He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times.

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...

There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don’t lose yourself at happy hour, but don’t lose yourself on the corporate ladder, either.

Recalling his first dreams of flight when he was a small child, Max acknowledged that his entire existence had been building up to this tipping point where he could finally choose to release his self-imposedlimitations.

I wanted her and only her.I wanted to be a part of her storm. I wanted to feel my pulse against hers.I wanted the bitter on her sweet tongue. I wanted the sadness in her...

She logged in and read a few of her old posts, smiling at the issues she had raged about and shaking her head at how some of the rants now seemed pretentious and judgmental. She...

Maybe universal nostalgia doesn’t exist. Maybe each of us carries our own personal version of the better times. It’s at about twnety-two years that we all begin to think of our childhood as the good...

You become a man when, in having children, you not only physically look after and protect them but also protect them with all the love and learning you have to give.

Beyond the boundaries of herself, her parents and the enclosing garden walls, were open fields and other waiting places she still knew nothing of – lies of the land, perhaps. What Katie did know is...

Manhood had come to him, both in character and demeanour, not as it comes to most young lads, an eagerly-desired and presumptuously-asserted claim, but as a rightful inheritance, to be received humbly, and worn simply...

I’m learning persistence and the closing of doors, the way the seasons come and go as I keep walking on these roads, back and forth, to find myself in new time zones, new arms with...

A child isn’t born bitter. I point no fingers as to who tainted the clean, pure pool of my childhood. Let’s just say that when I realized that I didn’t want to grow up, the...

I had a dream about you. I watched you grow up, and though I enjoyed the whole process, it did get pretty uncomfortable sitting in the tree holding those binoculars all those years.

Plans never go as planned, ever; that’s just how life is. People spend way too much time dreaming about a future they should be having more nightmares warning them against. But that doesn’t mean you...

We teach what we need to learn. And we teach it until we get it.

Adults tend to repress their pleasure. Sad to say, I think we become adults only through disappointment, grief, and lies. So of course gradually we become tough, less sensitive.

That was his mother. When she wasn’t crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.

Don’t try to make me grow up before my time…

Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I’ve decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

But I think I’m broken too. I just don’t know it yet.

Let this time in your life cut you open and drain all of the things that are holding you back. I’m going to help you forgive the things that you won’t let yourself forget.

You haunt my days and dreams.

I’m going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always...

Can I have a motorcycle when I get old enough?””If you take care of it.””What do you have to do?””Lot’s of things. You’ve been watching me.””Will you show me all of them?””Sure.””Is it hard?””Not if...

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...

Look forward to the wonderment of growing up, raising a family and driving by the gas station where the popular kids now work.

Well Sarah’s on drugs again and that’s why she did it in Mario’s backseat, but now she might be pregnant, oh, and that messed-up Seth kid’s been cutting himself again so he was sent away...

When we grow up, we find ways to hide our anxieties, our loneliness, our fear and sorrow. But children hide nothing, putting everything into their tears, which they spread liberally about for the whole world...

Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn’t happen. It was all dream stuff. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer?

I think that’s every unresolved person’s dream, to wake up one day and know what they want to do the rest of their life.

Reading all my old love letters was disorienting. You remember thinking the thoughts and writing the words but, man, you can’t TOUCH those feelings. Its like they belonged to someone else. Someone you don’t even...

Like everyone I slipped into adulthood like a delinquent through the back door.

People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn’t want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, “If this were the Middle Ages, you’d be married and...

I am living a simple life with a complicated mind and I have yet to find a state of mind where I feel safe with who I am, where I am, with what I do.

Despite being what would now be called a deprived child in a one parent family, I did not grow up with an urge to smash windows or to bash old ladies over the head in...

The people they had been last summer, the person she had been–Dicey guessed she’d never be afraid again, not the way she had been all summer. She had taken care of them all, sometimes well,...

The Babies we were are buried, and their shadows are plodding on.

It turns out, after a lot of exploration, that I’m not really a princess. A swell gal, sure, but not a princess.

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.

Strangely enough, when you get older the things you didn’t understand when you were a child start to make sense. “When this happened, I should have done that.” “When that happened, I should have said...

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 am convinced that most people do not grow up…We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years...

For so many years, I couldn’t understand why every time I thought that someone finally loved me, like… for real, they would eventually turn to vapor. Every person whom I’ve ever loved is trapped inside...

This is your life – not your parents’, teachers’ or significant other’s. If you ever find yourself on a path that just doesn’t feel safe anymore, you have every right to stop the car, get...

He could pour himself into my little paper cup heart and my emptiness would finally have a meaning.

Growing up is hard, love. Otherwise everyone would do it.

You think everyone will stay behind and do everything you did all over again, forever. You picture old geezers in jean jackets doing whip-its behind the plaza.

He looked, well, sturdier than he used to. His shoulders were square and, naturally, broader than before. His neck, a bit thicker. He probably had an Adam’s apple now too, like any man did. If...

The only pressure I agree to, is my conscious and not peer pressure.

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.