He left that morning, the last words still echoing in my head, and though he said he’d come back one day I know a broken promise from a right one for I have used them...

I’m seventeen today and dressed for a party. But I can’t move. I can’t think, much less move. I can’t breathe, much less think. This is the moment when my life will change forever.

Or maybe memories are like karaoke – where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen’s bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn’t even know the...

From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the...

I think it is a part of growing up, learning to control our suffering.

I realize now, I was learning how to walk as well. I haven’t mastered the steps, I fall too. But im on my path, my path… and one day that path… will take me to...

In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us — not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.

Thoughts are such fleet magic things. Betsy’s thoughts swept a wide arc while Uncle Keith read her poem aloud. She thought of Julia learning to sing with Mrs. Poppy. She thought of Tib learning to...

That’s the thing about being youngwe are textbook pagesof trial and errorfalling down and getting upnot by way of standing andbrushing off our jeansbuy by laying where we felluntil we were high enough to forget

This is the first fall that I haven’t gone to school. Maybe that’s why I feel weird all the time.

I know that this process of ‘me changing my life’ doesn’t just end once I set fire to this list of things I hate about myself. Tonight isn’t as much of a new beginning as...

As girls, we will do anything for the person whom we love. We will scale buildings in the rain or run through fire if it means saving our love’s life. There is absolutely nothing more...

Both my parents love jazz, and while growing up they took me to hear it live all the time, which cemented my interest in it,

It was strange walking through the empty apartment. My battered purple room was gone, Brittany’s bruised blue was gone. Two coats covered everything. It was like none of it had ever happened.

In my experience, when a woman’s cruelty is combined with love and devotion, it is almost always without exception an act performed not out of treachery, but as a painful self-sacrifice for the good of...

All You Need Is Love” in homage to their memory.

But hard as it is. It can’t be stopped. Can’t be sidestepped. No matter how much we want to or how fearful the future looks, we can’t stay frozen in place. You can go forward...

Maybe it’s just getting older. You become so palpably aware this is not a dress rehearsal. There’s a big sign in blazing neon that says You Haven’t Got Long. But I think it takes a...

My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not...

Being at home was like a mattress to fall back on with the smallest of peas on the bottom, just large enough to bother the princess. I was damn lucky that I had a place...

He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.

Did you never wonder why the old books are so full of dragons chasing after maidens? The serpents think the girls are orphans, and long to get them away in a lair so that they...

We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole...

Take a shower, wash off the day. Drink a glass of water. Make the room dark. Lie down and close your eyes.Notice the silence. Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting. You made it, after...

Why can’t a girl just want to know stuff and not do stuff?

Home was not the place where you were born but the place you created yourself, where you did not need to explain, where you finally became what you were.

I’m reminded of all the Firestone commercials we saw when we were growing up, ‘Firestone tires, where the rubber meets the road.’ Obviously they met the road a little too much, … What really makes...

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

I don’t want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I’ll be in...

If I could have all of those things, I wouldn’t mind if I touched her or not.

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.

but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst. So how do you tell an adult that maybe everything wrong in the world stems...

Isn’t that the tragedy of growing up though? One day you wake up and realize that everything you are and everything you feel is not much different from what everyone else feels.

Being a Dream Girl is never going to be about what you look like or how much you weigh. After all, our physical appearances are just reflections of our inner worlds. What makes you a...

That last time you kissed me my heart slid past your teeth down into the center of your chest… trapping us both in a stainless cage.

Q: I want to be an author when I grow up. Am I insane?”Neil Gaiman: “Yes. Growing up is highly overrated. Just be an author.”[Jumbo.com, 21 August 2012]

Without you there would be no me. I am everything reflected in your eyes. I am everything approved by your smile. I am everything born of your guidance. I am me only because of you.

Roseanne, Roseanne, if I called to you now, my own self calling to my own self, would you hear me? And if you could hear me, would you heed me?

It was too late. Maybe yesterday, while I was still a child, but not now. I knew too much, had seen too much, I was a child no longer now; innocence and childhood were forever...

Why is a caterpillar wrapped in silk while it changes into a butterfly? So the other caterpillars can’t hear the screams. Change hurts

The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, Slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized.

The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself. I was a child then, I had no idea what the world would be like. I wished to...

Experience is like evidence. When you’re young and don’t have much experience yet, you don’t have much basis for confidence. All you really have is hope, and that can get shaken pretty easily. But as...

And the One will take the Sword of the Western Sun and triumph over the enemy with boldness and insight. The arm of the One is steady and heads will roll. Snow Giants will battle

Most of our parents wanted the best for us, I knew, but we also wanted the best for them.

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.