She had the feeling, the tingling, lingering sense that something or someone life altering was just over the horizon. She had no idea what it was, but she wanted to rush headlong to bring it...

So her safe little world would never be safe again… She knew that the nurturing hand also held the knife, and that was very unsettling.

You never could tell when someone would stop growing old in Neverland. For Tik Tok, it had been after wrinkles had walked long deep tracks across his face, but for many people, it was much...

young adult,” and after that you’re a totally different person. Maybe even a less happy person. Maybe even a worse one.

I’ve grown up defined by this desperate, undeniable, ‘can’t breathe’ kind of space inside of myself and I’m afraid that the diagnosis is fatal.

Despite how lonely or broken down you might feel, we need you with us helping to make the world better, kinder and safer, especially for the little girls coming up.

If onlyyou could have witnessed howmuch I have changed: sit alonein a disused theatre and feel whatI have felt, see how the world hastransformed me, like the metamorphosisof a caterpillar.

And then the queen wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into...

nobody tells us as little girls that we may fall in love and have moments of hating our beloved, or have ridiculous arguments at 2 AM over something that neither person understands.

Growing up is made up of a million small moments in time, and one of the most painful is the moment you’re severed from the whole, when you realise that your parent is complicated, and...

When I was young, I used to wish I would fit in… I’m glad I didn’t get my wish.

We’re not the Faster-than-the-Speed-of-Light Generation anymore. We’re not even the Next-New-Thing Generation. We’re the Soon-to-Be-Obsolete Kids, and we’ve crowded in here to hide from the future and the past. We know what’s up – the...

Mamas are always crying about how one day they see you as a baby, and the next morning, they see you growed up.

No, you become a man when you first decide to put away the things of childhood, the talk of childhood, and the thoughts of childhood. You decide because you cannot be treated as both a...

Brushing my little teeth every morning of my childhood, I stood on my tippy toes, leaned over the sink and said to myself that when I am a big girl I will see from this...

When Uncle W. G. held out his hand to take my money, I dropped the dead mouse in his hand.

People keep asking what I do for a living and I keep saying that I don’t believe in making a living. That it’s a concept that has been twisted. I tell them I believe in...

Growing up is such a barbarous business, full of inconvenience… and pimples.

You’ll understand someday, James.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.” Perhaps the death of us all is called for in this time of emotional desperation. War is a product of the mind; only with the death...

Maybe that’s what growing up means, in the end – you go far enough in the direction of – somewhere – and you realise that you’ve neutered the capacity of the term home to mean...

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...