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What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.
Sep 10, 2025
You feel like telling him you're not single in the way that he thinks you're single. After all, you have yourself. I think a lot of humor is about distracting yourself. Pretend you're not trying to make it funny. Because for some reason the effort to be funny smells like sulphur in our culture.
Sometimes in New York, you're walking down the street and you realize there's a girl walking in front of you whose thighs you could hit a golf ball through, and maybe that makes you depressed.
I certainly have a very colorful nature, filled with great highs and great lows... in my early adulthood I probably was grappling with some serious depression issues.
We continue to think of virginity as first intercourse. That ends up minimizing and marginalizing other things kids are engaged in, like oral sex. And it's not going to feel particularly good for girls as the big marker of adulthood.
You think that adulthood will hit and you'll suddenly be more capable. But that doesn't happen, ever, does it?
Was he smart enough? Introspective enough? Was it just enough to love him, or should I attach myself to someone who seemed farther ahead of me, someone smarter and more ambitious than me, who'd be sure to carry me along into the version of adulthood I thought I should be striving for?
A life-long blessing for children is to fill them with warm memories of times together. Happy memories become treasures in the heart to pull out on the tough days of adulthood.
For me the breakthrough was the realization that I wasn't the center of the universe or even the centre of my own world. That you and your work, your living, are not the only reason you're here. Your role is to shepherd your children through to adulthood. That's the point of life. Your own little sessions and needs and passions are just there to flavour you and help you do that job for your children.
Andrew said you were the best person he ever knew." "He reached that conclusion before he saw me raise three barbarian children to adulthood. I understand your mother has six." "Right." "And you're the oldest." "Yes." "That's too bad. Parents always make their worst mistakes with the oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right.
It always seems that the generation below you is getting worse, which is why I had the worst character in the film Adulthood that said it. I don't remember speaking to my elders like that, because you never remember... actually our generation was quite bad because everyone else always seems worse.
I thought of my father's wisdom, as though it were buried in a box under a tree. As in the old song - a gold box with a silver pin. Some day I should be grown up, and I should dig up the box and turn the pin.
We are on red alert when it comes to how we are perceiving ourselves as a species. There's no desire to be an adult. Adulthood is not a goal. It's not seen as a gift.
There is 'a time to be born' - and born again, free of accumulated, encrusted sores of fears and prejudices, old hates, of cancerous wounds, old prides. And there is a time to die - a time for the blue, unburied child of our young years to be decently interred - and to get on with the living.
gods are children's blankets that get carried over into adulthood.
But the gates of my happy childhood had clanged shut behind me; I had become adult enough to recognize the need to conceal unbearable emotions for the sake of others.
one of the blessings of adulthood is that one is no longer addressed as a thing.
When I was in college, I remember fearing that the dreary grind of adulthood would feature infinitely more existential dread than frat parties had, but the opposite has been true for me. I'm much less likely to feel that gnawing fear of aimlessness and nihilism than I used to be and that's partly because education gave me job opportunities, but it's mostly because education gave me perspective and context.
I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.
[Adulthood:] It's when you stop doing the stuff you have to make excuses for and when you stop making excuses for the stuff you have to do.
The definition of adulthood is that you want to sleep.
The sad discovery of the adult world was the permanent truth: you don't always do what you want to do; you do what you must.
Life is not what you expected it to be.
The moment you decide that you're a grownup now, and therefore must put away foolish things like staying out all night or cruising down strange highways is the moment you will lose that ineffable glow of youth. If you don't believe me, look around. Study those people who would rather go to shopping malls than dance halls, who think the height of depravity is bidding two no trump with only fifteen points. Every single one of these people has a stringy neck.
People often say that you should never work with child actors. I think that's all wrong. Children have not had the imagination kicked out of them by life experience and adulthood. So, they still are very much alive with that kind of magical thinking which enables an actor to believe they're in these circumstances and make them real to you.
Let's face it: part of being a grownup is that every day you have to choose between going out at night or staying home, and it is one of life's unhappy truths that there is not enough time to do both.
The struggle to be considered a grown-up begins, I believe, shortly after birth.
Has it ever occurred to you that parents are nothing but overgrown kids until their children drag them into adulthood? Usually kicking and screaming?
The prospects were depressing: Adulthood meant that I'd have to stop having fun and do something I didn't really want to do for the rest of my life – which was apparently a considerable chunk of time.
I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children stories. They were better than that. They just were. Adult stories never made sense, and they were slow to start. They made me feel like there were secrets, Masonic, mythic secrets, to adulthood. Why didn't adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?
The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way.
For me, it feels like driving from truth into a lie, from adulthood to childhoold. I watch the land of pavement and glass and metal turn into an empty field. The snow is falling softly now, and I can faintly see the city's skyline up ahead, the buildings just a shade darker than the clouds.
For me the greatest revenge of all is having a happy adulthood, waking up in my gorgeous turquoise bedroom in the morning beside a person who really inspires me. That's the best revenge a girl-loving-girl from the Bible belt could possibly have. And, importantly, it's healthy.
If I were entering adulthood now instead of in the environment of fifty years ago, I would choose a career that kept me in touch with nature more than science. ... Too few natural areas remain; both by intent and by indifference we have insulated ourselves from the wilderness that produced us.
Calculated is the truth of adulthood, whereas honest is the truth of a child.
Welcome to adulthood." Cob said. "Every child finds a day when the realize that adults can be weak and wrong just like everyone else. After that day, you are an adult. Like it or not.
It's a Little Leaguers game that major leaguers play extraordinarily well, a game that excites us throughout adulthood. The crack of the bat and the scent of the horsehide on leather bring back our own memories that have been washed away with the sweat and tears of summers long gone...even as the setting sun pushes the shadows past home plate.
One of the loveliest things about being grown up is the knowledge that never again will I have to go through the miserable business of performing in Mrs. Smedley's Annual Piano Recital at McKinleyville's First Presbyterian Church.
God knows it's a sign of a really sick mind to see grown people, adults with responsibilities, wearing class rings.
A first lesson in the fragility of love and the preternatural cowardice of men. And out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang Beli's first adult oath, one that would follow her into adulthood, to the States and beyond. I will not serve.
Nothing ensures the success of the child more in the society than being read to from infancy to young adulthood. Reading books to and with children is the single most important thing a parent, grandparent, or significant adult can do.
Currently, young Christians reach adulthood bored with church experience, and with little or no sense of their calling as missionaries.
The natural inclination of a child is to take pleasure in the use of the mind no less than of the body. The child's primary business is learning. It is also the primary entertainment. To retain that orientation into adulthood, so that consciousness is not a burden but a joy, is the mark of the successfully developed human being.
At the opening of the Odyssey, Telemachus, inspired by the male-born Athena, searches for his father by turning against his mother. Jesus too publicly spurns his mother to be about his father's business. Male adulthood begins with the breaking of female chains.
The onset of adulthood is an organic, creeping process. No one wakes up one day and decides, 'Lo, on this day I shall forever put away childish things and begin clipping coupons to go to Wal-Mart.'
Creating a world that is truly fit for children does not imply simply the absence of war... It means having primary schools nearby that educate children, free of charge... It means building a world fit for children, where every child can grow to adulthood in health, peace and dignity.
Research in education has shown that we remember field trips long into adulthood. I remember visiting the post office in second grade and looking at the sorting machine. I have vivid memories of that, when I don't even remember the name of the teacher who took me.
The most important lesson I've learned is to not limit myself. Kids at my age often get intimidated by the idea of adulthood and feel like they have to know exactly who they are and what they want to do with their lives. I've realized that it's okay to take my time figuring it out and exploring different aspects of myself instead of fixating on one idea of who I am.
When you reach a certain age, you have fulfilled your childhood dream and whatever your first or second adulthood led you to do. Then you're in your third adulthood, the one that leads to the grave, and you ask yourself, "What will I do between now and then?" Instead of thinking in terms of glamour, you start thinking in terms of reform - your contribution to the world.
We all can think of at least one kid who had great parents, a great family, and an all-around great childhood...who suddenly went crazy as soon as he left the house for college or adulthood. And nobody can figure out how or why it happened!