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.

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

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!

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...

It wasn’t until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison...

I don’t want to be a man,” said Jace. “I want to be an angst-ridden teenager who can’t confront his own inner demons and takes it out verbally on other people instead.””Well,” said Luke, “you’re...

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day-A sunny day with the leaves just turning,The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you playYour first game of fotball, then, like a satelliteWrenched from its orbit,...

It was only high school after all, definitely one of the most bizarre periods in a person’s life. How anyone can come through that time well adjusted on any level is an absolute miracle.

So many people will tell you ”no”, and you need to find something you believe in so hard that you just smile and tell them ”watch me”. Learn to take rejection as motivation to prove...

I am not a broken heart. 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...

It’s about growing up and that’s one of the areas where I have to grow up in. I worked hard this summer on all of my abilities and that’s one of them. I’m going to...

We live through evolution ourselves, each of us, progressing through different apprehensions of the world, at each age forgetting the last age, every previous mind erased. We no longer see the same world at all.

Since being back in London everything seemed greyer, but clearer. She couldn’t explain it. The strangest thing was she couldn’t recall her New York self. She wanted that part of herself back, but she couldn’t...

She told herself that she longed greatly to go back to those dear merry days when life was seen through a rosy mist of hope and illusion, and possessed an indefinable something that had passed...

This is where the pivotal events of my childhood unfolded, while I ate banana and root beer Popsicles, two by two, tucking the sticks neatly under the skirt of the chair. It’s where Sunnybank Lad...

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...