Quotes about growing up

“Life was much easier before I had to worry about everyone else worrying,” Irene muttered.

“It’s called growing up, dear. It comes with staying alive.”

"I guess——" she said, wistfully—"I guess the only thing that's wrong with children is that they grow up to be people like you."

"Was she a bit mad?"

"Mad? Oh, no - unless you would call a failure to grow up a kind of madness - in which case there would be very few sane people."

I felt a poignant memory of those desolate patches of disillusion which are the shocks of growing up. The discovery that one lived in a world which could pay honour where honour was not due, was just such a one. The values were rocked, the dependable was suddenly flimsy, the solid became hollow, gold turned to brass, there was no integrity anywhere . . .

Blanca argued that her reading should be monitored because there were certain things that were inappropriate for her age, but her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it. (p311)

It made me miserable that I was rapidly becoming an adult and that I was unable to do anything about it.

In time, when we became adults, we might look back on this pain and loneliness as a funny thing, perfectly ordinary, but—but how were we expected to get by, to get through this interminable period of time until that point when we were adults? There was no one to teach us how. Was there nothing to do but leave us alone, like we had the measles? But people died from the measles, or went blind. You couldn't just leave them alone. Some of us, in our daily depressions and rages, were apt to stray, to become corrupted, irreparably so, and then our lives would be forever in disorder. There were even some who would resolve to kill themselves. And when that happened, everyone would say, Oh, if only she had lived a little longer she would have known, if she were a little more grown up she would have figured it out. How saddened they would all be. But if those people were to think about it from our perspective, and see how we had tried to endure despite how terribly painful it all was, and how we had even tried to listen carefully, as hard as we could, to what the world might have to say, they would see that, in the end, the same bland lessons were always being repeated over and over, you know, well, merely to appease us. And they would see how we always experienced the same embarrassment of being ignored.

It's not as though we only care about the present. If you were to point to a faraway mountain and say, If you can make it there, it's a pretty good view, I'd see that there's not an ounce of untruth to what you tell us. But when you say, Well, bear with it just a little longer, if you can make it to the top of that mountain, you'll have done it, you are ignoring the fact that we are suffering from a terrible stomachache—right now. Surely one of you is mistaken to let us go on this way. You're the one who is to blame.

In the eight years since his father’s death, Patrick’s youth had slipped away without being replaced by any signs of maturity, unless the tendency for sadness and exhaustion to eclipse hatred and insanity could be called ‘mature’.

Above all, he wanted to stop being a child without using the cheap disguise of becoming a parent.

Part of manhood, I am thinking, is to ponder one’s words before opening one’s mouth.

"...people are pretty much the same. Especially through adolescence and early adulthood. For the most part, people go through the same experiences and think the same thing, but somehow on one ever escapes the belief that his experience is unique in every conceivable way."

"...once she becomes a teenager...well, sometimes there's nothing you can do. With or without you, in the end, children grow up to become the people they were meant to be."