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Growing-up Quotes

When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as ...

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Picture of Aldo Leopold
Aldo LeopoldA Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

His sixth year, it seemed to him, had lasted a remarkably long time and there were points at which h...

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Picture of Alexander McCall Smith
Alexander McCall SmithBertie's Guide to Life and Mothers

How Horrid" has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me as Wildean. It appears to embrace the actu...

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Picture of Alison Bechdel
Alison BechdelFun Home: A Family Tragicomic

For so long I'd thought about myself as a girl who'd walked away from her mother's life that it woul...

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My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like ...

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

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I remember everything,' Bette Midler flatly notes. 'But you know how in life, you tend to hold grudg...

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I used to joke that we had prepared ourselves for a time like this by living with Mother. The proble...

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The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself. I was...

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Growing up is, at heart, the process of learning to take responsibility for whatever happens in your...

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Picture of Bell hooks
Bell hooksAll About Love: New Visions

There is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his u...

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Picture of Bernd Heinrich
Bernd HeinrichThe Homing Instinct: Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration

It wasn't until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly los...

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Picture of Bill Bryson
Bill BrysonI'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away

I don't think I'd have been in such a hurry to reach adulthood if I'd known the whole thing was goin...

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Picture of Bill Watterson
Bill WattersonThe Revenge of the Baby-Sat

It seems only yesterday I used to believethere was nothing under my skin but light.If you cut me I c...

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Picture of Billy Collins
Billy CollinsSailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

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

Just because you're an adult doesn't mean you're grown up. Growing up means being patient, holding y...

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Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

When the most important things in our life happen we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is...

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I don't want to be a man," said Jace. "I want to be an angst-ridden teenager who can't confront his ...

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Growing up happens when you start having things you look back on and wish you could change -Clary Fr...

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I've screwed everything up royally. I remember you saying that growing up happens when you start hav...

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Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician....

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I was a weird little kid. I was very irritable, bored, frustrated. I felt my imagination bubbling in...

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He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it...

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In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure, death will. The...

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Before you know it you'll be my age telling your own granddaughter the story of your life and you wa...

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Hand, nobody told me about the weight. Why didn't our parents tell us about the weight?—What weight?...

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Picture of Dave Eggers
Dave EggersYou Shall Know Our Velocity!

Everyone was doing that in their own way, rejecting things and moving on. It's just a part of discov...

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To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless...

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Judith Rey watches the young woman. Once upon a time, I had a baby daughter. I dressed her in frilly...

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Oh! Polly thought. Why aren't all girls locked up by law the year they turn fifteen? They do such st...

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What I feel now doesn't matter at all? But at what point am I entitled to say to myself, what I am f...

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Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't (...) Imagine you came from outer space ...

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Or maybe memories are like karaoke - where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawl...

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It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized you could buy a packet of cereal with a free gift and...

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Picture of Eddie Izzard
Eddie IzzardBelieve Me: A Memoir of Love

the much-sought prize of eternal youthIs just arrested growth.

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

How did I get to be a grown-up? At times, I find myself still sitting on the hillside, plotting reve...

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Picture of Erica Jong
Erica JongFear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir

Young women dream of romance and passion as men dream of conquest because those dreams are necessary...

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Picture of Erica Jong
Erica JongFear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir

Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the pen...

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Don't you find it odd," she continued, "that when you're a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages ...

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The child who refuses to travel in the father's harness, this is the symbol of man's most unique cap...

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I ran a constant low fever waiting for my ride to come and take me away to something finer. I lay in...

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They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed ...

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It is said with truth that every building is constructed stone by stone, and the same may be said of...

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She tried so hard to be brave, to be fierce as a wolverine and all, but sometimes she felt like she ...

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It’s hard to have done all one’s growing up since 33 — but that’s a damn sight better than not growi...

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Picture of H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. LovecraftSelected Letters V: 1934-1937

Maybe you never stop feeling like an eight-year-old in front of your parents. You resolve to be your...

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Picture of Hanif Kureishi
Hanif KureishiThe Buddha of Suburbia

Your "scared" and my "scared" are two different things.''What's that supposed to mean?' she asked.'A...

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Picture of Haruki Murakami
Haruki MurakamiHard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

I don't know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I'm pessimistic, then the ad...

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For me- and for everybody else, probably- this is my first experience growing old, and the emotions ...

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Picture of Haruki Murakami
Haruki MurakamiWhat I Talk About When I Talk About Running

The way surviving hard winters makes a tree grows stronger, the growth rings inside it tighter

It took me ages to grow into being a woman, into being happy with it.

From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, disciplin...

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We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday...

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Picture of Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. ThompsonThe Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman

Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand th...

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

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People always think something's all true. I don't give a damn, except that I get bored when people t...

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Picture of J. D. Salinger
J. D. SalingerThe Catcher in the Rye

As for the fact that Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle apeared to be going their different ways when they we...

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Picture of J. K. Rowling
J. K. RowlingHarry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

How awful it was, thought Tessa, remembering Fats the toddler, the way tiny ghosts of your living ch...

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Children are meant to grow up, and not to become Peter Pans. Not to lose innocence and wonder, but t...

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...that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I ...

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He had a third martini. He looked at me intently and took hold of my arm. 'Look', he said. 'You're a...

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Picture of Jack Kerouac
Jack KerouacAnd the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

Growth is life, and life is for ever destined to make for light.

I was eleven, the idea of two identical digits in my age still new and spectacular and heartbreaking...

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I went back to my cabin and lay down on my berth. Everything trembled as if it had a spring at its v...

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I began to feel alternately too big and too small. First, I grew so big that I took up the whole str...

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A dim antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty: ...

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Picture of James Joyce
James JoyceA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

As life runs on, the road grows strange With faces new, and near the end The milestones into headsto...

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In his grief over the loss of a dog, a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into ...

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I was happy, but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They...

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You are young," said my father. "You won't get any younger even if you clean your teeth twice a day....

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Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to...

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Picture of Jeanette Winterson
Jeanette WintersonWhy Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

In my youth, the question chiefly important to me was—What sort of man shall I decide to be? At nine...

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Picture of Jerome K. Jerome
Jerome K. JeromeSecond Thoughts Of An Idle Fellow

My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to g...

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Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you're young. But I don't think we make any fewer when we're ...

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but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst...

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I wonder if all mothers feel like this the moment they realize their daughters are growing up- as if...

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

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I wonder if all mothers feel like this the moment they realize their daughters are growing up—as if ...

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But kids don't stay where they're supposed to. You turn around and find her not in the bedroom but h...

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It's about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone.. A girl who may not know what she wants ri...

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Picture of Jodi Picoult
Jodi PicoultMy Sister's Keeper

I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them....

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Part of growing up was learning not to be quite that honest - learning when it was better to lie, ra...

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Picture of Jodi Picoult
Jodi PicoultNineteen Minutes

At seventeen, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take...

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I know it’s impossible for you to see peers this way, but when you’re older, you start to see them—t...

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I kept thinking there were two kinds of adults: There were...miserable creatures who scoured the ear...

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I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.

Picture of John Green (author)
John Green (author)Turtles All the Way Down

Such is life. We grow up. Planets like Tiny get new moons. Moons like me get new planets.

In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentou...

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Picture of John Irving
John IrvingUntil I Find You

As I grew up I was fervently desirous of becoming acquainted with Nature.

And if I sit in that room at the top of the house and I think about my life and if I shut my eyes fr...

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When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults ...

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As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that t...

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When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog foll...

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I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one mo...

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I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it somethin...

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Picture of Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran FoerExtremely Loud and Incredibly Close

The invention of the teenager was a mistake. Once you identify a period of life in which people get ...

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Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most fea...

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