what I had (…), which just cruised blithely along,...

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

Your love life is insignificant when it comes to raising your children to be respectable human beings. The moment you see them suffer or lower their standards because of your selfishness, is the day you...

I lost something magical in the process of growing up – my disillusionment.

Cry your guts out because nothing is sadder than an adult who forgets how to be a child.

Growing apart doesn’t change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I’m glad for that.

Sometimes in storm weather the shore had fluttered with disabled swallows. They crouched lower for his approach, without strength to escape. In his hands they pulsed with that same pulse. He had taken a bird...

When I look in the mirror I see the girl I was when I was growing up, with braces, crooked teeth, a baby face and a skinny body.

I am a worried person with a stressed out soul, living a simple life with no capital.

Realizing that many you once thought the world of are nothing but glorified assholes means you’ve grown up. 

Learning is one letter short of maturity.

Growth is life, and life is for ever destined to make for light.

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?

I don’t have to get married to grow up!

I once made a solemn vow that I could not keep… I am from this world. Even with all its failures and suffering it is still worthy of my best efforts… and wishing it was...

I just wanted to see if… we were okay,” she said, feeling relief. “Just to make sure we can be friends. I don’t want it to be weird, you know?” Friends? Different parts of Birdie...

And if I sit in that room at the top of the house and I think about my life and if I shut my eyes from time to time and imagine being warm in the...

I’ve always seen this in you, ever since you were a little girl — this hunger to love other people into their highest selves and it’s what has made me irreversibly and just so forever...

Recognize that you have been chosen to be alive, right now, at this exact moment in time and know that none of that is random. There is something about you, your past or your future...

Ne zaman kadın olduğunu sen bileceksin. O anı fark edeceksin. Ama bana sorarsan, kalbinin kırıldığı anlardan birinde oluyor bu. Daha önce varlığını bile bilmediğin yerinden kırılan kalbine, kırıktan giren ışık önce seni zehirleyecek, sonra felç...

The groove is so mysterious. We’re born with it and we lose it and the world seems to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the world unifies...

It’s hard at times, but it makes a kid strong in ways that most people can’t understand. Teaches them that even though people are left behind, new ones will inevitable take their place; that every...

I walked over to the hill where we used to go and sled. There were a lot of little kids there. I watched them flying. Doing jumps and having races. And I thought that all...