Quotes & Sayings About Adulthood Life

Most women have learned a great deal about how to set goals for our First Adulthood and how to roll with the punches when we hit a rough passage. But we're less prepared for our Second Adulthood as we approach life after retirement, where there are no fixed entrances or exits, and lots of sand into which it is easy to bury our heads. — Gail Sheehy

When I was younger, I use to laugh at my mom when she was silly. Now that I'm older, I find myself just as silly as her. Thanks mom, for teaching us that even as adults, it's OK to be fun and enjoy life laughing. I now get to teach my nephews and stepdaughter the same thing. — April Mae Monterrosa

As children become increasingly less connected to adults, they rely more and more on each other; the whole natural order of things change. In the natural order of all mammalian cultures, animals or humans, the young stay under the wings of adults until they themselves reach adulthood. Immature creatures were never meant to bring one another to maturity. They were never meant to look to one another for primary nurturing, modelling, cue giving or mentoring. They are not equipped to give one another a sense of direction or values. As a result of today's shift to this peer orientation, we are seeing the increasing immaturity, alienation, violence and precocious sexualization of North American Youth. The disruption of family life, rapid economic and social changes to human culture and relationships, and the erosion of stable communities are at the core of this shift. — Gabor Mate

America has tolerated inequality because people think they can get ahead. If you have immobility on top of inequality, then people are not going to be happy campers. If you're stuck on the bottom and there just isn't much churning in society and you're stuck there through your adulthood, that's not a nice life to look forward to. — Thomas B. Edsall

that life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences, that their marvelous years were not behind them. — Hanya Yanagihara

They envy your youth. You two are like exotic creatures from the land of the young.'
I've never understood all that these-are-the-best-years-of-your-life crap. If this is as good as it gets then I might as well quit now. Let me get to the shimmery oasis of adulthood. — Leanne Hall

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

I love reading. It has taught me many things. I have learned how to bridge the gap between both genders and age. Separation anxiety and psychoanalysing myself. Between youth and adulthood. It takes a lifetime for some people to fully grasp how wonderful it is just to accept the friendship of someone who is older than you or younger than you. You will always learn something new and that is always how the game of life is played. You do not have to be an intellectual to realise that this moment in time for any generation you will always be caught between pitching your tent, finding that perfect picnic spot, realising that you are perpetually caught between being the frosting on top of the cake and the Everest. — Abigail George

A person can have a happy and fulfilling life without children. — Judy Blume

Age is an accumulation of life and loss. Adulthood is a series of lines crossed. — Ellen Goodman

I used to wonder if a mother could see the shift when her child became an adult. I wondered if it was clinical, like at the onset of puberty; or emotional, like the first time his heart was broken; or temporal, like the moment he said I do. I used to wonder if maybe it was a critical mass of life experiences - graduation, first job, first baby - that tipped the balance; if it was the sort of thing you noticed immediately when you saw it, like a port-wine stain of sudden gravitas, or if it crept up slowly, like age in a mirror. Now I know: adulthood is a line drawn in the sand. At some point, your child will be standing on the other side. I — Jodi Picoult

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
[Kung Fu Monkey
Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009] — John Rogers

A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, "How could I have lived without reading it!" and also, "What a pity I did not read it in my youth!" Well, these statements do not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading. — Italo Calvino

Though I have been busy, perhaps overbusy, all my life, it seems to me now that I have accomplished little that matters, that the books have never come up to what was in my head, and that the rewards - the comfortable income, the public notice, the literary prizes, and the honorary degrees - have been tinsel, not what a grown man should be content with. — Wallace Stegner

I was vaguely worried about how they would cope with wandering the desert of adulthood without the other's hand to hold, but then I remembered that they never appeared to give each other that much comfort in the first place, or at least if they had, those days were buried so far in the past that it was hard to consider them a meaningful part of their life. — Nick Burd

The odor of frying bacon, sausage links, and ham tiptoed on little pig feet all the way to the north end of the second floor. Inevitably, the odor made her simultaneously ravenous and nauseated. She hated the sensation. It reminded her of pregnancy. Every Sunday morning, Leigh-Cheri awoke to a pan of fried fear. — Tom Robbins

Let's say I hope that I appeal to the more carefree times in a person's life rather than to his reasoning adulthood. I'd just like to be an image that reminds someone of joy rather than of the problems of the world. — John Wayne

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

No one except your husband knows of the cautiousness at the heart of your life. Your adulthood has been a progressive retreat from curiosity and wonder, an endless series of delays and procrastinations. You wanted to be so much, once, but life kept on getting in the way ... You settled. Shunned creativity, flight, risk, never had the courage to give a dream, any dream, a go. — Nikki Gemmell

[ ... ] the responsibility for their wellbeing and for the fundamental meaning they give to their own life must, in adulthood, be theirs. To accept the burden that someone 'can't live without you' is unrealistic. It infantilises that person and overburdens you. p.226 — Stephanie Dowrick

Relax. You will become an adult. You will figure out your career. You will find someone who loves you. You have a whole lifetime; time takes time. The only way to fail at life is to abstain. — Johanna De Silentio

Above all, staring at my old bedroom ceiling, I feel safe. Cocooned from the world; wrapped up in cotton wool. No one can get me here. No one even knows I'm here. I won't get any nasty letters and I won't get any nasty phone calls and I won't get any nasty visitors. It's like a sanctuary. I feel as if I'm fifteen again, with nothing to worry about but my Homework. (And I haven't even got any of that.) — Sophie Kinsella

Eventually he understood that he was crying for himself. He was ashamed of the man whom he had become, mourning the man whom he had expected to be when he'd been a boy. — Dean Koontz

People who don't get excited about receiving gifts are tired of life. — Anna Maxted

People whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood, who were protected, respected, and treated with honesty by their parents, will be-both in their youth and in adulthood-intelligent, responsive, empathic, and highly sensitive. They will take pleasure in life and will not feel any need to kill or even hurt others or themselves. They will use their power to defend themselves, not to attack others. They will not be able to do otherwise than respect and protect those weaker than themselves, including their children, because this is what they have learned from their own experience. — Alice Miller

In his grief over the loss of a dog, a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood. After this most inconsolable of sorrows there is nothing life can do to him that he will not be able somehow to bear. — James Thurber

The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent's greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with. The fear of one day being obliged for your child's own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, above all, the fear of knowing - as every parent fears - that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited. It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with which The Road extends the metaphor of a father's guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself in a ruined, friendless world that The Road finds its great power to move and horrify the reader. — Michael Chabon

The years roll on and life seems like this more and more, that choices don't really exit in the way I thought they would when I was a child and expected the regal power of adulthood to provide clarity and insight. — Scott Turow

But we should open our eyes to the many ways in which hypervigilance keeps them penned in from the more liberated life they deserve to live and that in turn would prepare them for adulthood. — Julie Lythcott-Haims

I am convinced that most people do not grow up ... We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias. — Maya Angelou

Intern will resonate not only with doctors, but with anyone who has struggled with the grand question 'What should I do with my life?' In a voice of profound honesty and intelligence, Sandeep Jauhar gives us an insider's look at the medical profession and also a dramatic account of the psychological challenges of early adulthood. — Akhil Sharma

I despise this false lucidity that comes with age. The truth is that they are just like everyone else: nothing more than kids without a clue about what has happened to them, acting big and tough when in fact all they want is to burst into tears.
And yet there's nothing to understand. The problem is that children believe what adults say and, once they're adults themselves, they exact their revenge by deceiving their own children. 'Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is' is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe. Once you become an adult and you realize that's not true, it's too late. The mystery remains intact, but all your available energy has long been wasted on stupid things. All that's left is to anesthetize yourself by trying to hide the fact that you can't find any meaning in your life, and then, the better to convince yourself, you deceive your own children. — Muriel Barbery

Artillery has stopped for the moment, and the predawn fires inside the walls take on a steady middle life, an adulthood. — Anthony Doerr

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

I wondered what a man I had encountered the day before on the plane en route to Chicago's O'Hare airport would have made of this. As he tried to push through a crowded aisle, he said loudly: "Life is never easy. And it's never pleasant." I couldn't let this go. I looked up at him from my seat and said, "I do hope life gives you cause to change that opinion. Otherwise you may find that opinion walking ahead of you, giving you more and more reasons to believe it. — Robert Moss

I think everything happens for a reason and all the things that happened to me - good, bad - I'm glad they did. It's made me ready for life, for adulthood. — Freddy Adu

In the closing of this chapter, Lutzer describes the choice of forgiveness in more detail: 'Without both honesty and
forgiveness, there can be no freedom from the fits of rage.'
What happens through the years when such anger is left unattended or is unresolved (or forgiveness is not pursued)? Without forgiveness, does the anger dissipate or possibly fade away? I don't think so; but instead, anger continues in one's life and is carried into their adulthood. What kind or level of control can manifest (or grow) in this unresolved anger; and as for the person or carrier, what can be expected of their heart and soul? — H. Kirk Rainer

Life is truly a ride. We're all strapped in and no one can stop it. When the doctor slaps your behind, he's ripping your ticket and away you go. As you make each passage from youth to adulthood to maturity, sometimes you put your arms up and scream, sometimes you just hang on to that bar in front of you. But the ride is the thing. I think the most you can hope for at the end of life is that your hair's messed, you're out of breath, and you didn't throw up. — Jerry Seinfeld

I suppose a certain degree of adulthood has entered my life. Aiming for Broadway, I can't think that way any more. Of course, Broadway will always be important. But it's not the focus of everything that you do. You know, I'm very happy I was born when I was, so I got there in time. When it was time to get there. — Harold Prince

My father had been my Moses, bringing me to life. Then my grandfather became my Joshua, carrying me through my childhood and teen years into adulthood. — Wes Moore

I would go so far as to say I would not have the life that I have right now if it wasn't for Gabe Liedman. He is the first person I met in my adulthood that I felt was truly delighted by me and understood me and also was curious about me. — Jenny Slate

A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full or wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later year ... the alienation from the sources of our strength. — Rachel Carson

People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite. — Chad Harbach

There was a time when that kind of thing looked like the kingdom of heaven, but somewhere along the line it had lost its glow. Maybe that was just the cost of growing up. And maybe the cost of growing up was too high. — James P. Blaylock

Adulthood is a wonderful thing, and brief. You must be sure to enjoy it while it lasts. — Marilynne Robinson

Apart from all this, I do of course have a real life. I sometimes have trouble believing in it, because it doesn't seem like the kind of life I could ever get away with, or deserve. This goes along with another belief of mine: that everyone my age is an adult, whereas I m merely in disguise. — Margaret Atwood

Those smooth, spit-cleaned cheeks gave no indication of the dreams crowding her skull. Should she make it to adulthood, the girl would arrive with two hundred and six bones. Two and a half million sweat glands. Ninety-six thousand kilometers of blood vessels. Forty-six chromosomes. Seven meters of small intestines. Six hundred and six discrete muscles. One hundred billion cerebral neurons. Two kidneys. A liver. A heart. A hundred trillion cells that died and were replaced, again and again. But no matter how many ways she dismembered and quantified the body lying beside her, she couldn't say how many years the girl would wait before she married, if at all, or how many children she would have, if any; and between teh creation of this body and its end lay the mystery the girl would spend her life solving. — Anthony Marra

For me the breakthrough was the realization that I wasn't the center of the universe or even the centre of my own world. That you and your work, your living, are not the only reason you're here. Your role is to shepherd your children through to adulthood. That's the point of life. Your own little sessions and needs and passions are just there to flavour you and help you do that job for your children. — Shaun Micallef

Both of us on the cusp of adulthood, and this is how my brother and I understood what it meant to be a woman: working, dour, full of worry. What it meant to be a man: resentful, angry, wanting life to be everything but what it was. — Jesmyn Ward

Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn't miss an appointment, it never has. — Juan Gabriel Vasquez

But how was one to be an adult? Was couplehood truly the only appropriate option? (But then, a sole option was no option at all.) "Thousands of years of evolutionary and social development and this is our only choice?" he'd asked Harold when they were up in Truro this past summer, and Harold had laughed. "Look, Willem," he said, "I think you're doing just fine. I know I give you a hard time about settling down, and I agree with Malcolm's dad that couplehood is wonderful, but all you really have to do is just be a good person, which you already are, and enjoy your life. You're young. You have years and years to figure out what you want to do and how you want to live. — Hanya Yanagihara

With God, all things are possible- including, dominating adulthood, swimming upstream for life, and living in light of eternity in a world that tells you all you can do is live for the moment. — Katie Kiesler

At 13 I was someone that didn't have a personality yet. It's a fascinating period in a human life. It's so exciting because you are in between childhood and adulthood. — Pirjo Honkasalo

That's extremely important to understand. He had given up.
Because he'd given up, the surface of life was comfortable for him. He worked reasonably hard, was easy to get along with and, except for an occasional glimpse of inner emptiness shown in some short stories he wrote at the time, his days passed quite usually. — Robert M. Pirsig

But that was the hypocrisy of adulthood: You never wanted the children you cared about to do things you'd done when you were heedless of the fragility of life. — Lisa Unger

For pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement, There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for planning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future. And now life has become the future. — John Green

[...] I was created by cruel men. Not in a lab, not in a test tube, but through years of undeserved mistreatment at a time in life that's supposed to be magical. Early adulthood. Newfound freedom, newfound love. — Steph Sweeney

She was at that period of her life that almost everyone must pass through, when childhood is done with and a faux maturity, untrammeled by experience, gives one a sense that anything is possible until the arrival of real adulthood proves conclusively that it is not. — Julian Fellowes

Today, I slept in until 10,
Cleaned every dish I own,
Fought with the bank,
Took care of paperwork.
You and I might have different definitions of adulthood.
I don't work for salary, I didn't graduate from college,
But I don't speak for others anymore,
And I don't regret anything I can't genuinely apologize for.
And my mother is proud of me.
I burnt down a house of depression,
I painted over murals of greyscale,
And it was hard to rewrite my life into one I wanted to live
But today, I want to live.
I didn't salivate over sharp knives,
Or envy the boy who tossed himself off the Brooklyn bridge.
I just cleaned my bathroom,
did the laundry,
called my brother.
Told him, "it was a good day. — Kait Rokowski

The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortext from genes. — Robert M. Sapolsky

I bet even this little boy will grow up to be an adult before he realizes. He'll just become an adult like that. Whether he accepts it or resists until the end is a big fork in the path of life, I suppose. — Inio Asano

Yes, the life of an adult entails accepting and in some way being responsible for pain. — James A. Autry

Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement, There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for plannning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future
you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college. — John Green

Families start out, most of the time, with unconditional acceptance of one another. That acceptance starts in childhood and continues into adulthood. Somewhere in there, between childhood and adulthood, the ability to distinguish right versus wrong is born. — Bart Hopkins

Somewhere along the line, between the idealisms of youth and the realities of adulthood, we become pacified by our jobs; we tolerate how we hurt the world so that we can sustain our lives. At some point, blurred in the past, we traded the greater good for ourselves. — Richard Beckham II

adulthood's full of ghosts." "I'm sorry, I'm not sure I quite - " "I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped. Dan's like that." "You don't think he likes his job, then." "Correct," she said, "but I don't think he even realizes it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially." What — Emily St. John Mandel

First of all, I think that sex, like love, is a sacred thing..if I were going to live beyond puberty, it would be really important to me to keep sex as a sort of marvelous sacrament. And secondly, a teenager who pretends to be an adult is still a teenager. If you imagine that getting high at a party and sleeping around is going to propel you into a state of full adulthood, that's like thinking that dressing up as an Indian is going to make you an Indian. And thirdly, it's a really weird way of looking at life to want to become an adult by imitating everything that is most catastrophic about adulthood. — Muriel Barbery

To make a difference in the world, it only takes one optimistic person, who can gather millions of people to make the change. — Gia Russell

You and I should do whatever we can to keep our youthful joy alive. If your life is too predictable, don't go postal. Take a ridiculous ride back to whatever it was that gave you joy as a child. Jump on a trampoline. Saddle up a pony. Give adulthood a rest. — Nick Vujicic

Sum of life; Birth, childhood, youth, adulthood, parenthood, old age and death. — Lailah Gifty Akita

This, according to the fellows who saw me as fit for a Service career, put me ahead of the curve, to understand this truth at an age when most guys are starting only to suspect the basics of adulthood--that life owes you nothing; that suffering takes many forms; that no one will ever care for you as your mother did; that the human heart is a chump. — David Foster Wallace

so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood's full of ghosts." "I'm sorry, I'm not sure I quite - " "I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped. — Emily St. John Mandel

For all the varied concerns attendant to the raising of a child - over schoolwork, dress, and manners - in the end, a parent's responsibility could not be more simple: To bring a child safely into adulthood so that she could have a chance to experience a life of purpose and, God willing, contentment. — Amor Towles

Finally and essentially: I not only never could have, but never would have, written this book without the conversations with - and the kindness, grace, empathy, forgiveness, and wisdom of - Jared Hohlt, my first and favorite reader, secret keeper, and North Star. His beloved friendship is the greatest gift of my adulthood. — Hanya Yanagihara

I'm pretty squeaky clean. No big tragedies in my childhood or adolescence or adulthood. I've had a very easygoing, simple life. — Vera Farmiga

My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Life after 50 or 60 is itself another country, as different as adolescence is from childhood, or as adulthood is from adolescence - and just as adventurous. — Gloria Steinem

Denied access to information about important arenas of human life, history, and art, women like Augusta Welland demonstrate well into adulthood a lack of moral insight and sympathetic compassion. — Edith Wharton

So ended the formative period in [his] life, the single year that set in motion all the clockwork of his future identity. Thinking back on it, I wonder if it isn't the same for all of us. Adulthood is a glacier encroaching quietly on youth. When it arrives, the stamp of childhood suddenly freezes, capturing us for good in the image of our last act, the pose we struck when the ice of age set in. — Ian Caldwell

People often say that you should never work with child actors. I think that's all wrong. Children have not had the imagination kicked out of them by life experience and adulthood. So, they still are very much alive with that kind of magical thinking which enables an actor to believe they're in these circumstances and make them real to you. — Nicolas Cage

When the world tells us that it is impossible and when the world is falling from underneath us, and we have no where to turn, I feel the safest. For I know that you are there, and you won't let anything happen to me. When that same world tells us that this isn't meant to be,
and that we aren't ready for a life of commitment and adulthood, I still feel the safest. Because I know that you will always be there with me, for you are committed to me, and I am committed to you. I swear to you, in this moment when all of the world is watching and filled with doubts, when the entire world is slowly dying, that I will never leave your side. I want to live my life with you, and I want to die with you. I vow to you to always be true, be faithful, and be not only a wife, but a friend and comforter. My heart is all I can give you; it is all that I own. Therefore I give you my all. I give you everything that I have."
-Lily Potter — Mordred

But however the forms of family life have changed and the number expanded, the role of the family has remained constant and it continues to be the major institution through which children pass en route to adulthood. — Bernice Weissbourd

All too soon the garden of childhood is paved cold with the asphalt roads of adulthood. And while it is not within her power to halt this unrelenting progression, a mother can diligently guard this most precious garden and insure that the roads become gentle paths that wind through it instead of byways that kill it. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

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

You," she said. She grabbed my wrist and pressed two fingers onto me as if taking my pulse and I stopped breathing. "I know you. I remember you from my youth. You contain multitudes. There is a crush of experience coursing by you. And you want to take every experience on the pulse. — Stephanie Danler

Your zeal to face life's rough and tumble, your ardor to accept the responsibilities of adulthood is hardly congruent with the aspirations of most graduate students ... ' He shook his head of disagreeable hair. 'I need not tell you,' he deplored, sinking to paralipsis, 'that there resides in almost every one of 'em the unconscious desire not to grow up. For once the academic goal is attained and the doctorate irradicably abbreviated after the name, the problem of facing the world is confronted. The subtlest, most unremitting drive of the student is his unconscious proclivity to postpone the acceptance of responsibility as long as possible. — Millard Kaufman

These were the ridiculous tales of being twenty-two and twenty-five, of being in that happy, malleable phase of postcollege life before everything set in the gray cement of adulthood. — Maya Lang

Each era invents its own child. Over the past 500 years, conceptions of the child changed gradually from an ill-formed adult who must be subjugated to society's goals to a precious being who must be protected from unreasonable social demands. Childhood has come to be seen as a special period of life, rather than as a temporary state of no lasting importance for adulthood. — Sandra Scarr

Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself. — Jonathan Kozol

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

That was happiness. Not the framed greatest hits, but the moments in between. At the time, I hadn't pegged them as being particularly happy. But now, looking back at those phantom snapshots, I'm struck by my calm, my ease, the evident comfort with my life. I'm happy in retrospect. — Maria Semple

I had been riding horses before my memory kicked in, so my life with horses had no beginning. It simply appeared from the fog of infancy. I survived a difficult childhood by traveling on the backs of horses, and in adulthood the pattern didn't change. — Monty Roberts

Everything about my life looked pretty well messed up compared with how adulthood had always been advertised to me. I — Hope Jahren

Recipe for a dissatisfied adulthood is setting goals that are especially difficult to attain. Measured by life satisfaction 20 years later, the least promising goal that a young person could have was becoming accomplished in a performing art. — Daniel Kahneman

As a man begins to understand the sacrifices he must make to live the life he dreams of, he often loses his courage for such a life. — Josie Sigler

The day you graduate from childhood to adulthood is the day you take full responsibility for your life. — Darren Hardy

We want to make an impact on the world, but we end up making or selling playthings that are developed to keep us distracted and designed to deconstruct. We have turned the activities that were meant to be the stuff of life into mere means of subsisting in it. — Susan Neiman

Whoa. If high school was suppose to be the best years of my life - at least so far - I was truly destined to have a sucky adulthood. — Meg Cabot

O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales. — Leo Rosten

One of life's fundamental truths states, 'Ask and you shall receive.' As kids we get used to asking for things, but somehow we lose this ability in adulthood. We come up with all sorts of excuses and reasons to avoid any possibility of criticism or rejection. — Jack Canfield