Quotes About Adulthood

As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy, and for some of us that world of make-believe continues into adulthood.

Years later, a Columbia business school dean, citing a university study, told me that the single most important predictor of a happy life in adulthood was having a paying job as a teenager. All

Life asks us to make measurable progress in reasonable time. That's why they make those fourth-grade chairs so small–so you won't fit in them at age 25.

sometimes a kid has to act older than they are

Life is meant to form us in independence, usher us into an adulthood that begins in apprenticeship and ends in mastery, and then, those tasks accomplished, to bring us to the acme of integrity, of wisdom, of eldership in the community of the world. It is a process of ripening as we go, getting stronger, getting more caring, becoming more procreative, sharing more wisdom as we grow—so that those who come after us can walk a clearer path.

Adulting was bullshit.

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

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

Would it help if I said I was very drunk? Brachio shook his head. - We all were. -Shitty childhood? -Mummy used to leave me in a cupboard. -Shitty adulthood? -Whose isn't?

We're all like children, Rikke. The older you get, the more you realise the grown-ups won't suddenly walk in and set things right. You want things right, you have to put 'em right yourself.

Maturity is the ability to do a job whether or not you are supervised, to carry money without spending it and to bear an injustice without wanting to get even.

There's no use asking Mom and Dad to talk to Nana about her punishment. They won't stand up to her. They never do. This is why I decide I am not going to speak to Nana or Papa or my parents. What Leila and I did was wrong. But now I have been put in the middle of something else entirely. Something about Adam and the adults and things that happened before I was born, maybe even before Adam and Uncle Hayden and Mom were born. ~pgs 144-145; Hattie on adulthood

I'd never seen that kind of love in person. My parents loved each other, but badly, and they were miserable. So were all the other couples in my neighborhood. Have you ever actually seen that kind of love?" William shook his head. He had married out of fear, because he didn't think he was capable of steering himself into adulthood. He'd needed Julia to be his parent more than his

She's that magic, shimmering age—he guesses 27—when a woman has one foot in youth and one in adulthood.

ringing all the bells of adulthood.

Children are the only people who can see adults from inside their lives, permitted to observe every small thing, as if their forming minds are incapable of judging what they see, or as if it does not lodge there, somewhere, permanently,

It's funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools - friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty - and said 'do the best you can with these, they will have to do'. And mostly, against all odds, they do.

Kids can handle a lot more than you think they can. It's when they get to be grown up that you have to start worrying.

Hazel understood. Being grown up meant doing what grown-ups wanted you to do. it meant sacrificing your imagination for rules. It meant sitting quietly in you chair while your best friend is helicoptered off for emergency eye surgery. It meant letting people say whatever they wanted to you.

Part of being grown up is acting the way you're supposed to act, even if you don't feel like it. Can you be grown up for me?

They're not going far. You wait and see. Ten years from now they'll still be hanging around with their dirty laundry, looking for a hot meal. Kids these days don't really grow up. Have you noticed, Nash? They don't worry about the future. But surprise, the future's here, isn't it? It's all so goddamned different. We grew up so fast. We had to

want to, you say it's not a good idea." She shook her head. Grown-

Acting like an adult and being professional on set and getting my work done has just been a lifestyle for me. It's not something I have to try hard to do, necessarily.

About the time I turned 50, I experienced the profound biological change that often accompanies women at that age. Also, I put two kids in college and lost both of my parents, so I'm no longer somebody's daughter.