Quotes & Sayings About Growing Up

How strange it is, our little procession of life! The child says, "When I am a big boy." But what is that? The big boy says, "When I grow up." And then, grown up, he says, "When I get married." But to be married, what is that after all? The thought changes to "When I'm able to retire." And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it; somehow he has missed it all, and it is gone. — Stephen Leacock

I started reading Dickens when I was about 12, and I particularly liked all of the orphan books. I always liked books about young people who are left on their own with the world, and the four children's books I've written feature that very thing: children that are abandoned by their families or running away from their families or ignored by their families and having to grow up quicker than they should, like David Copperfield - having to be the hero of their own story. — John Boyne

There has been among us, particularly in America, an adolescent competitiveness - a feeling that life is a race in which the victory of one must mean the defeat of the other. No one can measure how much personal unhappiness and inner cowardice have come from this immaturity of our social outlook, this childlike comparison, this absurd rivalry in every area of life. As our democracy becomes more mature, men have a chance of growing up and of realizing that every person is needed and has some contribution to make. — Joshua Loth Liebman

Yes, God loves you this very day and always. He is not waiting to love you until you have overcome your weaknesses and bad habits. He loves you today with a full understanding of your struggles. He is aware that you reach up to Him in heartfelt and hopeful prayer. He knows of the times you have held onto the fading light and believed-even in the midst of growing darkness. He knows of your sufferings. He knows of your remorse for the times you have fallen short or failed. And still He loves you. — Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom. — Christopher Lasch

Weston: Look at my outlook. You don't envy it, right?
Wesley: No.
Weston: That's because it's full of poison. Infected. And you recognize poison, right? You recognize it when you see it?
Wesley: Yes.
Weston: Yes, you do. I can see that you do. My poison scares you.
Wesley: Doesn't scare me.
Weston: No?
Wesley: No.
Weston: Good. You're growing up. I never saw my old man's poison until I was much older than you. Much older. And then you know how I recognized it?
Wesley: How?
Weston: Because I saw myself infected with it. That's how. I saw me carrying it around. His poison in my body. — Sam Shepard

My mom and dad played this music all the time when I was growing up, so to me songs by Jerry Lee and Fats Domino are the classics, they're the best songs ever. — Chris Isaak

I was on the set when I was five years old with Spencer Tracy. A lot of what I learned growing up in terms of artistry is very clean, very tidy, very organized. — Robert Blake

Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't ( ... ) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That's me and my memories. — Douglas Coupland

Growing up in the south, N.Y.C. always seemed like a destination to visit but not to live in. — Martha Hunt

I remember, growing up, if something big - God forbid - happened, the first jokes you heard on the subject came out of Jersey. — Oscar Nunez

Growing up in Ireland, when my family received important news, good or bad, we would boil water and make tea. It was the first thing I did when my father died in 1984. This ritual allowed me a moment to take in the enormity of what had happened. — Roma Downey

...[their] children were not growing up or being brought up, but were tumbling up. — Charles Dickens

My mom was a big feminist, and when I was growing up, I wasn't allowed to have typical girl toys: she did not let me have dolls. Barbies were banned in our household. She read feminist books to me; my mom was a major feminist. — Leila Janah

When I was growing up listening to music, it was 2004, when The Starting Line and Finch and The Used were kind of my favorite bands. — Kellin Quinn

Growing up in Ohio and just being kind of an average guy from flyover country - my dad was a factory guy - I try to put things on a screen that reflect reality. I don't mind if people want to argue with that, or think that's crazy. — Roger Ailes

My mother always told me growing up I had a punchable face. Little did I know she was predicting my television career. — Michael Emerson

I've always wanted to be in comedy ... growing up with Asian parents and not seeing yourself represented in media - it was always just a daydream. — Anna Akana

I was a Chicago Bulls, Michael Jordan fan growing up. — LeBron James

Growing up, I wasn't sure about acting, but I knew I wanted to be part of the movie industry. — Daniella Alonso

People in London are so much more exposed to danger, or bad things. It took me quite a long time to grow up in that environment. — Eliot Paulina Sumner

Growing up, I had a very busy social life. It wasn't until I was a sophomore in high school that I asked Mama if I could come into the kitchen and have her teach me how to cook something. — Paula Deen

Reading all my old love letters was disorienting. You remember thinking the thoughts and writing the words but, man, you can't TOUCH those feelings. Its like they belonged to someone else. Someone you don't even know. I'm aware, in an intellectual way. That I felt all those things about him, but this emotions are far away now.
What's so strange to me is that I can't even force my heart back to that place where I felt that all consuming passion. That makes me feel distant from myself. Who WAS I then? Will I ever be able to get back to that place? Reading the letters again made me wonder: Which is the real me? The one who saw the world in that emotionally saturated way, or the me who sees it the way I do now? — Bill Shapiro

As I was growing up, you know, I'm a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother's family had fled the czars of Russia before that. — Eugene Jarecki

One of my pleasantest memories as a kid growing up in New Orleans was how a bunch of us kids, playing, would suddenly hear sounds. It was like a phenomenon, like the Aurora Borealis
maybe. The sounds of men playing would be so clear, but we wouldn't be sure where they were coming from. So we'd start trotting, start running
'It's this way! It's this way!'
And sometimes, after running for a while, you'd find you'd be nowhere near that music. But that music could come on you any time like that. The city was full of the sounds of music. — Danny Barker

I supposed this is what is meant by 'growing up'...Find out the difference between what one expected one's life would be like and how things really are" -Lady Constance — Maryrose Wood

I wanna grow up and be a critic. — Richard Pryor

-When I was growing up, Lieutenant Uhura was a major role model for me, a strong black woman on the bridge of a starship ...
-In a miniskirt, answering the interplanetary telephone? — Suzanne Brockmann

In those years I did not care to enjoy sex, only to have it. That is what seeing Alex again on Fifth Avenue brought back to me - a youth of fascinated, passionless copulation. There they are, figures in a discoloured blur, young men and not so young, the nice ones with automobiles, the dull ones full of suspicions and stinginess. By asking a thousand questions of many heavy souls, I did not learn much. You receive biographies interesting mainly for their coherence. So many are children who from the day of their birth are growing up to be their parents. Look at the voting records, inherited like flat feet. — Elizabeth Hardwick

What are you girls, if not my very own heart growing up once and for all? — Mira Jacob

The shelf life of my own opinion is somewhere between 3 seconds to 3 months, especially when it is about life and its meaning!
... But my recorded opinions definitely reflect my growing up for me, sometimes we do grow up in 3 seconds after we express something! ... yes we do! — Madura Aka Tirunelveli Tamizhachchi

I've been a Lakers fan since growing up in Oklahoma. My hometown's finally got the Thunder, which is really exciting, but I've still got to stick with the Lakers. — Matt Kemp

I loved growing up in Canada. It's a great place to grow up, because - well, at least where I grew up - it's very multicultural. There's also good health care and a good education system. — Ryan Gosling

A person's native tongue influences the way he or she perceives music. The same succession of notes may sound different depending on the language the listener learned growing up.12 As evidence, speakers of tonal languages including Mandarin are more likely than Westerners to have perfect pitch. In one study, 92 percent of Mandarin speakers who began the music lessons at or before the age of five had perfect pitch compared to 8 percent of English speakers with comparable music training. — Ken Robinson

For me, growing up, the downside of it was that as a kid you don't want to stand out. You don't want to have a famous father let alone get a job because of your famous father, you know? But I'm a product of nepotism. That's how I got my foot in the door, through my dad. — Jeff Bridges

Drop the fear. Fear was taken up by you in your childhood, unconsciously. Now consciously drop it and be mature. Then the life can be a light which goes on deepening as you go on growing. — Rajneesh

Growing up poor, I didn't even have a lunch to take to school. Lunch was 26 cents, and we didn't even know what 26 cents looked like. I didn't love school because I wanted to disguise that I was poorer than everybody else. — George Foreman

If I could have all of those things, I wouldn't mind if I touched her or not. — Nick Hornby

As he rose to his feet he noticed that he was neither dripping nor panting for breath as anyone would expect after being under water. His clothes were perfectly dry. He was standing by the edge of a small pool - not more than ten feet from side to side in a wood. The trees grew close together and were so leafy that he could get no glimpse of the sky. All the light was green light that came through the leaves: but there must have been a very strong sun overhead, for this green daylight was bright and warm. It was the quietest wood you could possibly imagine. There were no birds, no insects, no animals, and no wind. You could almost feel the trees growing. The pool he had just got out of was not the only pool. There were dozens of others - a pool every few yards as far as his eyes could reach. You could almost feel the trees drinking the water up with their roots. This wood was very much alive. — C.S. Lewis

Sometimes we don't want to be tethered to yesterday. It's nicer to forget. Maybe the gaps in our memory are there for a reason, evolutionary perhaps, to give us the space to grow, to get away from childishness or childish things. Or maybe it's so we have the chance to invent, or at least include, some magic in our yesterdays, surely the consolation of getting older, of moving away from youth, is that we can shape our past to our fantasies. So, even if the present isn't going the way we want it, we can stand and remember our earlier selves as exciting and funny and daring — Sue Perkins

I remember growing up thinking that astronauts and their job was the coolest thing you could possibly do ... But I absolutely couldn't identify with the people who were astronauts. I thought they were movie stars. — David M. Brown

There is no barrier to Indiana Jones growing older. It's not an age-based character. We can't bang him up as much as we used to, maybe. But I guess I can pretend to have the capacity as well as I pretended before. — Harrison Ford

I asked myself what I believed. I had never prayed a lot. I hoped hard, wished hard, but I didn't pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organised religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking and honorable. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptised. — Lance Armstrong

Just being young and growing up in this business is hard. Just growing up in general is hard. — Justin Bieber

Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation. — Simon Schama

He couldn't believe it!
He knew her intent before she dove for her sgian dubh. But he couldn't react quickly enough. He wasn't about to allow her to arm herself again. He dropped his sword, needing both hands free and lunged for her, only with his body this time. Tackling her, he took her down, her back cushioned by the wealth of leaves, and planted his body on top of hers.
She grew very still then, and he smiled a little at her. "If you had done just as I asked, we wouldna be like this, now would we lassie?"
Sorcha was fuming mad and scared witless as the braw Highlander pressed his body on top of hers. She felt his staff growing against her belly the longer he remained between her legs. He was beautiful, his dark brown eyes swimming with lust, his long brown hair hanging about her face as she looked up at him, panting for breath, trembling, despite wishing to show he didn't frighten her one bit. But he did. — Terry Spear

I played hockey in North Dakota growing up and watch a lot of that. — Phil Jackson

I'm surrounded by music; I always was when I was growing up and continue to be. And I love music. And when I imagine a fictional world, I imagine there's music in it for those people, too. — Lorrie Moore

Without living, there will be no learning. Without learning, there will be no growth. Without growth, there will be no change. The only way you learn is by trying. You may make mistakes but you have to remember that doing so will lead to change. Be willing to learn from experiences, grow and live to become better not bitter. — Kemi Sogunle

I think I've always been drawn to the second person. When I was growing up and playing with my friends, the usual way we interacted with imaginary worlds was as characters: a bench was 'your' boat, leaves on a lawn were the fins of sharks out to get 'you.' — Mohsin Hamid

I think that's what growing up is all about. It's about taking on new responsibilities and learning what you can handle, and learning what you can't. — Sarah Michelle Gellar

You're growing up. All you need to remember is that nothing changes. New technology, new markets, global interconnectivity, doesn't matter. It's still the rulers and the ruled. The fleecers and the fleeced." "Which are you?" "I'm a piece of expensive equipment. You, too. Maybe not so expensive. [ ... ] — Sam Lipsyte

Home wasn't a pleasant place to live, growing up. — David Morse

He had made a passionate study of education, only to come, gradually, to the knowledge that education is nothing but the process of building up, gradually, a complete unit of consciousness. And each unit of consciousness is the living unit of that great social, religious, philosophic idea towards which humankind, like an organism seeking its final form, is laboriously growing. — D.H. Lawrence

Human inheritance is both blessing and curse. And in religious inheritance this paradox is acute. For many of us religion is heavy baggage. Stories of love and fear, liberation and constriction, grace and malice come not only from our own experiences, and our family's past, but from an ancestral history within a tradition. What curses do we need to shed, in the process of growing up? What can we hold to, as blessing? — Kathleen Norris

Healing occurs in the present, not the past. We're not held back by the love we didn't receive in the past, but by the love we'e not giving in the present. There's a lot of talk today about people growing up in dysfunctional homes, but who didn't grow up in a dysfunctional home? This world is a dysfunction. However, there's nothing we've been through or seen or done that cannot be used to make our lives more valuable now. We can grow from any experience, and we can transcend any experience. — Marianne Williamson

Poetry deserves the honor it obtains as the eldest offspring of literature, and the fairest. It is the fruitfulness of many plants growing into one flower and sowing itself over the world in shapes of beauty and color, which differ with the soil that receives and the sun that ripens the seed. In Persia, it comes up the rose of Hafiz; in England, the many-blossomed tree of Shakespeare. — Robert Aris Willmott

I think men, growing up, you have to go through some form of hardship. You've got to harden the metal. — Ice-T

Look forward to the wonderment of growing up, raising a family and driving by the gas station where the popular kids now work. — Tim Dorsey

We are told from childhood onward that everything we want to do is impossible. We grow up with this idea, and as the years accumulate, so too do the layers of prejudice, fear and guilt. There comes a time when our personal calling is so deeply buried in our soul as to be invisible. But know that it's still there. — Paulo Coelho

We think we have to prove our allegiance to God by being poor. Many years ago, my own psychic development teacher taught me that to be on a spiritual path meant that you needed to be poor, because that was proving your allegiance to God. So growing up with that kind of teaching from her was a real struggle for me, also. — Echo Bodine

Growing up, I loved the tale of Peter Rabbit and also books on Pippi Longstocking. Pippi was a girl who had so much fun and was very daring. My sons loved all the Dr. Seuss books — Soraya Diase Coffelt

I know this'll sound obnoxious, but acting was very much an accident for me. I didn't have, like, posters of Marlon Brando in my bedroom when I was growing up. — Michael Shannon

Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel. — Colson Whitehead

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

I think even though things are changing a bit, we still kind of tend to grow up with girls being like, 'Don't be too loud, don't be too rude, don't be too naughty,' or whatever, to act a certain way. — Courtney Barnett

There is no night porter wandering about in King's. The authorities pay you the compliment, ugly gate-crasher, of treating you as a grown-up. And since we are not grown-up you and I, we will perform our midnight frolics as the inmates burn the midnight oil. — Whipplesnaith

I've never had a very quiet voice. I tried in choir to make it smaller, and it just didn't work out. And I listened to a lot of soul music when I was growing up on my own accord. But I was mostly into Mama Cass and Gladys Knight, and they all had big voices too; just different than mine. — Beth Ditto

I'm appalled at how many people my age, or even five or ten years younger, have no tangible memories of important history that happened when we were growing up. — Jello Biafra

When I was growing up, both my grandmothers would play the organ, and we would all sing. — Janelle Monae

India went through a dramatic revolution after the '90s when our economy started opening up for the first time and Indians were now experiencing the Western life, if you will. Drugs and sex and a lot of those influences came in as the economy stabilized, and we were growing up and experiencing that. The Indian writing market was very small at that time. Our literature was very attuned to what Western audiences were interested in, so everybody was writing about the slums in India and magic realism or stories about Hindus and Muslims and partition. — Karan Bajaj

For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs, the question is a simple one: Can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then they'll end their days in societies dominated by people with a very different worldview. — Mark Steyn

Oh maturity's a wrapped up package deal so it seems
And ditching teenage fantasy means ditching all your dreams
All your friends and peers and family solemnly tell you you will
Have to grow up be an adult yeah be bored and unfulfilled
Oh when no ones yet explained to me exactly what's so great
About slaving 50 years away on something that you hate, about meekly shuffling down the path of mediocrity
Well if that's your road then take it but it's not the road for me. — Frank Turner

Growing up with two sisters, you either play by yourself or play Barbie with them. I played by myself. — Ricky Williams

I was a child during the Lebanese civil war, and I remember Israeli bombardments. So growing up, my view of Israel was completely negative. I'm not coming from a neutral place, but with time, I've had to re-examine my thinking. — Ziad Doueiri

All of us growing up have come to terms with too much pain. Although we repress it, it's still there. The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realising your parents do not need you in the way you need them. — John Lennon

My whole life growing up, both my parents told me not to swear like a sailor. After college, I recall there was finally a time where I swore, and neither one of them was correcting me, and I felt so relieved. I thought, finally; I can finally be myself and not get yelled at. — Rory Freedman

You look like trouble. When I was growing up, my mother used to tell me to never trust a redhead. — Tarryn Fisher

That's one of the things we learn as we grow older
how to forgive. It comes easier at forty than it did at twenty. — L.M. Montgomery

God's ultimate goal for your life on earth is not comfort, but character development. He wants you to grow up spiritually and become like Christ. — Rick Warren

Growing up, my father was a financial analyst for an oil company. He was just a regular dad. And when I would say, 'Hey, come see my play,' he'd say, 'Sure.' He'd see one, 'Oh, good play' - you know, very typical dad reaction. — Eric McCormack

I didn't actually get along with my dad when I was growing up, so by the time I was in my 20s, I didn't think I was going to be a writer. — Brian Herbert

Growing up in a house of five girls, I couldn't help but glance at a fashion magazine or two. — Karlie Kloss

I always loved comic books when I was growing up, and Spider-Man was definitely a character I gravitated towards because I loved the story of an average teenager having super powers. — Drake Bell

When I was growing up we didn't have a massive house and there were five women running around, so my dad and I had to stick together! — Louis Tomlinson

Growing up in college, in high school, I was the focal point. — James Harden

He considered the hard times in his life. All the things he had been afraid of. All those years wasted, he told himself, because I was terrified of being different. That's why all us fifty-four-year-olds end up looking so much alike. All of us are terrified of being different. — Stuart McLean

Anybody who gives away money is mostly looking at things where they think they can make a difference. I'm trying to help people who helped me, educational institutions that helped me with scholarships, or organizations that were very useful to me in growing up. — David Rubenstein

Our growing ability to eliminate the slow-moving aspects of entertainment and go hopping from one peak to another is not without cost. Stand-up comics, movie-makers and others who earn their living entertaining no longer "waste" time with setups and plot development, lest we reach for the remote and click them off our screen. The result is a loss of subtlety, anticipation and nuance and, in the process, a coarsening of our discourse. — William Raspberry

You grow up watching certain films or admiring certain filmmakers, and to write a love letter to one and have them validate it, it's extraordinary. — Simon Pegg

When I was growing up, I did not exercise at all. I was raised in the French Quarter in New Orleans. If I saw someone running, I would call the police because I thought they stole something on Royal Street. — Richard Simmons

The side effects of growing up 'just outside of [insert major urban center here] are many but practically intangible. This is logical given the fact that suburbia itself is a side effect and practically intangible. — Sloane Crosley

The nice thing about growing up in that kind of environment is you were exposed to so much
music, plays, art exhibits, rock concerts. — Perrey Reeves

You dream that you want to be a monster maker when you grow up, and that's what happened. I refused to take no for an answer. I just was a very driven kid, who's now a very driven semi-adult. — Howard Berger

[There's] a joke that I've done forever: 'Nowadays they say that the largest majority of people will be Latino and you'll tell scary stories to your grandkids: "A long time ago when I was growing up, there used to be people who were white," and the kid says, "Really?" and you say, "Yeah, like the man who cuts our grass."' I've had that line forever and I love it. — George Lopez

Growing up on a mountain in Tennessee, I spent most of my childhood outside. — Rachel Boston

Have I added to their building blocks, shoring them up with strength and their own magnificence? Have I shown them enough color? Did I let them have enough ice cream and leave them alone enough without my anxieties? How can we know which is the right way? We have to go with our inner instincts and the feeling in our bones. But I can contribute to their growing cells, show them some foods that are better than others, walk with them, and encourage their own tastes. I can teach them to love and appreciate food, help them treat their bodies like gold, listen to them wanting more or less. The rest I have to trust. — Tessa Kiros

That's because true travel, the kind with no predetermined end, is one of the most selfish endeavors we can possibly undertake-an act in which we focus solely on our own fulfillment, with little regard to those we leave behind. After all, we're the ones venturing out into the big crazy world, filling up journals, growing like weeds. And we have the gall to think they're just sitting at home, soaking in security and stability.
It is only when we reopen these wrapped and ribboned boxes, upon our triumphant return home, that we discover nothing is the way we had left it before. — Stephanie Elizondo Griest

My maternal granddad, Leonard, was full of amazing stories. He was an orphan, with 11 or 12 brothers and sisters, and he used to tell us about growing up near the Irrawaddy river and how one brother was eaten by a crocodile. — Jamie Cullum

Well, when I was growing up it was Ozzie and Harriet on TV - nobody's parents were like that. — Liza Minnelli