coming of age Quotes

I’ll make the world safe and sound for you. You will come of age with our young nation. We’ll bleed and fight for you, we’ll make it right for you.

“He felt an offense against what his mother called his instinct for rightness. It wasn’t that Reverend Mother lied to him. She obviously believed what she said. It was something deeper, something tied to his terrible purpose.”

“There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

″(Lucy) had once known them better than the stars of our own world, because as a Queen in Narnia she had gone to bed much later than as a child in England.”

“Raw meat is not a nice thing to fill one’s pockets with, but they folded it up in fresh leaves and made the best of it. They were all experienced enough to know that they would feel quite differently about these squashy and unpleasant parcels when they had walked long enough to be really hungry.”

Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?

“Dream big, they say. Shoot for the stars. Then they lock us away for 12 years and tell us where to sit, when to pee, and what to think. […] Then we turn 18 and even though we’ve never had an original thought, we have to make the most important decision of our lives. […] And if you don’t have the money and don’t really have the grades, a lot of the decision gets made for you.”

“I don’t care who you are. Puberty is merciless.”

“Middle school is like this endless horror show. Well, maybe not endless, because it ended, but it really burns into your psyche.”

This books has a touch of mystery, a healthy dose of coming of age and a surprising amount of introspection.

“The Winter of the Dog is a winter Joel will never forget. It’s then that he begins to understand that he’s himself, and nobody else. But he grows up, he grows older, he becomes thirteen.”

There are bandits that are attacking them when a Buddhist monk stops it. The monk has been looking for their spiritual master Tulku to lead them.

In England, John Spencer’s parents are dead, and his uncle sends him off to the Royal Navy as a “Gentleman Volunteer” on a ship, the HMS Sentinel, on anti-slavery patrol.

“The black rocks of Ushant far astern, the ragged coast of Spain to port; off Corunna, Sentinel’s bows swinging south, to faraway lands and the sun.”

“Hobberdy Dick is the hobgoblin who protects Widford Manor and has for countless years.

“The fact dawns on him that he will never own a dog because it’d be too big for the house and central London is no place to raise a large dog.”

School and home seemed to recede from us and their influences upon us seemed to wane.