Grown Up Quotes & Sayings

all this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet. And for us to suppose we can have something great - ideas, work - it's all dust and ashes." "But — Anton Chekhov

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

Having grown up in a military family, I know that politics should have no role in determining who is best qualified to lead our armed forces. — Ron Barber

I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and tired and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded. — Ellen Glasgow

She understood that it had never just been about talent: it had also always been about money. Ethan was brilliant at what he did, and he might well have made it even if Ash's father hadn't encouraged him, but it really helped that Ethan had grown up in a sophisticated city, and that he had married into a wealthy family. Ash was talented, but not all that talented. This was the thing that no one said, not once. But of course it was fortunate that Ash didn't have to worry about money while trying to think about art. Her wealthy childhood had given her a head start, and now Ethan had picked up where her childhood had left off. — Meg Wolitzer

It's a difficult thing to lose a child, a grown-up child. — Claire Tomalin

One ought not to judge her: all children are Heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb high trees and say shocking things and leap so very high grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one. But, as in their reading and arithmetic and drawing, different children proceed at different speeds. (It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.) Some small ones are terrible and fey, Utterly Heartless. Some are dear and sweet and Hardly Heartless At All. September stood very generally in the middle on the day the Green Wind took her, Somewhat Heartless, and Somewhat Grown. — Catherynne M Valente

If I may, I'd like to take a moment to praise Mark Zuckerberg's parents for not procreating sooner. Praise be to all that is holy that Facebook didn't exist when I was that age and the Internet then was but a Usenet group for Star Trek fans. I feel like the luckiest person in the world to have grown up when cameras used actual film because the only thing that stood between infamy and me was the clerk who developed photos at Walgreens. Thank God for him. — Jen Lancaster

Young people are having a hard time with what's reality and what's fantasy these days ... We created discussion. It wasn't to create controversy for sale's sake, but rather it was my obligation to use the medium for discussion. Nobody's discussing the grown-up topics; they are faking and fronting. — Chuck D

... the matter was new to me, and I had no material for its treatment. But I got books, read up the facts, laboriously constructed a skeleton out of the dry bones of the real, and then clothed them, and tried to breathe into them life, and in this last aim I had pleasure. With me it was a difficult and anxious time till my facts were found, selected, and properly pointed; nor could I rest from research and effort till I was satisfied of correct anatomy; the strength of my inward repugnance to the idea of flaw or falsity sometimes enabled me to shun egregious blunders; but the knowledge was not there in my head, ready and mellow; it had not been down in Spring, grown in Summer, harvested in Autumn, and garnered through Winter; whatever I wanted I must go out and gather fresh; glean of wild herbs my lap full, and shred them green into the pot. — Charlotte Bronte

I have never relied on anyone else for money since I graduated, and that made me feel grown up. — Jeanine Tesori

When you grow up", I said, "do you ever stop feeling little and weak?"
"No," she says. "There's always a little frail and tiny thing inside, no matter how grown-up you are. — David Almond

People feel they are not participating in the decision-making process. Decisions are exclusive to those at the very top. You have grown up with crony capitalism and it creates ever more resentment. — Sri Mulyani Indrawati

Soeur Marie Emelie"

Soeur Marie Emelie
is little and very old:
her eyes are onyx,
and her cheeks vermilion,
her apron wide and kind
and cobalt blue.

She comforts
generations and generations
of children,
who are
"new"
at the convent school.
When they are eight,
they are already up to her shoulder,
they grow up and go into the world,
she remains,
forever,
always incredibly old,
but incredibly never older...
She has an affinity with the hens,
When a hen dies,she sits down on a bench and cries,
she is the only grown-up, whose tears
are not frightening tears.
Children can weep without shame,
at her side...
Soeur Marie Emelie...
her apron as wide and kind
as skies on a summer day
and as clean and blue. — Caryll Houselander

But we didn't know anything in our twenties when we were first married. It was all just instinct and the patterns we'd grown up with. — Kent Haruf

I have seen conversations that I had three years ago, when I was young, in love, and naive. I've grown a lot since those days. I now know that love isn't just that abstract feeling, because there are so many other sides to it. Sometimes you learn that to truly love someone you have to just support them as a person, and step out of their view finder. Be their friend and nothing else. Sometimes you learn to walk away and find what you need. You learn you knew nothing and that's when you grow up and change your ways. There may be no fairy take endings, but that is okay, because love is much more real than that. So much less superficial. — Jennifer Megan Varnadore

Our teacher made us write a story about what we want to be when we're big," Noah tells him.
"What did you write?"
"I wrote that I wanted to concentrate on being little first."
"That's a very good answer."
"Isn't it? I would rather be old than a grown-up. All grown-ups are angry, it's just children and old people who laugh."
"Did you write that?"
"Yes."
"What did your teacher say?"
"She said I hadn't understood the task."
"And what did you say?"
"I said she hadn't understood my answer. — Fredrik Backman

Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork ... They run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by some mysterious inner needle that points all the time to what they must do next. You can only marvel at such misuse of time. — Elizabeth Bowen

When had Eden grown up? I feel like I blinked and missed it. — Marie Lu

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 like to make fun of Jeffy [of Family Circus] the most, because I know the grown-up Jeff Keane personally and enjoy ridiculing him. — Stephan Pastis

How do we know that Moses was grown up? Because he went out unto his brethren, and was ready to bear the burdens and share the plight of his people. Maturity is sensitivity to human suffering. — Julius Gordon

The specific use of folks as an exclusionary and inclusionary signal, designed to make the speaker sound like one of the boys or girls, is symptomatic of a debasement of public speech inseparable from a more general erosion of American cultural standards. Casual, colloquial language also conveys an implicit denial of the seriousness of whatever issue is being debated: talking about folks going off to war is the equivalent of describing rape victims as girls (unless the victims are, in fact, little girls and not grown women). Look up any important presidential speech in the history of the United States before 1980, and you will find not one patronizing appeal to folks. Imagine: 'We here highly resolve that these folks shall not have died in vain; and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth. — Susan Jacoby

It's very important not to talk down to kids, and to give them something which they think is quite grown-up and hardcore. Kids themselves are very good at self-censoring. If they don't like something, if they think it's too strong for them, they'll simply stop reading. That's the thing about a book, you can't force someone to read it ... I think there's a lot in my books about friendship, leadership, about society and how it works, how we learn to live with each other and what skills do we need to make a viable society. Kids don't need to know any of that, they just want someone to be eaten again. — Charlie Higson

It's very, very special for me. This is where I've grown up, it's my home, and winning the Monaco Grand Prix is the highlight of any racing driver's career and for me a childhood dream. It being my home makes it all the more special, unbelievable. — Nico Rosberg

But just as soon as this war's over and finished with,I'll get back home and marry her.I've grown up with her, Joey, known her all my life. S'pose I know her almost as well as I know myself, and I like her a lot better. — Michael Morpurgo

Once you let yourself begin to be grown-up, you face a world full of problems you can't solve. The politicians and specialists - adults, all - have a hard enough time trying to figure out where to look. It doesn't have to be that way. The greatest solutions in society are reached by corporate thinking, ruled by a motive to either make a profit or go out of business. — Ray Bradbury

Where did you grow up?"
He wiggled his eyebrows at her. "Who says I've grown up? — Dana Marton

had my share of beauty, but I do not pretend to be anything extraordinary now. When a woman has five grown-up daughters, — Jane Austen

I'm not actually sure I'm grown-up enough for grown-up books. — Barbara Park

Cara: I used to believe everything my brother told me, because he was older and I figured he knew more about the world. But as it turns out, being a grown-up doesn't mean you're fearless. It just means you fear different things. — Jodi Picoult

No one tells you that it hurts this much to be a grown-up. That people are so complicated they end up hurting each other to self preserve. — Tarryn Fisher

Science is a capital or fund perpetually reinvested; it accumulates, rolls up, is carried forward by every new man. Every man of science has all the science before him to go upon, to set himself up in business with. What an enormous sum Darwin availed himself of and reinvested! Not so in literature; to every poet, to every artist, it is still the first day of creation, so far as the essentials of his task are concerned. Literature is not so much a fund to be reinvested as it is a crop to be ever new-grown. — John Burroughs

I've aged, but I don't think I've grown up. — Helena Bonham Carter

You and I who still enjoy fairy tales have less reason to wish actual childhood back. We have kept its pleasures and added some grown-up ones as well. — C.S. Lewis

I don't hate you, Jace."
"I don't hate you, either."
She looked up at him, relieved. "I'm glad to hear that - "
"I wish I could hate you," he said. His voice was light, his mouth curved in an unconcerned half smile, his eyes sick with misery. "I want to hate you. I try to hate you. It would be so much easier if I did hate you. Sometimes I think I do hate you and then I see you and I - "
Her hands had grown numb with their grip on the blanket. "And you what?"
"What do you think?" Jace shook his head. "Why should I tell you everything
about how I feel when you never tell me anything? It's like banging my head on a
wall, except at least if I were banging my head on a wall, I'd be able to make myself stop."
Clary's lips were trembling so violently that she found it hard to speak. "Do you think it's easy for me?" she demanded. — Cassandra Clare

You have fewer than 1,000 Saturdays with each child in your care before they're grown up. — Laura Vanderkam

Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown,
or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws. — Horace Mann

Heartbreaking and brave, Rachel Resnick masterfully pulls the past to the present, exploring how the seeds of addiction planted during an unhappy girlhood can blossom into a grown-up woman's frantic search for love. LOVE JUNKIE is a memoir unlike any other; it will blow your mind. — Lee Montgomery

I've got the rest of my life to be a grown-up. And for now, it's OK to be young. — Cory Monteith

I had grown up. I had learned that being a woman was knowing when to stand firm and when to compromise. I had learned to laugh and weep; I had learned that I was weak as well as strong. I had learned to love. I was no longer a rigid, upright tree that would not flex and bow, even though the gale threatened to snap it in two; I was the willow that bends and shivers and sways, and yet remains strong. — Juliet Marillier

Father laughed, which upset Bruno even more; there was nothing that made him more angry than when a grown-up laughed at him for not knowing something, especially when he was trying to find out the answer by asking questions. — John Boyne

I would bring myself down to his level. I would talk to him about bridge, and golf, and politics, and neckties. And the grown-up would be greatly pleased to have met such a sensible man. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

The Family and Medical Leave Act, for example, only entitles spouses, grown children, and parents to take time off to care for a sick loved one. If a childless single person falls ill, only her parents have the legal right to take off work to care for her. If they're deceased or not up to the task, she's out of luck. Even if she has a sister, niece, or best friend willing to take a leave, they won't be legally entitled to do so. No one has the right to care for her. — Sara Eckel

There is within the human heart a tough fibrous root of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess. It covets 'things' with a deep and fierce passion. The pronouns 'my' and 'mine' look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use is significant. They express the real nature of the old Adamic man better than a thousand volumes of theology could do. They are verbal symptoms of our deep disease. The roots of our hearts have grown down into things, and we dare not pull up one rootlet lest we die. Things have become necessary to us, a development never originally intended. God's gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution. — A.W. Tozer

For a little while, I actually feel grown-up and responsible. I strut around with my head held high, looking the other responsible people in the eye with that knowing glance that says, I understand. I'm responsible now too. Just look at my groceries. — Allie Brosh

Animal crackers, and cocoa to drink That is the finest of suppers, I think When I'm grown up and can have what I please, I think I shall always insist upon these. — Christopher Morley

The playfulness that I talk about comes very slowly. You cannot just jump out of your seriousness which you have accumulated for lives. Now it has a force of its own. It is not a simple matter to relax; it is one of the most complex phenomena possible, because all that we are taught is tension, anxiety, anguish. Seriousness is the very core the society is built around. Playfulness is for small children, not for grown-up people. And I am teaching you to be children again, to be playful again. It is a quantum leap, a jump ... but it takes time to understand. — Rajneesh

If you're 20 years old, you've grown up without buying albums. — Andy Summers

O.K., then, all right, they would adopt a white-trash dog. Ha ha. They could name it Zeke, buy it a little corncob pipe and a straw hat. She imagined the puppy, having crapped on the rug, looking up at her, going, Cain't hep it. But no. Had she come from a perfect place? Everything was transmutable. She imagined the puppy grown up, entertaining some friends, speaking to them in a British accent: My family of origin was, um, rather not, shall we say, of the most respectable ...
Ha ha, wow, the mind was amazing, always cranking out these - — George Saunders

I've grown up with dogs and love dogs. — Stephanie Zimbalist

The burden of being intelligent and shy and young is that you will always know, cannot not know; have grown up in a fiction of perpetual responsibility, believing that whatever cracks in life you find must be your cracks, that anything at all can be your fault. — John Burnham Schwartz

Sometimes I want to clean up my desk and go out and say, "Respect me; I'm a respectable grown-up!" and other times I just want to jump into a paper bag and shake and bake myself to death. — Wendy Wasserstein

Finally, for all of us but a lucky few, the dream of playing big-time baseball is relinquished so we can get on with grown-up things. — John Thorn

Maybe there's a chance to get back to grown-up films. Anything that uses humor and dramatic values to deal with human emotions and gets down to what people are to people. — Robert Altman

As football gets more globalised, it's probably more important than ever to have one or two players in your team who have grown up in the same streets or been to the same schools as the hard-core fans. — Gary Neville

She laughed at him then, because he sounded like a small boy, not like a very large grown-up Beast with a voice so deep it made the hair on the back of your neck stir when you heard it. 'But vegetables are good for you,' she said, and added caressingly, 'They make you grow up big and strong.'
He smiled, showing a great many teeth. 'You see why I wish to eat no more vegetables. — Robin McKinley

My imagination is closer to a child's imagination than to a grown-up's. — Mary Pope Osborne

Sometimes I think I was more in control of my life years and years ago, and yet one should make progress; one should learn more every year and become ... well, if not happier, then calmer and more able to handle your problems. But I'm not. Sometimes I just seem to make more problems for myself. I do. It makes me feel I haven't grown up as much as I should have by now. — Marilyn Monroe

Little girls get hurt when they play grown-up games. — V.C. Andrews

I felt very grown up when I was wearing makeup, thank you very much. — Nick Rhodes

It was amusing, in such lightness of air, that the Prince should again present himself only to speak for the Princess, so unfortunately unable again to leave home; and that Mrs Verver should as regularly figure as an embodied, a beautifully deprecating apology for her husband, who was all geniality and humility among his own treasures, but as to whom the legend had grown up that he couldn't bear, with the height of his standards and the tone of the company, in the way of sofas and cabinets, habitually kept by him, the irritation and depression to which promiscuous visiting, even at pompous houses, had been found to expose him. — Henry James

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies. — Roy Blount Jr.

Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions — Frantz Fanon

When you're young, the blue blazer feels like a grown-up costume. — Willie Geist

Jaenelle opened her mouth, closed it, and finally said timidly, "Do you think, when I'm grown up, I could wear an outfit like that?" Daemon bit his cheek. He didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Buying time, he looked down at himself. "Well," he said, giving it slow consideration, "the shirt would have to be altered somewhat to accommodate a female figure, but I don't see why not." Jaenelle beamed. "Daemon, it's a wonderful hat." It took him a moment to admit it to himself, but he was miffed. He stood in front of her, on display as it were, and the thing that fascinated her most was his hat. You do know how to bruise a man's ego, don't you, little one? he thought dryly as he said, "Would you like to try it on?" Jaenelle bounced to the mirror, brushing against him as she passed. — Anne Bishop

I had grown up in a house with a fence around it, and in this fence was a white smooth wooden gate, two holes bored round and low together so the dog could see through. One night, the moon high, late for me home from the school dance, I remember that I stopped, hand on the gate, and spoke so quietly to myself and to the woman that I would love that not even the dog could have heard.
I don't know where you are, but you're living right now, somewhere on this earth. And one day you and I are going to touch this gate where I'm touching it now. Your hand will touch this very wood, here! Then we'll walk through and we'll be full of a future and of a past and we'll be to each other like no one else has ever been. We can't meet now, I don't know why. But some day our questions will be answers and we'll be caught in something so bright ... and every step I take is one step closer on a bridge we must cross to meet. — Richard Bach

In 1972, I recorded Gumbo, an album that was both a tribute to and my interpretation of the music I had grown up with in New Orleans in the 1940s and 1950s. I tried to keep a lot of the little changes that were characteristic of New Orleans, while working my own funknology on piano and guitar. — Dr. John

In British culture, redheads get teased at school. But I've grown up enough to realize I love my hair. — Lily Cole

The diamond absolutes.
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner emigre, grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne
Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;
Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
The comet's pulsing tose. — Seamus Heaney

Let us be quite clear that the ideal is a paradox. Most of us, having grown up among the ruins of the chivalrous tradition, were taught in our youth that a bully is always a coward. Our first week at school refuted this lie, along with its corollary that a truly brave man is always gentle. It is a pernicious lie because it misses the real novelty and originality of the medieval demand upon human nature. Worse still, it represents as a natural fact something which is really a human ideal, nowhere fully attained, and nowhere attained at all without arduous discipline. It is refuted by history and Experience. Homer's Achilles knows nothing of the demand that the brave should also be the modest and the merciful. He kills men as they cry for quarter or takes them prisoner to kill them at leisure. — C.S. Lewis

Country music is me, it's what I've grown up with, and it's what I do. — Scotty McCreery

Be the kind of grown up you needed as a child. — Jill Telford

Affection between adults - if they are really adult in mind and not merely grown up children - and creatures so relatively selfish and cruel as children necessarily are without knowing it or meaning it, cannot be called natural. — George Bernard Shaw

When leaders wonder what they can do to position their societies for the industries of the future, they need to open up and resist control-freak tendencies. The 21st century is a terrible time to be a control freak; future grown depends on empowering people. — Alec J. Ross

You need to come face-to-face with the past, not as some naive, easily wounded boy, but as a grown-up, independent professional. Not to see what you want to see, but what you must see. Otherwise you'll carry around that baggage for the rest of your life. — Haruki Murakami

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

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

Whoever wishes to make progress in perfection should use particular diligence in not allowing himself to be led away by his passions, which destroy with one hand the spiritual edifice which is rising by the labors of the other. But to succeed well in this, resistance should be begun while the passions are yet weak; for after they are thoroughly rooted and grown up, there is scarcely any remedy. — St. Vincent

I don't believe any lip shade is off-limits, but texture is key. A sheer lipstick in a healthy pink or neutral color looks more polished and grown-up than a super-shiny gloss. — Bobbi Brown

Xmas all grown ups sa is the season for the kiddies but this do not prevent them from taking a tot or 2 from the bot and having, it may seme, a better time than us. For children in fact Xmas is often a bit of a strane wot with pretending that everything is a surprise. Above all father xmas is a strane. You canot so much as mention that there is no father xmas when some grown-up sa Hush not in front of wee tim. So far as i am concerned if father xmas use langwage like that when he tripped over the bolster last time we had beter get a replacement. — Geoffrey Willans

He'd grown up an untroubled believer, but the war had put an end to that. What God could permit such misery and slaughter? But, in time, he had found consolation in a God beyond understanding, and prayed for those he'd lost, for those he loved, and an end to evil in the world. — Alan Furst

Parents get all focused on themselves, and they see their little babies start walkin' and talkin', and since they kinda look like them and sound like the, they start thinking of those little babies as themselves....And then something funny happens. Those babies grow up to be kids and teenages and grown-ups in their own right....so everything the kids do, everything, is a betrayal. — Barry Lyga

Yet Tanneman was a man grown up to danger and trouble, knowing nothing else, and for the first time he was acting with conscious, deliberate purpose. — Louis L'Amour

I cannot feel like a duchess in my
mother's sitting room."
"What do you feel like, then?"
"Hmmm." She took a sip of her tea. "Just Daphne
Bridgerton, I suppose. It's difficult to shed the surname in
this clan. In spirit, that is."
"I hope that is a compliment," Lady Bridgerton remarked.
Daphne just smiled at her mother. "I shall never escape
you, I'm afraid." She turned to Gareth. "There is nothing like one's family to make one feel like one has never
grown up. — Julia Quinn

Robots can now milk cows. Oil prices have fallen globally, meaning both the petro-states and those indirectly propped up by them are weakened. At the same time, slower growth in China has lately shrunk its voracious appetite for African, Australian, and Latin American commodities. China accounted for more than a third of global growth in recent years, and its growth engine multiplied the growth of many of the countries that exported raw materials to Beijing. That has slowed. China's total debt has grown from roughly 150 percent of its GDP in 2007 to around 240 percent today - a massive increase in one decade that is dampening its growth and its imports and shrinking China's wallet for foreign aid and investment in African and Latin American commodity-exporting countries. In — Thomas L. Friedman

Sometimes being a grown-up sucks hairy balls! — Anonymous

When I was 14, I wanted to smoke because my mother smoked like mad. I wanted to smoke to look grown-up. But my mother said: 'You shouldn't smoke. Your hands are not that beautiful and that shows when you smoke. — Karl Lagerfeld

The beautiful thing is I have sort of grown up. I don't care if I'm highbrow or not anymore. — David Lagercrantz

Your Nafs is just like a suckling child. If you do not take the pains to wean him, he will yearn for his mother's breast even when he's grown up. Therefore you should not try to satisfy your lust by indulging in sins. This will only increase the desire for more sins. The same is the case with the disease of gluttony. The more a person eats, the more his hunger increases. — Busiri

I think the kind of landscape that you grew up in, it lives with you. I don't think it's true of people who've grown up in cities so much; you may love a building, but I don't think that you can love it in the way that you love a tree or a river or the colour of the earth; it's a different kind of love. — Arundhati Roy

The Flowers
All the names I know from nurse:
Gardener's garters, Shepherd's purse,
Bachelor's buttons, Lady's smock,
And the Lady Hollyhock.
Fairy places, fairy things,
Fairy woods where the wild bee wings,
Tiny trees for tiny dames
These must all be fairy names!
Tiny woods below whose boughs
Shady fairies weave a house;
Tiny tree-tops, rose or thyme,
Where the braver fairies climb!
Fair are grown-up people's trees,
But the fairest woods are these;
Where, if I were not so tall,
I should live for good and all — Robert Louis Stevenson

Adrianna tried to deal with a lot of grown up issues on her own and fell into some bad traps that could have had irreversible results. I would like to say to anyone who finds themselves in a predicament similar to young Adrianna's, it is important to seek help from someone you can trust. Even though she had reservations discussing her problems with others, there is nothing shameful in seeking guidance for problems you or someone you know may be having. Like Adrianna, you may have many people around you who are willing to help, such as a family member, coach, teacher, guidance counselor, or others. You will find that facing your problems with the help of others will make life much more enjoyable. — Vicki L. Drewa

Her breasts had changed, too. He remembered when they had stuck out from her chest as if they were weightless, the nipples pointing up. Then, when she was pregnant, they had become even bigger, and the nipples had grown larger. Now they were lower and softer, and they swung delightfully from side to side when she walked. He had loved them through all their changes. He wondered what they would be like when she was old. — Ken Follett

People were like, 'Oh, there are going to be people running up to you taking pictures' and I thought it was going to be a bunch of little kids. But it's grown-ups! And that's, like, creepy. — Mo'ne Davis

I imagine him grown up and finished with med school, patients lying on the operating table - reaching inside people's rib cages, fixing their broken hearts. — Katie Cotugno

The Churches of the Standing Order were filled with unconverted persons, with many who had grown up in them from infancy, being introduced at that time by christening; and but a small proportion of their members made any claim to a spiritual regeneration. The intuitions of a converted soul recoil from Church associations with those whose only claim to membership in Christ's mystical body is a ceremony performed over an unconscious infant, for the renewed man seeks fellowship with those who, like himself, have exercised faith in Christ's saving merits, and he is likely to take the Scriptures for his guide in seeking his Church home. — Thomas Armitage

Yet I felt he was innocent in a way I was not, that I knew more about evil than he ever could, because he had parents who loved him and wanted the best for him, while I had grown up with Mummy. — Jo Walton

All the talk about virgins recently had made him secretly yearn for some of the Nectar that they produced in their young wombs.It must have been at least fifty years since he had last tasted a virgin's Nectar. And that came from the lovely Metis, the neighbour's daughter, who subsequently became his wife.
Virgins were supposed to have hymens, yet he had never seen his wife's hymen."You don't notice such things when you are young", he told himself. All his three daughters had grown up from virgins to adults without him ever noticing them having hymens. They were all happily married now, with families of their own.[MMT] — Nicholas Chong

Anyone who can read history with both hemispheres of the brain knows that a world comes to an end every instant
the waves of time leave washed up behind themselves only dry memories of a closed & petrified past
imperfect memory, itself already dying & autumnal. And every instant also gives birth to a world
despite the cavillings of philosophers & scientists whose bodies have grown numb
a present in which all impossibilities are renewed, where regret & premonition fade to nothing in one presential hologrammatical psychomantric gesture. — Hakim Bey