Boys Growing Up Quotes & Sayings

My dad believed in scaring us as we were growing up. Scaring the boys who wanted to date us more. — Karin Slaughter

Red remembered growing up in that house as heaven. There were enough children on Bouton Road to form two baseball teams, when they felt like it, and they spent all their free time playing out of doors - boys and girls together, little ones and big ones. Suppers were brief, pesky interruptions foisted on them by their mothers. They disappeared again till they were called in for bed, and then they came protesting, all sweaty-faced and hot with grass blades sticking to them, begging for just another half hour. "I bet I can still name every kid on the block," Red would tell his own children. But that was not so impressive, because most of those kids had stayed on in the neighborhood as grown-ups, or at least come back to it later after trying out other, lesser places. Red — Anne Tyler

Growing up in the 1950s, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, boys were supposed to be athletic. — Chris Van Allsburg

I'm hungry," Jason grumbled as he stared at the empty plates on his small
coffee table.
Brad groaned, "You practically ate both plates of cookies. How in the hell are
you hungry?"
Jason shrugged leaning back in his chair to watch the game. "I just am.
Leave me the hell alone I'm a growing boy, damn it!"
"Yeah, a growing thirty-one year old boy," Brad mumbled.
"I'm still growing damn it so shut the hell up and feed me!"
"Order something and stop bitching!" Brad snapped.
"You order something. I'm too weak to move. — R.L. Mathewson

On, I don't think I'm a genius!' cried Josie, growing calm and sober as she listened to the melodious voice and looked into the expressive face that filled her with confidence, so strong, sincere and kindly was it. 'I only want to find out if I have talent enough to go on, and after years of study be able to act well in any of the good plays people never tire of seeing. I don't expected to be a Mrs. Siddons or a Miss Cameron, much as I long to be; but it does seem as if I had something in me which can't come out in any way but this. When I act I'm perfectly happy. I seem to live, to be in my own world, and each new part is a new friend. I love Shakespeare, and am never tired of his splendid people. Of course I don't understand it all; but it's like being alone at night with the mountains and the stars, solemn and grand, and I try to imagine how it will look when the sun comes up, and all is glorious and clear to me. I can't see, but I feel the beauty, and long to express it. — Louisa May Alcott

I purely attribute my 'hamming it up' quality to growing up with three older brothers and just being like a tomboy my whole life. Literally, my mother had to be like, 'Honey, there's a certain point where you have to start wearing a shirt.' You know, I would run around with the boys and play tag football and climb trees. — Eliza Dushku

When I realised I wasn't Michael Jackson and I was this 10 year old boy growing up in the suburbs, I was devastated — Darren Hayes

I found myself suddenly jealous of the time when things were simple, when days centered on creek walks and tetherball, and your biggest worry was whether you'd have riding or sailing. There were no boys, there were no secrets or rumors, and there were no regrets. Not even fear of regret. There was just a best friend and endless hours to fill with Pixy Stix and laughing so hard you couldn't breathe. — Kathryn Williams

Growing up, I didn't get the talk of 'Make sure boys take you on a date and treat you right.' So I was the girl who wasn't dating and would just text. I dated these guys who didn't have jobs, and I would always be paying. At one point, I remember looking in the mirror and thinking, 'You're too pretty and cool to be treated like this.' — Meghan Trainor

While I was growing up, all the boys used to be my buddies. I never got that special kind of attention from them, and I was the tomboy around. Although I've become an actress today, I still have those traits. — Esha Gupta

[London is] one of the best cities in the world. There is just so much culture there and so much history and so much diversity. It's just a perfect place to grow up. I studied at the Guildhall every Saturday so I'd always be in town every weekend doing that. I was kind of a city boy really. — Douglas Booth

I used to breakdance, be a b-boy. I love hip-hop from back in the graffiti days, growing up listening to Michael Jackson. Loved it from birth. I know it all, from Afrika Bambaataa, the roots and the beginning. I came up in a good era. — DJ Khaled

But how can you be Peter Pan? You? The Boy Who Never Grew Up? That's not you. You have egg on your collar. You can't fly. You're not Alice. Alice was a blond little girl, I know it. You're lying to me.' And then they remember. What growing up really is: when they learned that boys can't fly and mermaids don't exist and White Rabbits don't talk and all boys grow old, even Peter Pan, as you've grown old. They've been deceived. As if you've somehow been lying to them. So following hard on the smile of remembrance is the pain in the eyes, which you've caused, everytime you meet someone. — John Logan

I was painfully shy when I was younger but at some point you've gotta grow up. I think the genius in the man-boy thing is you tap into a woman's motherly instincts. — Bill Burr

I didn't know what gay was. There was no such thing when I was growing up. I knew I had crushes on boys, but I didn't think there was anything wrong with that until I started to hear about it from the other kids in school. — Kevyn Aucoin

One of the reasons I'm an actor is because I was no physical specimen as a child. I wasn't athletic and didn't have any prowess in that regard. Growing up in Kentucky, most little boys were trying to get into sports, and it was very competitive, so that was not to be. But I did want to do something. — Michael Shannon

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

A boy, if he's lucky, discovers his limitations across a leisurely passage of years, with a self-awareness arriving slowly. That way, at least he has plenty of time to heroically imagine himself first. Most boys unfold in this natural, measured way, growing up with at least one adult on the scene who can convincingly fake being all-powerful, omniscient, and unfailingly protective for a kid's first decade or so, providing an invaluable canopy of reachable stars and monsters that are comfortably make-believe. — Ron Suskind

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

My fellow Americans, this is an amazing moment for me. To think that a once scrawny boy from Austria could grow up to become Governor of California and stand in Madison Square Garden to speak on behalf of the President of the United States that is an immigrant's dream. It is the American dream. — Arnold Schwarzenegger

When you're in a broken family and your role model is a violent male, boys grow up believing that's the way they're supposed to act. And girls think that's an accepted way men will treat them. — Jim Costa

Her boys were growing up, too. William would start nursery school in January of 1987 at four and a half. The most exciting part for William was the uniform, "which he is thrilled to bits about, especially as Harry is very envious of his big brother!" The next year would find Diana and Charles in Portugal, Spain, and Germany. "It never stops and it's certainly no holiday package tour!" How true. I'd seen that for myself in Washington.
I had been thrilled to catch a television documentary on the royal couple and had said so in my letter. Diana wrote, "An awful lot of money was raised for very worthy causes so that made the intrusion much more worthwhile!" This comment exemplified the conflict Diana faced between her desire for privacy and her desire to do good. — Mary Robertson

When you're growing up in a family without a lot of money and four boys, it can't always be, 'Let's go see a specialist, see if you're okay.' If you got hurt, you just walked it off. — Ryan Reynolds

I'll always be the baby in the family. I'm the youngest sister, but growing up with so many boys, it makes you tough. You get teased. There's no tiptoeing around each other. You say it the way it is; you're honest. — Nicola Peltz

Because of my comedic-influence growing up, Mel Brooks, Jim Carrey, Steve Martin. A lot of Jeff comedic-influences included Charlie Chaplin and physical comedians of the silent-era. What we were able to do together is to show all these major influences but make it into our own comedy. We've seen the stereotypical boy-meets-girl story a hundred thousand times. — J. Robert Spencer

What self-respecting teenage kid growing up in the U.S. hasn't played Truth or Dare? Before cell phones, we kids spent a lot of time in the same place and actually had to come up with our own entertainment. Truth or Dare was the game of choice to break the ice between the boys and the girls. — Catherine Bybee

I love physical kinds of comedy and getting down and dirty and doing stunts. When I was growing up, I was always getting into fights with guys and usually punching out boys my age because I was a lot bigger and tougher. So I'm naturally accustomed to putting myself into the headspace of a girl who can take care of herself. — Cameron Diaz

I love my boys. I love watching them growing up. I love seeing them develop, and I'm always looking forward to seeing what they're going to become and what they're going to be interested in later in life. — Josh Turner

Thousands are the children of poor foreigners who have permitted them to grow up without school, education, or religion. All the neglect and bad education and evil example of a poor class tend to form others, who, as they mature, swell the ranks of ruffians and criminals. So, at length, a great multitude of ignorant, untrained, passionate, irreligious boys and young men are formed who become the 'dangerous class' in their city. — Charles Loring Brace

Sometimes guys are so concerned with being cool and hanging out with their friends. They don't want to seem like the guy that 'has to call his girlfriend.' It's just boys growing up. — Kristin Cavallari

I would say my fraternity was nothing but a bunch of farm boys; we weren't really in the whole fraternity scene, but yeah, that's a safe assessment of who I am. I've lived that life, growing up in agriculture and then going off to college and joining a fraternity, livin' that life. — Luke Bryan

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day-
A sunny day with the leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled - since I watched you play
Your first game of fotball, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
with the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature's give-and-take - the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay.
I had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show-
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love proved in the letting go. — Cecil Day-Lewis

If we can reawaken that fierce quality in a man, hook it up to a higher purpose, release the warrior within, then the boy can grow up and become truly masculine. — John Eldredge

Adults always teased me about having boyfriends, but there was an age where it was no longer a joke, the idea that boys might actually want you. — Emma Cline

Oh gosh, well, you know, growing up in the '70s being a young boy there, you know, there were still exploitation movies, where, you know, were, you know, still opened up every week and, you know, played - sometimes they would play it at the local, you know, mall theater. — Quentin Tarantino

Becoming a man means doing the right thing even though it may be hard or difficult. Boys do what is easiest. A man does what is right, whether easy or not. — Carew Papritz

When I was growing up, there were times I had to compete against boys in tae kwon do, and I'd show them right away that I wasn't someone to mess with. — Katheryn Winnick

Growing up, I had an insane crush on Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys. — Erin O'Connor

This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove. Our first flaws were emerging, but they were being corrected. Blurry vision could be fixed invisibly with the magic of the contact lens. Crooked teeth were pulled straight with braces. Spotty skin could be chemically cleared. Some girls were turning beautiful. A few boys were growing tall. — Karen Thompson Walker

But, really, are there any guys out there who aren't jerks? I don't even know any grown-up men who aren't jerks. — Margaret Peterson Haddix

I loved the time I got to spend in Denver. My boys, Arin and Ryan, were growing up. I got to spend time with them without being pried upon. There was no public scrutiny. I was free and could take them to the supermarket or to the park without being noticed or looked at. — Madhuri Dixit

I always prayed the same way at night: "Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Please bless my mother, father, sister, everyone in the word, and me. And please make my father quit drinking."
As a child growing up in a family battling alcoholism, this is what I know: Something bad is coming; it always does. I can't ask for help; I'm too ashamed. I can't talk about our secrets; no one understands. I can't trust anyone; they always leave.
Questions bounced off my self-constructed wall of values
a barricade I'd made from the fears I'd pushed into my darkness.
How could Ryan, a professional baseball player, really resist all those women? How could I really trust Jerry, my childhood friend? I'd barely awakened to sex and already boys were the seventh wonder of the world. Did anyone really trust another person? I needed proof. That proof hadn't revealed itself ... yet. — Pamela Taeuffer

I have spent much of my life where the boys are, first as a tomboy and then on Wall Street. Growing up, I loved every and any sport. I was frustrated by girls who didn't, so I spent most of my afternoons with the boys. — Karen Finerman

I think as women we've always been very used to growing up reading and identifying with male protagonists, especially in fantasy. There's a saying in publishing that girls will read about boys, but boys will only read about boys, and it's important to give women strong heroines. — Cassandra Clare

There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful. — Doris Lessing

When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting. — Willa Cather

We have to teach our boys the rules of equality and respect, so that as they grow up gender equality becomes a natural way of life. And we have to teach our girls that they can reach as high as humanly possible. — Beyonce Knowles

There was a part, you know, obviously there was a part of the whole I military experience that you know like hooks right into the whole boyhood experience that that you know most American boys have growing up, you know, which is proving your manhood by proving how hard you are, by proving that you can take it. — Peter P. Mahoney

Shall I tell her? Shall I be a kind and merciful narrator and take our girl aside? Shall I touch her new, red heart and make her understand that she is no longer one of the tribe of heartless children, nor even the owner of the wild and infant heart of thirteen-year-old girls and boys? Oh, September! Hearts, once you have them locked up in your chest, are a fantastic heap of tender and terrible wonders - but they must be trained. Beatrice could have told her all about it. A heart can learn ever so many tricks, and what sort of beast it becomes depends greatly upon whether it has been taught to sit up or to lie down, to speak or to beg, to roll over or to sound alarm, to guard or to attack, to find or to stay. But the trick most folk are so awfully fond of learning, the absolute second they've got hold of a heart, is to pretend they don't have one at all. It is the very first danger of the hearted. Shall I give fair warning, as neither you nor I was given? — Catherynne M Valente

I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up. — Beverly Cleary

Single parent situations drive poverty and often lead to unsupervised kids. Many boys growing up without fathers often feel angry and abandoned. Thus, they seek comfort in all the wrong places. — Bill O'Reilly

There are some people that see the half full cup and get upset about where the other half of the cup went ... With an attitude like that, they will never be happy. I see a half full cup and I immediately take half of someone else's cup and then I have a full cup and I'm happy. With the right attitude, life is really very simple. Peter Pan from 'Leaving Neverland' (Why Little Boys Shouldn't Run Big Corporations) — Daniel Prokop

But lassies are trained for it, in a manner of speaking; it's part of the growing-up process for them, young females. It doesn't happen with boys, just if you're a lassie, you've got to learn how not to talk; plus how not to look, you get trained how not to look. How not to look and how not to talk. You get trained how not to do things. — James Kelman

My mom was very strict when I was growing up. I could not talk to boys until I was 18. I had to study and work hard. — Coco Lee

I should mention that while I was growing up, Einstein was presented as a worthy role model for a young boy who was good at his studies. — Sidney Altman

Well, you know what grown-ups are,' said Dinah. 'They don't think the same way as we do. I expect when we grow up, we shall think like them - but let's hope we remember what it was like to think in the way children do, and understand the boys and the girls that are growing up when we're men and women. — Enid Blyton

Men at any age truly never grow up. All, no matter what importance they may have attained, are still no more than little boys. — Diane De Poitiers

These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which were now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone. — James Baldwin

Beer: All real men drink a specific brand of cheap beer. While I was growing up, my stepfather, who was the manliness man on the planet, drank Schlitz tall boys. There
was no room in the fridge, so he just left them on the counter and drank them warm. One day I asked him why he drank Schlitz, and he said, "It's only 3.1 cents per
ounce. Beer is an acquired taste, so you might as well acquire a taste for cheap beer." That's some manly shit. — Forrest Griffin

Boys annoyed her. Girls annoyed her. She should have been a cat. — Katie Neipris

My father's attitude was that this was but an inevitable phase of my growing up and he affected to take it lightly. But beneath his jocular, boys-together air, he was at a loss, he was frightened. Perhaps he had supposed that my growing up would bring us closer together - whereas, now that he was trying to find out something about me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me. And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitably undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgment, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying. — James Baldwin

I have six kids - four girls and two boys. I'm amazed that growing up in the same house, same parents with the same exposure to the same things that all my six kids can be so different. I see that as their (being) designed by God. — Alex Kendrick

It's a shame for a woman's history to be all about men-first boys, then other boys, then men, men, men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and elections, one war after another, with the dull periods of peace skimmed over when they happened. — Elizabeth Kostova

The phrase 'Boys will be boys,' reflects that a male child is expected to be unpredictable and occasionally troublesome. — Kilroy J. Oldster

With three boys in the house, my mother was always on us when growing up about keeping our faces clean, washing behind our ears, and brushing our teeth. So I still take my morning routine seriously. — Cam Newton

I'm the biggest nerd - I love comic books and stuff like that! I don't have any friends who are actresses. I only had one girlfriend when I was growing up. Most of my friends were boys. I was such a tomboy. I enjoyed doing guy things. — Megan Fox

Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations. — Cyril Connolly

My favorite thing about coaching? Teaching. Being around young people, just watching a player grow and develop. You know, a young man comes in with dreams and goals and ambitions and just helping him reach (them). It's like your dad watching you grow up and like me watching my boys grow. — Tubby Smith

We live in an adolescent society, Neverland, where never growing up seems more the norm than the exception. Little boys wearing expensive suits and adult bodies should not be allowed to run big corporations. They shouldn't be allowed to run governments, armies, religions, small businesses and charities either and just quietly, they make pretty shabby husbands and fathers too. Mankind has become Pankind and whilst "lost boys" abound, there is also an alarming increase in the number of "lost girls. — Daniel Prokop

Those boys at the counter are too dreamy and young to do anything but drool as they watch Gillian. And, to her credit, Gillian is especially kind to them, even when Ephraim, the cook, suggests she kick them out. She understands that theirs might just be the last hearts she will break. When you're thirty-six and tired, when you've been living in places where the temperature rising to a hundred and ten and the air is so dry you have to use gallons of moisturizer, when you've been smacked around, late at night, by a man who loves bourbon, you start to realize that everything is limited, including your own appeal. You begin to look at young boys with tenderness, since they know so little and think they know so much. You watch teenage girls and feel shivers up and down your arms - those poor creatures don't know the first thing about time or agony or the price they're going to have to pay for just about anything. — Alice Hoffman

But babies become children, and they go to elementary schools that indoctrinate them on how to overthrow governments, and they get interested in boys and girls, or they don't, and anyway they change. — Joseph Fink

There are a million boys growing up in the United States who have never seen a saloon, and who will never know the handicap of liquor and this excellent condition will go on spreading over the country when the wet press and the paid propogandists of booze are forgotten. The abolition of the commercialized liquor trade in this country is as final as the abolition of slavery. — Henry Ford

Growing up, I was vaguely aware of things that went on in church, because I was in the boys' choir at the local Episcopal church. But I got the clear message that I was supposed to learn music there, and not pay too much attention to the rest of it, and I followed those instructions very carefully. — Francis Collins

The little boy who goes to the store and forgets what his mother sent him for, will probably grow up to be a congressman. — Evan Esar

Growing up, I was sort of a tomboy. I was the one skating with the boys. — Amy Smart

NEVERLAND:The imaginary island home of Peter Pan and the lost boys. A place where you never grow up. Michael Jackson's former retreat. An accurate description of the 21st century. — Daniel Prokop

The law of the [Cub Scout] pack guides the boys to move in the direction of being helpful, friendly, courteous, trustworthy and promote qualities which parents and the community are looking for. The whole purpose of scouting is to help the children grow up making good decisions in life. — John C. Maxwell

Once upon a time, growing up male gave little boys a sense of certainty about the natural order of things. We had short hair, wore pants, and played baseball. Girls had long hair, wore skirts, and, no matter how hard they tried, always threw a baseball just like a girl. — Kenneth R. Miller

What is the use of being a little boy if you are growing up to be a man. — Gertrude Stein

Psycho-analysis has taught us that a boy's earliest choice of objects for his love is incestuous and that those objects are forbidden ones - his mother and his sister. We have learnt, too, the manner in which, as he grows up, he liberates himself from this incestuous attraction. A neurotic, on the other hand, invariably exhibits some degree of psychical infantilism. He has either failed to get free from the psychosexual conditions that prevailed in his childhood or he has returned to them - two possibilities which may be summed up as developmental inhibition and regression. — Sigmund Freud

The boys on the island vary, of course, in numbers, according as they get killed and so on; and when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out; but at this time there were six of them, counting the twins as two. Let us pretend to lie here among the sugar-cane and watch them as they steal by in single file, each with his hand on his dagger. — J.M. Barrie

Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but overlaid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions and phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own. And thus, the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them. — John Stuart Mill

I am the youngest of four children - three boys and one girl. I don't think becoming an actor had anything to do with seeking attention, though. My relationship with my siblings when I was growing up was close and playful. — David Harewood

I'm a boy who doesn't want to grow up. — Ray Park

Growing up with three boys in a heavily male-dominated world, I especially needed to express myself as a woman. — Elisabeth Shue

Growing up, others girls wanted to dance and help their mums with the cooking. I liked to play soccer with the boys. Or I'd be off on my own, tilting mirrors towards the sun in order to burn armies of ants. That was my idea of fun. — Ali Larter

[My boys] bloody well will work. Same as myself, same as David. They're not going to be the kinds of kids that just hang about. I want them to be able to fulfill their passions, but I think it's important that the children grow up and have respect for themselves. — Victoria Beckham

The idea of not being a kid anymore terrifies me. I am an adult and I have been hurled out of the world of boys and girls into the fray of men and women, and expected to function as a grown-up when I never functioned very well as a kid. — Kelley York

Now whenever I left class to go to the boys' room, I worried that I would end up on the blue tiled floor in a puddle of piss and blood. — Kenneth Logan

Most normal boys, as they're growing up, they - in order to become attractive, they might, you know, get good at sports or join a rock band or develop good social skills, and for some reason, I thought that drawing comic books might be my route. — Adrian Tomine

Some of the greatest values that have influenced me through the years are those that I learned as a boy growing up on the farm. I remember mostly the love in our family, but I also remember the discipline. Then there was the work; we all had to work. — Billy Graham