Quotes & Sayings About Adolescence To Adulthood

We know that childhood and adolescence are the most crucial times for environmental stimuli to affect breast cancer risk, but changes made during adulthood and even after diagnosis still have the potential to create positive changes in the body. — Joel Fuhrman

These days we have no true childhood, only a diseased precocity, introducing children to things that any decent man of Whittier's day, or of Armstrong's, would have considered unutterably vile. Therefore we have no true adulthood either, only a prolonged infantility, a curdled adolescence followed by old age and death. — Anthony M. Esolen

I had low blood sugar, a chemical imbalance, plus the normal nervous breakdown everyone goes through from adolescence to adulthood. — Mel Brooks

Adolescence was only recognised as a life stage in the early 20th century, when psychologists got down to work. Today's generational battle obscures the fact that adulthood is happening later. A new transitional stage has emerged after adolescence: the twenties. — Jane Ridley

It is not however, adulthood itself, but parenthood that forms the glass shroud of memory. For there is an interesting quirk in the memory of women. At 30, women see their adolescence quite clearly. At 30 a woman's adolescence remains a facet fitting into her current self ... At 40, however, memories of adolescence are blurred. Women of this age look much more to their earlier childhood for memories of themselves and of their mothers. This links up to her typical parenting phase. — Terri E Apter

Many children, early on, acquire a love of places they have never been. Often, such wonder is summarily crushed on the crawl through the sludge of murky, confused adolescence on to the flat, cracked pan of adulthood with its airless vistas ever lurking beyond the horizon. Oh, well, sometimes such gifts of curiosity, delight and adventure do indeed survive the stationary trek, said victims ending up as artists, scholars, inventors and other criminals bent on confounding the commonplace and the platitudes of peaceful living. But never mind them for now, since, for all their flailing subversions, nothing really ever changes unless in service to convenience. — Steven Erikson

Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth. — Maya Angelou

A lot of men not only fear emotional pain, they are afraid to be transparent and vulnerable. To let an outsider even glimpse their confusion or suffering is a taboo that starts in adolescence and becomes more entrenched with adulthood. — Michael R. French

One of the tragedies of our day is that too many boys are growing up without guidance of a father, or another man, to show them what it looks like to do away with that boyhood stuff. As a result, they often move into adolescence and then adulthood looking like men but still speaking, reasoning, and behaving like boys. — Dennis Rainey

The changes during adolescence are not something to just get through; they are qualities we actually need to hold on to in order to live a full and meaningful life in adulthood. — Daniel J. Siegel

Watching her, he saw again how she teetered between adolescence and adulthood, with a raw sensuality that had to deposit her in a kind of no-man's land
too much a woman for boys her own age, too young for fully adult men. — Keith Ablow

It may comfort you to know that if your child reaches the age of eleven or twelve and you have a good bond or relationship, no matter how dramatic adolescence becomes, you children will probably turn out all right and want some form of connection to you in adulthood. — Charlotte Sophia Kasl

I believe our entire nation is in the midst of a collective coming-of-age crisis without parallel in our history. We are living in an America of perpetual adolescence. Our kids simply don't know what an adult is anymore - or how to become one. Many don't even see a reason to try. Perhaps more problematic, the older generations have forgotten that we need to plan to teach them. It's our fault more than it is theirs. — Ben Sasse

As people move through life, passing from the hopeful ignorance of youth into sobering adulthood, they inevitably face an increasingly nagging question: Is this all there is? Childhood can be painful, adolescence confusing; most people, expect that in adulthood things will get better. During the early years of adulthood the future still looks promising. But inevitably the mirror' shows the first white hairs and confirms the fact that those few extra pounds are not about to leave; eyesight begins to fail and mysterious pains begin to shoot through the body...' Where's all that money I was to have made? Where are all of the good times I was going to have? — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Success is different at different stages of development - from not wetting your pants in infancy, to being well liked in childhood and adolescence, to getting laid in young adulthood, to making money and having prestige in later adulthood, to getting laid in middle age, to being well liked in old age, to not wetting your pants in senility. What's — John Bradshaw

I feel that adolescence has served its purpose when a person arrives at adulthood with a strong sense of self-esteem, the ability to relate intimately, to communicate congruently, to take responsibility, and to take risks. The end of adolescence is the beginning of adulthood. What hasn't been finished then will have to be finished later. — Virginia Satir

The longing to belong and to be prized by one's peers permeates childhood and adolescence and can be compelling and anxiety provoking at any time in life, as the common dread of cocktail parties in adulthood attests. This need -- as old and as potent as erotic desire -- is a fundamental part of being human; according to object relations theory, we become ourselves by being recognized and loved by others. — Jeanne Safer

... when your palm laced like water
on a cheek of mine, a finger raiding
each contour by oath, we both knew
that in growing up, some signs had to be
sought behind closed doors, and upon discovery,
remain beyond the doors we wrought as ransom. — Jerrold Yam

It seemed to him [Otto Kugelblitz] obvious that the human life span runs through the varieties of mental disorder as understood in his day - the solipsism of infancy, the sexual hysterias of adolescence and entry-level adulthood, the paranoia of middle age, the dementia of late life ... all working up to death, which at last turns out to be sanity. — Thomas Pynchon

Our lives are scattered throughout with periods of unbelonging; in childhood, of course, and adolescence; but in adulthood too, when sudden loss (or gain) forces us to reassess things we believe immutable. — Clive Barker

Massachusetts is the first state in America to reach full adulthood. The rest of America is still in adolescence. — Uwe Reinhardt

Children do not always appreciate their parents encouraging them to explore and grow. The selfishness of a child manifests itself in his or her intent to remain a child and never enter an adult world of distress, disappointment, and jadedly surrendering an envisioned life by making commitments that limit boundless options. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The trauma of Down's syndrome is that it is present prenatally and can therefore undermine the early stages of bonding. The challenge of autism is that it sets in or is detected in the toddler years, and so transfigures the child to whom parents have already bonded. The shock of schizophrenia is that it manifests in late adolescence or early adulthood, and parents must accept that the child they have known and loved for more than a decade may be irrevocably lost, even as that child looks much the same as ever. — Andrew Solomon

Comma in 'Beginning with a Comma' is the hiccup, not only a pause. One can never imagine where a breath pauses, where adolescence can get acquainted with adulthood, its shadow lines, blurred realities that make the appearance and likeliness a mere binary to each other! Comma is a mental conflict, therefore, I call it a hiccup, an 'uncomfortable' pause- one that either continues till you gulp down something else or vanishes forever, miraculous!
Gita, Crusades, Khalsa or Jihad- War has never been alien to world religions. But it is not the physical combat these wars symbolise, but the inner conflicts. In Gita, while Arjuna symbolizes a person who seeks salvation, Krishna is the God himself and it is the mental conflict which is Kurukshetra.

Epilogue, Beginning with a Comma — Amrit Sinha

Through the whole trajectory from birth to childhood to adolescence and then into adulthood, we change so much, not only physically but also emotionally and intellectually, yet something remains unchanged. That sense of something unchanged is the eternal spark within. At the beginning it may be felt as a very subtle, almost incomprehensible intuition, but when we bring our full attention to that felt intuition of what's the same throughout our whole lives, then that little seed of divine radiance can begin to reveal itself, can begin to shine brighter and brighter in our lives. — Adyashanti

Pure IQ is stubbornly resistant to improvement after about age eight. But executive functions and the ability to handle stress and manage strong emotions can be improved, sometimes dramatically, well into adolescence and even adulthood. — Paul Tough

Despite the fact that I have no regrets about how things turned out in my life, I still can't help wanting to understand my intense relationship with Leo, as well as that turbulent time between adolescence and adulthood when everything feels raw and invigorating and scary-and why those feelings are all coming back to me now. — Emily Giffin

We shall forever be battling our scars, healing ourselves from the deep scars of childhood, to the awkward scars of adolescence, the hard scars of adulthood and scars of frail old age. In the answering spark in another's eyes, the cosy laughter of friends, and the circle of family, we rush to heal, heal our scars. In the eyes of a complete stranger, we finally find our balm until they are a stranger no more, and then we scar again, only to bleed again. — Srividya Srinivasan

They didn't really have a childhood. Just them and Mom and then her liver went and she died and it was just them. Except they never learned to be grown-ups. And they never learned to be just kids, either. Stuck in never-never land. Kinda sad. — Gerry Boyle

While the splendors that elude us in youth are likely to receive our casual contempt in adolescence and our measured consideration in adulthood, they forever hold us in their thrall. — Amor Towles

So it was a crossroads summer, when the universe seemed to stand perilously still like an egg wobbling on a precipice, a regular rite of passage summer that saw us traverse the hazardous divide between the illusions of boyhood and the far more pernicious deceptions of maturity, et cetera. — Sol Luckman

Dogs are a really amazing eye opener for us humans because their lives are compressed into such a short period, so we can see them go from puppyhood to adolescence to strong adulthood and then into their sunset years in 10 to 12 years. It really drives home the point of how finite all our lives are. — John Grogan

Camus-boy, you're always going to be the same you, just older. It's not like there's a moment when you wake up and go, Shit, I'm grown-up, I don't feel like myself anymore.'
I don't tell him, but this is the scariest fucking thing I've ever heard in my life. Being grown-up should feel like a big transition. It can't be something that, despite my best efforts, I've been drifting closer and closer to every summer. It needs to be a shock. I need to know at what point to stop holding on. And that moment will suck, and probably every moment after that will suck, but at least I'll know that everything that came before really was valid. I really was young and innocent. I wasn't fooling myself. — Hannah Moskowitz

Personal change, growth, development, identity formation
these tasks that once were thought to belong to childhood and adolescence alone now are recognized as part of adult life as well. Gone is the belief that adulthood is, or ought to be, a time of internal peace and comfort, that growing pains belong only to the young; gone the belief that these are marker events
a job, a mate, a child
through which we will pass into a life of relative ease. — Lillian B. Rubin

The experience of being in between-between the time we leave home and arrive at our destination; between the time we leave adolescence and arrive at adulthood; between the time we leave doubt and arrive at faith. It is like the time when a trapeze artist lets go the bars and hangs in midair, ready to catch another support: it is a time of danger, of expectation, of uncertainty, of excitement, or extraordinary aliveness. — Paul Tournier

We're all adolescents now," writes Thomas Bergler. "When are we going to grow up?"17 Bergler explains that churches and parachurch organizations first began to provide youth-oriented programs - mainly to help at-risk kids in the cities (e.g., the YMCA). Then the "teenager" was invented as a unique demographic in society. As a result, the youth group was created, offering adolescent-friendly versions of church. "In the second stage, a new adulthood emerged that looked a lot like the old adolescence. Fewer and fewer people outgrew the adolescent Christian spiritualities they had learned in youth groups; instead, churches began to cater to them." Eventually, churches became them. — Michael S. Horton

It has always seemed to me a disgrace that the embarrassments of early life should continue to smart throughout adulthood with undiminished intensity. Is it not enough that our youthful blunders made us cringe at the time, when we were at our tenderest, but must stay with us beyond cure, burn marks ready to flare up painfully at the merest touch? No: an indiscretion from earliest adolescence will still bring a blush to the cheek of the nonagenarian on his deathbed. — John Banville

As soon as enough people in contemporary societies progress beyond adolescence, the entire consumer-driven economy and egocentric lifestyle will implode. The adolescent society is actually quite unstable due to its incongruence with the primary patterns of living systems. The industrial growth society is simply incompatible with collective human maturity. No true adult wants to be a consumer, worker bee, or tycoon, or a soldier in an imperial war, and none would go through these motions if there were other options at hand. The enlivened soul and wild nature are deadly to industrial growth economies - and vice versa. — Bill Plotkin

In idyllic small towns I sometimes see teenagers looking out of place in their garb of desperation, the leftover tatters and stains and slashes of the fashion of my youth. For this phase of their life, the underworld is their true home, and in the grit and underbelly of a city they could find something that approximates it. Even the internal clock of adolescents changes, making them nocturnal creatures for at least a few years. All through childhood you grow toward life and then in adolescence, at the height of life, you begin to grow toward death. This fatality is felt as an enlargement to be welcomed and embraced, for the young in this culture enter adulthood as a prison, and death reassures them that there are exits. "I have been half in love with easeful death," said Keats who died at twenty-six and so were we, though the death we were in love with was only an idea then. — Rebecca Solnit

Although I was well past my teenage troubles, our music was specifically designed to lubricate the passage from adolescence to adulthood. — Pete Townshend

A crude way to put the whole thing is that our present culture is, both developmentally and historically, adolescent. And since adolescence is acknowledged to be the single most stressful and frightening period of human development
the stage when the adulthood we claim to crave begins to present itself as a real and narrowing system of responsibilities and limitations (taxes, death) and when we yearn inside for a return to the same childish oblivion we pretend to scorn
it's not difficult to see why we as a culture are so susceptible to art and entertainment whose primary function is escape, i. e. fantasy, adrenaline, spectacle, romance, etc. — David Foster Wallace

Childhood in large parts of modern Britain, at any rate, has been replaced by premature adulthood, or rather adolescence. Children grow up very fast but not very far. That is why it is possible for fourteen-year-olds now to establish friendships with twenty-six-year-olds - because they know by the age of fourteen all they are ever going to know. — Theodore Dalrymple

(William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self. — David Brooks