Quotes About Adulthood

I have this sense that I didn't really start growing up until my twenties.

You've got to grow up sometime.

A grownup is a child with layers on.

No deberíamos haber crecido. Si hubiéramos sabido que ser un adulto es tan aburrido, habríamos jugado mucho más de pequeñas.

I can't believe it's actually happening. This is independent adulthood, this is what it feels like. Shouldn't there be some sort of ritual? In certain remote African tribes there'd be some incredible four day rites of passage ceremony involving tattooing and potent hallucinogenic drugs extracted from tree-frogs, and village elders smearing my body with monkey blood, but here,rites of passage is all about three new pairs of pants and stuffing your duvet in a bin-liner.

Who do you think you are, Jane Eyre? Grow up. Be sensible. Don't get carried away.

At some point you'll have to get serious about life.

She didn't feel like an adult. She was in no way prepared. It was as if a fire alarm had gone off in the middle of the night and she was standing on the street with her clothes bundled up in her arms.

This is the great paradox of defense mechanisms: they protect us from crushing anxiety during our childhoods, but then become an integral part of our personality that often damages us in adulthood.

The same phenomenon can be observed when young adults with underformed personalities who join cults and fringe groups. These groups attract hordes of "adults" who never had the type of early care that resulted in a solid identity, and they eagerly give up what little personality structure they have and allow the cult to dominate their life.

The loss for all adults who remain loyal to ungiving parents is the loss of time. Living with the attitudes and identity of a child in an adult body is a guaranteed way of wasting time that could be used toward developing a more mature and satisfying way of life. The lost time is simply that—lost—and every passing year reduces the probability that the adult child who remains attached to failed parents will be able to emerge into adulthood.

He succeeded in staying out of exactly and only those forms of postadolescent trouble that were not winked at, sating himself with those that were.

Mourning the passing of their youth made them jealous of young people and resentful of all the things young people do. Consequently, she and other old people inclined to remember themselves in childhood not as children but as miniature adults and their parents as patron saints of irreproachable stature. They did not recollect ever stepping outside the margins and viewed willfulness in modern children as a sign of emerging pathology.

Then we become more adult, because we are fulfilling the inner urge that all humans were born with: to go on a heroic journey, to move on rather than stay stuck. Where we are is not our fate. It is where we can best begin the journey.

As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts.

If we don't resolve the key issues at each stage, we may get stuck and be considered immature by our peers.

grown women don't make mistakes; they make decisions!

College is the best time of your life. When else are your parents going to spend several thousand dollars a year just for you to go to a strange town and get drunk every night?

I am an adult person who is not answerable to children.

What's bosoms?" Cade asked."You'll find out when you get older, " Jake said."A lot older, " Colt said.

They don't want to be grown-ups. They're so rich they don't think they have to get old. They lived down here when they were twenty-three and they want to relive their bohemian days, except not crammed into a tiny apartment with roommates who never flush the toilet. I didn't have bohemian days. I worked.

Yet GenX'er teens didn't slow down--they were just as likely to drive, drink alcohol, and date as their Boomer peers and more likely to have sex and get pregnant as teens. But then they waited longer to reach full adulthood with careers and children. So GenX'ers managed to lengthen adolescence beyond all previous limits: they started becoming adults earlier and finished becoming adults later.

Adolescence--the time when teens begin to do things adults do--now happens later. Thirteen-year-olds--and even 18-year-olds-- are less likely to act like adults and spend their time like adults. They are more likely, instead, to act like children--not by being immature, necessarily, but by postponing the usual activities of adults. Adolescence is now an extension of childhood rather than the beginning of adulthood.

technology means there is more to learn before becoming a productive adult. With the economy shifting away from agriculture and toward knowledge-based jobs, more education becomes necessary. As a result, it takes longer to grow to adulthood—you can no longer start working full-time at 12, as my grandfather did, and have all the skills you need. Instead, it takes until 18, 22, or longer to finish education and begin full-time work, one measure of reaching adulthood.