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Quotes About Adulthood

People say you're born innocent, but it's not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can't wash off. ... We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent.
~ Hugo Hamilton
becoming a grown-up did not mean good things were waiting for you.
~ Hwang Sok-yong
Plus. the feeling of sudden adulthood that came with getting drunk wasn't bad either.
~ Hwang Sok-yong
He would never forget the feeling of that first year, the sense of freedom just being on his own gave him. He had his own room for the first time, his own money to spend as he wanted, his own food to buy and places to go and decisions to make; it was glorious, sublime.
~ Iain Banks
Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.
~ Ian Mcewan
He was making one of the advances typical of early adulthood: the discovery that there were new values by which he preferred to be judged.
~ Ian Mcewan
Childhoods shine through adult skin, helpfully or not.
~ Ian Mcewan
tooled cowboy boots, engraved hip flask and, in recognition of his new passion for geology, a nineteenth-century explorer's specimen hammer in a leather case. To bless his second adolescence on turning fifty, a trumpet that had once belonged to Guy Barker. These offerings represented only a fraction of the happiness she urged on him, and sex was only one part of that fraction, and only latterly a failure, elevated by him into a mighty injustice.
~ Ian Mcewan
That naked childlike surrender, before she rose to assume an adult's armour, seemed first thing this morning like a essential from which she was banished.
~ Ian Mcewan
Israel had always thought that growing up was simply something that happened to you: you grew taller, more dextrous, you acquired language, learned to feed yourself, developed intellectually, went to school, got a mortgage, had children, got fatter and tired and full of regrets, and that was it, you were grown up, you were an adult. There was more to it than that though, apparently - and it was something that women knew, and men did not.
~ Ian Sansom
Do you know what separates adults from children? Self-discipline. We don't want to go to work, we don't want to do our chores, and we don't want to make unpleasant decisions, but we do all those things because we're aware of the consequences which will follow if we don't.
~ Ilona Andrews
Do you know what separates adults from children? Self-discipline. We don't want to go to work, we don't want to do our chores, and we don't want to make unpleasant decisions, but we do all those things because we're aware of the consequences which will follow if we don't.
~ Ilona Andrews
In our culture, I think that there is no markers anymore. Young men don't really have something that says you're a grown up now, until you have a baby.
~ Antoine Fuqua
Young people should ponder over problems that might confront them and be prepared to cope with them in a way that their parents, their leaders, and their Heavenly Father would have them cope, that they might keep themselves clean and pure.
~ Joseph B. Wirthlin
Americans need to call on Boomers, in their next act onstage, to behave like grown-ups. And there is no better way for them to do this than to guide young people to lives of greater meaning, effectiveness, and purpose.
~ Eric Liu
When I was young, I lived like an old woman, and when I got old, I had to live like a young person.
~ Diane von Furstenberg
To be told that one can be dependent on one's parents until age 26 should strike a young person who wants to grow up as demeaning, not as something to celebrate.
~ Dennis Prager
Every young person has to bear the burden - heavier in proportion as the individuality is richer - of accommodating himself to existence now that it is no longer seen with the eyes of a child, the eyes to which everything is as it should be.
~ Ellen Key
Well, you have to get a job! That's the first thing you have to do as a young person. You're not in school anymore... It costs a lot of money to pay the rent these days.
~ Ivory
Seeing games become more of a young person thing, I feel like a toy I grew up with has been left behind. I don't want to. I want this thing to be respected by adults. I want this thing to be growing with me. It's important to have games that could be more nuanced and reflective of the real world and relevant to adults.
~ Jenova Chen
'Adulting' will cover some topics that I, as a young woman, constantly think and worry about, so I hope others find it relatable - and funny!
~ Emily Atack
The things a young woman goes through between the ages of 18 and 20 are far different than what a young woman can go through between 20 and 22.
~ Dolores O'Riordan
I think that the path that I took was normal in the American society where young women and men are not trained as to how to make the transition from being a girl to being a woman, from being a boy to being a man. And so I think that most young people in America live by trial and error, and not by parental instruction, community guidance.
~ Sister Souljah
Young women today, as in the fifties, find themselves entering the big world and having to make choices.
~ Robert Gottlieb