I was running and deliberately lost my way. The world far off and nothing but my breath and the very next step and it’s like hypnosis. The feeling of conquering my own aliveness with no...

I think I’m learningthat sometimes the bravest thing is not to face the world,but to turn away from it.

To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood’s limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood’s end.

Camus-boy, you’re always going to be the same you, just older. It’s not like there’s a moment when you wake up and go, Shit, I’m grown-up, I don’t feel like myself anymore.’ I don’t tell...

lost girls.

It was all beginning to run together in the back of Eleanor’s mind, and the things that had probably really happened were confused with the things that probably hadn’t. And every day everything in her...

When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great...

I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can’t bake any more bread.You never bake bread, he wrote,...

We all have days when we say that we are gown-ups, that we are mature, have a lot of experience and don’t need advise from others.But it is our mom and dad we turn to...

Most of us won’t see one another after graduation, and even if we do it will be different. We’ll be different. We’ll be adults–cured, tagged and labeled and paired and identified and placed neatly on...

Does our purpose on Earth directly link to the people whom we end up meeting? Are our relationships and experiences actually the required dots that connect and then lead us to our ultimate destinies?

I never want a girl to lose all hope that her life can’t completely turn around, even if she feels that she is at the edge, standing on one foot, and ready to say goodbye.

I feel like a paper cut just waiting to bleed.

I ought to grow up successfully, and I’m sure it will be my own fault if I don’t. I feel it’s a great responsibility because I have only one chance. If I don’t grow up...

as kids we counted on our fingers, as we grew up we started counting more on people, now what do you think was more disappointing?

Magda looks at me as if I’ve gone mad. Or I’ve grown up. It’s kind of the same thing.

Growing up is the greatest adventure of all.

Sometimes, when you were thinking about something, trying to understand it, it opened up in your head without you expecting it to, like it was a soft spongy light unfolding, and you understood, it made...

I reckon responsible behavior is something to get when you grow older. Like varicose veins.

As it turned out, almost every notion I had on my 13th birthday about my future turned out to be a total waste of my time. When I thought of myself as an adult, all...

I’ve screwed everything up royally. I remember you saying that growing up happens when you start having things you look back on and wish you could change.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

I think people make their own faces, as they grow.

… because one day, maybe one day, if I learned how to write clear enough, sing loud enough, be strong enough, I could explain myself in a way that made sense and then maybe one...

Don’t forget to speak scornfully of the Victorian Age; there will be time for meekness when you try to better it. Very soon you will be Victorian or that sort of thing yourselves; next session...

Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don’t (…) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two...

I am what you made me, Father.

Witty sayings don’t grow on bumpers the way babies do. I was raised by a single rush hour.

I kept thinking there were two kinds of adults: There were…miserable creatures who scoured the earth in search of something to hurt. And then there were people like my parents, who walked around zombically, doing...

Maturity is when your world opens up and you realize that you are not the center of it.

They soon stopped being ten years old. But whatever age they were seemed to be exactly the right age for having fun.

İnsan bir zaman gelince galiba herkesin yaptıklarını yapıyor ve kendisinin çok da farklı olmadığını anlıyor. Herhalde büyümek böyle bir şey.

Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.

I love him in ways that I can’t explain to other people. They don’t understand… it’s not their fault.

I tried to push my body through his and completely disappear.

Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished.

How do we deal with all the people we’ve been? What happens when we have to confront them?

In the boundaryless forests, there’re dancers of nude.Yet in the confines of pasture, there’s promise of food.On which is your side?Ô, but tarry and bide,ere you decide,in both do confide.

Margaux was older and wiser now and knew the waves couldn’t fix what was wrong in her life, but at least they might give her some temporary respite.

Stop using him, and start protecting him. I know he thinks he doesn’t need it, but sometimes he does. Sometimes we all do.

We were still at the age when girls are years older than guy, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to.

Feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up.

I remember everything,’ Bette Midler flatly notes. ‘But you know how in life, you tend to hold grudges? Well, I don’t do that any more. Bad, bad stuff. I did as a young person, but...

What happened before the attack. I think you saw the future. Which is kind of freaky when – two months ago – you didn’t think you were going to have one.

A dragon looks like a girl when it is young.

Don’t you find it odd,” she continued, “that when you’re a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you’re older, somehow they act offended if you even try.

Living in this skin is hard and painful, most of the times, because I never volunteered to take this on. The daily sacrifice of heart over mind,the forever ongoing task of explaining this and that,and...

One can only hope that our horizons widen as we grow taller.

In his grief over the loss of a dog, a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood. After this most inconsolable of sorrows there is nothing...

I did not see Pirahã teenagers moping, sleeping in late, refusing to accept responsibility for their own actions, or trying out what they considered to be radically new approaches to life. They in fact are...