I ruin everything. I think that a bullet must have passed through my heart when I was very young, causing me to bleed out slowly, over things and people and every white surface that I’d...

Life is too hard, too much to handle. Nobody told me there’d be days like these. How could nobody tell me there’d be days like these? How could they let me grow up like that—happy...

I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.

That I always had space to run and that I had the opportunity to play with my imagination. I also loved that my mum drew and painted with me. I always remember that my parents...

Most parents try really hard to give their kids the best possible life. They give them the best food and clothes they can afford, take their own kind of take on training kids to be...

Because I used to be six.

Everyone always knows what they’re doing,” he says abruptly, still not looking up from his hands, the little plastic pot and the old tattoo and the new white dressing on his left wrist. “You know...

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...

The only thing that keeps me going, is the desire to get away as far as possible.

His sixth year, it seemed to him, had lasted a remarkably long time and there were points at which he frankly wondered whether he would ever turn seven. But now it was the night before...

It would be inappropiate, undignified, at 38, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour or intensity of a 22 year old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry? Crying at pop songs? Dragging...

I am not collarbones or drunken letters never sent. I am not the way I leave or left or didn’t know how to handle anything,at any time,and I am not your fault.

Life isn’t happily ever after & golden sunsets & shit like that. It’s work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that &...

She had been a teenager once, and she knew that, despite the apparent contradictions, a person’s teenage years lasted well into their fifties.

Growing up, Renaldo and his father had a great relationship. At least until his father went and slept with someone else.

The trouble is I’m not very good at trusting my own instincts. I’ve been wrong before. A lot.””About what? You worry too much, about everything. You’re to hard on yourself.””I was wrong about Rory -“”You...

It must be lovely to be grown up, Marilla, when just being treated as if you were is so nice…Well, anyway, when I grow up, I’m always going to talk to little girls as if...

She had the feeling, the tingling, lingering sense that something or someone life altering was just over the horizon. She had no idea what it was, but she wanted to rush headlong to bring it...

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.

You never could tell when someone would stop growing old in Neverland. For Tik Tok, it had been after wrinkles had walked long deep tracks across his face, but for many people, it was much...

young adult,” and after that you’re a totally different person. Maybe even a less happy person. Maybe even a worse one.

I’ve grown up defined by this desperate, undeniable, ‘can’t breathe’ kind of space inside of myself and I’m afraid that the diagnosis is fatal.

Despite how lonely or broken down you might feel, we need you with us helping to make the world better, kinder and safer, especially for the little girls coming up.

If onlyyou could have witnessed howmuch I have changed: sit alonein a disused theatre and feel whatI have felt, see how the world hastransformed me, like the metamorphosisof a caterpillar.

And then the queen wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into...

nobody tells us as little girls that we may fall in love and have moments of hating our beloved, or have ridiculous arguments at 2 AM over something that neither person understands.

Growing up is made up of a million small moments in time, and one of the most painful is the moment you’re severed from the whole, when you realise that your parent is complicated, and...

When I was young, I used to wish I would fit in… I’m glad I didn’t get my wish.

We’re not the Faster-than-the-Speed-of-Light Generation anymore. We’re not even the Next-New-Thing Generation. We’re the Soon-to-Be-Obsolete Kids, and we’ve crowded in here to hide from the future and the past. We know what’s up – the...

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 I grew up I was fervently desirous of becoming acquainted with Nature.

Stephanie took another puff from her candy cigarette, reached into her purse, brought out the rest of the pack, and said, “Want one of these damned cigarettes?

Maybe I’ve moved to the dark side, but it’s clean and nice and we never run out of toilet paper.

Why wait? So precious is this life—this gift—this temporary blindness. Burn and drown and embrace the false dark, then grasp the unthinkable height of resulting joy. For in the end, in the light of truth...

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.