Quotes About Adulthood

Not having yet passed through those bitter experiences which enforce upon older years circumspection and coldness, I deprived myself of the pure delight of a fresh, childish instinct for the absurd purpose of trying to resemble grown-up people.

If we fail to provide boys with pro-social models of the transition to adulthood, they may construct their own. In some cases, gang initiation rituals, street racing, and random violence may be the result.

The question of morality and conscience, a hallmark of creativity, enters with the sense of injustice that the orphaned child feels and continues to feel into adulthood," and eventually develops into "a thirst for identity, a need to imprint oneself on the world."3

The problem with growing up is that once you're grown up, the people who aren't grown up aren't fun anymore.

When he graduated he'd thought life was going to be like a novel, starring him on his own personal hero's journey, and that the world would provide him with an endless series of evils to triumph over and life lessons to learn. It took him a while to figure out that wasn't how it worked.

Wishes are for children," Jane Chatwin said. "I grew up.

It made Kate wonder how such a lazy, irresponsible person could've gotten his hands on all that money, but adults never explained contradictions like that. They only ever changed the subject.

You deal with it, and you get on with your life. "Little children don't know that. Magical thinking: that's what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded.

The problem with growing up," Quentin said, "is that once you're grown up, people who aren't grown up aren't fun anymore.

to live out childhood fantasies as a grown-up was to court and wed and bed disaster

The problem with growing up," Quentin said, "is that once you're grown up, people who aren't grown up aren't fun anymore." "We

A boy becomes an adult three years before his parents think he does, and about two years after he thinks he does.

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.

It is the stupidest children who are the most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are the most grown-up.

By the time I received my doctorate in American studies in 1957, I was in the twisted grip of a disease of our times in which the sufferer experiences an overwhelming urge to join the 'real world.' So I started working for newspapers.

We have magnificent brains, but we use a great deal of our brilliance to keep ourselves stuck and ignorant, to keep ourselves from not shining. We are so afraid of our beauty and radiance and brilliance because it scared the adults around us when we were children.

My 20s were a completely and utterly different time in my life.

I wasn't into going to college for four years and that whole dorm thing. I had such an aversion to it. It's an extended vacation, isn't it?

I don't consider Los Angeles home anymore; ultimately, it was pretty negative, but I did spend my formative years in the Valley and all around L.A. proper. Through my teenage years and into my young adulthood, up until the age of 30, I spent a good amount of time there.

I moved to San Francisco when I was 20 years old. I couldn't even drink yet. My friends in college thought I was so stupid for missing out on the four best years of my life. But I was so ready to start living my own life and absorb Silicon Valley culture.

MICHAEL DOUGLAS SENT me a strip-o-gram for my birthday. The editors crowded into my office to cheer on the uncomfortable moment. I was thirty-six and by any measure an adult, with a wife, a career, and responsibilities

So many land mines in this new territory called adulthood. Talent has a window. Freedom sometimes becomes a trap. We may die before we finish our dreams. Acutally, that we die is a pretty big surprise by itself. We can't spend innocence without accounting. Relationships are contracts. We partner not just for love but because we become too weak to make it alone.

our cognitive abilities as adults are heavily influenced by the social environment that we experienced during childhood, making it hard to discern any influence of preexisting genetic differences.

When you're a kid and a teen, you're not in control of your circumstances. But the beautiful thing about growing up is that you get to create your own reality and your own family. That family might be a group of tight-knit friends, that family might be a spouse and children of your own. But ultimately, your childhood realities do not have to perpetuate themselves into adulthood, not if you don't let them. It for sure takes work.