Quotes About Adulthood

How much of life is like this? Mark wondered. Is that what being grown-up means? Saying goodbye as often as hello?

How do you become an adult in a society that doesn't ask for sacrifice? How do you become a man in a world that doesn't require courage?

If a twenty-year-old is frightened of stoves in the same way he was as a two-year-old, we have a problem.

Women do not decide at some time in adulthood that they would like other people to understand them to be women, because being a woman is not an 'identity'. Women's experience does not resemble that of men who adopt the 'gender identity' of being female or being women in any respect. The idea of 'gender identity' disappears biology and all the experiences that those with female biology have of being reared in a caste system based on sex.

I needed to grow up and do things all adults do. It was time to stop having everything spoon fed to me. It was about being independent.

I used to be a child. It came naturally to me. I was an adult for a time, too. That came less naturally.

How does anybody change from the time that they're 18 till they're 25? Everything kind of changes. You see the world much differently, and you get your priorities in order a little bit more.

I'm trying not to be a kid all the time, but it's hard.

It can take a long time for some people to find out how to ground themselves, and film sets are an odd atmosphere to do it in - especially if, like me, you finished school early.

My mom was a terrible parent of young children. And thank God - I thank God every time I think of it - I was sent to my paternal grandmother. Ah, but my mother was a great parent of a young adult.

I may be a little like the grown-ups. I must have grown old.

A life-long blessing for children is to fill them with warm memories of times together. Happy memories become treasures in the heart to pull out on the tough days of adulthood.

Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor. With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats. I didn't choose them, I don't fault them, but it took time to reject them. Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness.

But honestly, isn't that adulthood in a summary? Constant feelings of pure, overwhelming dread?

For the first thirty-something years of my life, I never once asked my dad if he was OK . . . and now I've done it twice in one week. I wonder if this is just the way it is. Are all our parents, collectively, fucked up? Have they always been fucked up, and it just takes us until our own adulthood to figure that out?

it doesn't feel like home—more like a strange, wildly expensive sleepaway camp for pseudoadults.

Are all our parents, collectively, fucked up? Have they always been fucked up, and it just takes us until our own adulthood to figure that out?

We're growing up, Betsy said aloud. She wasn't even sure she liked it. But it happened, and then it was irrevocable. There was nothing you could do about it except to try and see that you grew up into the kind of human being you wanted to be. I'd like to be a fine one, Betsy thought quickly and urgently.

We're growing up and I don't like it, said Tacy, as they say at Heinz's later, drinking coffee.

We're growing up, Betsy said aloud. She wasn't even sure she liked it. But it happened, and then it wasn't irrevocable. There was nothing you could do about it except try and see that you grew up into the kind of human being you wanted to be. I'd like to be a fine one, Betsy thought quickly and urgently.

She had always thought applying to college would be exciting. Living away from home, meeting so many new people, Learning new things, making a few poor life desicisons....

There's nobody to guide through the process of becoming a man... to explain to them the meaning of manhood. And that's a recipe for disaster.

I spent the first few months of graduate school pretending to be a student of theoretical physics. This required no great acting skill beyond the effort to appear unperturbed in the face of the inexplicable, which is as far as I can see one of the central tasks of adulthood.

mostly I saw her efforts to induct me into adulthood much as a calf might see its mother's explanations of veal: I was being recruited into the great death march of biology—be born, reproduce, die.