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...

A self-made man” – not of woman born but alchemized, through sheer force of will, by the man himself. This is what I want to be. I want to be a self-made woman. I want...

I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility.

The Girl was gone, buried in the past. She never wanted to hear that name again. She was a woman for better for worse. Whatever the future might bring she could face it as a...

You can get what you want or you can just get old.

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...

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.

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...

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.

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...