Quotes About Adulthood

Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up

You grew up, became a man, had to adjust to taking less than you hoped for; you discovered the dream-machine had a big OUT OF ORDER sign on it.

There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.

Tell you what, the worst part of growing up is how it shuts you up.

For God's sake, Larry, grow up. Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little spread over all your scruples is an absolute necessity!

What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just playground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn't be, could it? It was too horrible to think about.

Do grown men always have to play games? Does everything have to be an excuse for another kind of game? Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?

Adulthood is accretive by nature, a thing which arrives in ragged stages and uneven overlaps.

If being a grown-up really meant knowing better, why did his father go on smoking three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day and snorting cocaine until his nose bled? If being a grown-up gave you some sort of special knowledge of the right things to do, how come his mother was sleeping with her masseuse, who had huge biceps and no brains?

You know, small children take it as a matter of course that things will change every day and grown-ups understand that things change sooner or later and their job is to keep them from changing as long as possible. It's only kids in high school who are convinced they're never going to change. There's always going to be a pep rally and there's always going to be a spectator bus, somewhere out there in their future.

You could not moralize children out of growing up. Or teach them how to do it.

Has it ever occurred to you, he said abruptly, that parents are nothing but overgrown kids until their children drag them into adulthood? Usually kicking and screaming? I shook my head. Tell you what I think, he said, I think that part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.

I always wondered about growing up. I bet it's mostly lies.

If you remain dependent on your parents all your life, do not carry a wrong pretence that you are even born.

Life is like this roller coaster you can't wait to be tall enough and old enough to get on. But when you get on it you realize you're afraid of roller coasters.

Mockery is childish. It does not become you.

When I was twenty-something, I asked my father, "When did you start feeling like a grownup?" His response: "Never.

Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.

Mumps, measles, and puppy love are terrible after twenty.

I understood what he was doing, that he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd and tedious duty of graduating from college and now he was emancipated from that world of abstraction, false security, parents, and material excess.

When a young person is moved by a passion and feels compelled to go on this sort of quest, I think you have to let him. You can't stop him. In our culture we don't have formal rights of passage like in some ancient cultures. Subjecting yourself to risk... may be something you have to go through to be a man or a woman.

Your children grow into adults, and they leave, and they make a life of their own. It's the way the world turns, he said.

Both humans and dogs love to play well into adulthood, and individuals from both species occasionally display evidence of having a conscience.

I love my parents. But I'm almost 28 and it's not fun to be asked, 'What are you doing today? What do you want for dinner? When are you going to be home?' It just makes you feel like a kid. It's this juxtaposition of feeling annoyed and really lucky to have people who love you so much.