Quotes About Adults

Novels are make-believe and play for adults.

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

But there is no obvious reason for holding that some normal adults are entitled to make choices for other normal adults, as paternalists of both left and right believe.

For children love is a feeling; for adults, it is a decision. Children wait to learn if their love is true by seeing how long it lasts; adults make their love true by never wavering from their commitment.

Ender understood more than she said. Manipulation of gravity was one thing; deception by the officers was another; but the most important message was this: the adults are the enemy, not the other armies. They do not tell us the truth.

It was funny. The adults taking all this so seriously, and the children playing along, playing along, believing it too until suddenly the adults went too far, tried too hard, and the children could see through their game.

Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves.

Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves. And

It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn't hurt a bit. But since adults always said it when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.

marriage is not a covenant between a man and a woman... Marriage is a covenant between a man and woman on the one side and their community on the other. To marry according to the law of the community is to become a full citizen; to refuse marriage is to be a stranger, a child, an outlaw, a slave, or a traitor. The one constant in every society of human kind is that only those who obey the laws, tabus, and customs of marriage are true adults.

Bingwen didn't argue. What good would it do? When adults became defiant in public, no amount of evidence, however irrefutable, would make them change their minds.

When adults became defiant in public, no amount of evidence, however irrefutable, would make them change their minds.

Children couldn't stomach the truth, adults believed. Children had to be protected from the harsh realities of the world.

Perché gli adulti credevano che i bambini sopportassero meglio i misteri che la verità? Non sapevano quali storie terribili ci si andava a inventare, alle volte, per tentare di capire ciò che i grandi nascondevano?

But then, said Caliburn, the adults are making such an almighty mess of things maybe we have to put our faith in the children, crazy and unrealistic and reckless though they are...

I think adults forget just how much faith teenagers can have in them, just how willing to believe that adults, by virtue of being adults, know absolute truths, or that absolute truths are even knowable.

Psychology: "Sympathy the human species universally craves. The child eagerly displays his injury; or even inflicts a cut or bruise in order to reap abundant sympathy. For the same purpose adults … show their bruises, relate their accidents, illness, especially details of surgical operations. 'Self-pity' for misfortunes real or imaginary is, in some measure, practically a universal practice.

They would catch her. They would make sure she was all right. That's what grown-ups did. They looked after you. They—

Children and adults are alike--it's not as if we ever outgrow our darker fears. Let's not pretend we're all so reluctant to entertain the unknown.

Misunderstandings are fine and many of the novels we read start out that way, but misinterpretations between adults are easily discussed and cleared up.

For most of us, our language changes under different circumstances. We talked differently in formal situations them with family and friends. We called this form of language doggerel.Think about this: with adults we usually use ten to eleven words per sentence, but with dogs it's four.

Since one cannot educate adults, the word "education" has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretense of education, when the real purpose is coercion without the use of force.

Children laugh an average of three hundred or more times a day; adults laugh an average of five times a day. We have a lot of catching up to do.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized. —Margaret Atwood