How Horrid” has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me as Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror–puberty, public disgrace–then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing.

I felt for the first time, maybe ever, how much harder it was to be the adults. And I wasn’t sure I could do that when it was my turn.

I didn’t begin life hating my grandmother. Like every child, I adored her. Until I formed a brain and got to know her.

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.

All I wanted was my art and the chance to be the creator of my own world, my own reality.

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

We’re from two opposite backgrounds, but whatever’s inside of him, from his core growing up, there’s a quality I like in that he enjoys the game still as a kid. I think that’s important at...

Being the only black player on my team growing up, I dreamt just like everybody else to be in the NHL, … When I would say it, some other kids — not trying to be...

We’re about to hit that age when we’ll be too exhausted to maintain friendships, and the days of hanging out will be long behind us.

But, really, are there any guys out there who aren’t jerks? I don’t even know any grown-up men who aren’t jerks.

You’ll have lots of questions to answer as you get older. Who you are. Who you want to be. What you think about things. Like politics. And romances. And whether you’ll be able to speak...

In a way, losing hope and losing importance are the same thing. It is that youthful vibrance, that eternal longing and believing, that makes youth so important–if you grow old and lose that without finding...

The things you let go will someday teach you how to fly.

I could watch him do this until morning — never asking questions and never interrupting his work. I worship quietly — his intense focus and attention to detail and then, out of no where, I...

Love is my drug of choice, even if it comes laced with pain and disaster.

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...

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...

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...

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.