growing up Quotes

”Don’t try to make me grow up before my time, Meg.”

“All children, except one, grow up.”

“You need not be sorry for her. She was one of the kind that likes to grow up. In the end she grew up of her own free will a day quicker than the other girls.”

“Forget them, Wendy. Forget them all. Come with me where you’ll never, never have to worry about grown up things again. Never is an awfully long time.”

“That’s the worst of growing up, and I’m beginning to realize it. The things you wanted so much when you were a child don’t seem half so wonderful to you when you get them.”

“Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.”

“My sister was counting on me, and this was the first time anyone ever counted on me for anything.”

“I think it was the first time in my life I ever felt like I looked ‘good.‘”

“I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day -- mock me horribly!”

“I am with you at present,” said Gandalf, “but soon I shall not be. I am not coming to the Shire. You must settle its affairs yourselves; that is what you have been trained for. Do you not yet understand? My time is over: it is no longer my task to set things to rights, nor to help folk to do so. And as for you, my dear friends, you will need no help. You are grown up now. Grown indeed very high; among the great you are, and I have no longer any fear at all for any of you.”

“And he grew and grew strong as a boy must grow who does not know that he is learning any lessons, and who has nothing in the world to think of except things to eat.”

“Even we, who were boys but a short while ago, cannot escape the inexorable progress of time. So the generations pass, and soon it will be our turn to send our children out into the land to do the work that needs to be done.”

Although I had no regrets, I told myself sadly that growing up was not the painless process one would have thought it to be.

″‘I am too big to climb and play,’ said the boy. ‘I want to buy things and have fun. I want some money. Can you give me some money?‘”

“She had given it up, consoling herself with the vow that when she grew up, she would work hard, save money and buy every single book that she liked.”

“Once I spoke the language of the flowers, Once I understood each word the caterpillar said, Once I smiled in secret at the gossip of the starlings, And shared a conversation with the housefly in my bed. Once I heard and answered all the questions of the crickets, And joined the crying of each falling dying flake of snow, Once I spoke the language of the flowers. . . . How did it go? How did it go?”

“The baby grew. He grew and he grew and he grew. He grew until he was two years old, and he ran all around the house. He pulled all the books off the shelves.”

“I am convinced that most people do not grow up. We find parking spaces and honor our credit cards. We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.”

“A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.”

“Bills, sadly, are not an ignore-it-and-it-goes-away problem. If you’ve been getting an overdue notice from the cable company every two weeks for the last three months, and all of a sudden it stops coming, that does not mean that they’ve gotten over you and moved on to someone else. Big companies are like the mob - they never forget, they never give up, and they always get their money. Get them before they get you: Pay up, and pay on time.”

“Language development, for instance, has a critical period that begins in infancy and ends between eight years and puberty. After this critical period closes, a person’s ability to learn a second language without an accent is limited. In fact, second languages learned after the critical period are not processed in the same part of the brain as is the native tongue.”

“Tonight was different. I felt like we were each separate and full to our edges with our own stories, mostly unshared. In a way it scared me, having a summer of experiences and feelings that belonged to me alone.”

“They just witnessed one of those regular but painful life transitions. That, it turns out, is The Way of the Pants.”

“And they themselves grew and changed as the years passed over them. And Peter became a tall and deep chested man and a great warrior, and he was called King Peter the Magnificent. And Susan grew into a tall and gracious woman with black hair that fell almost to her feet and the Kings of the countries beyond the sea began to send ambassadors asking for her hand in marriage. And she was called Queen Susan the Gentle. Edmund was a graver and quieter man than Peter, and great in council and judgement. He was called King Edmund the Just. But as for Lucy, she was always gay and golden haired, and all Princes in those parts desired her to be their Queen, and her own people called her Queen Lucy the Valiant.”

“Oh, dear, oh, dear, I wish I had never seen that filthy sword at all.”

“We have had a good time while we were young, but it is in the nature of Time to fly.”

“As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings. Okonkwo had clearly washed his hands and so he ate with kings and elders. ”

“Ezinma did not call her mother Nne like all children. She called her by her name, Ekwefi, as her father and other grown-up people did. The relationship between them was not only that of mother and child. There was something in it like the companionship of equals, which was strengthened by such little conspiracies as eating eggs in the bedroom.”

“I don’t care what she is. Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that supposed to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing.”

“Most folks think you start to be a real adult when you’re fifteen or sixteen years old, but that’s not true, it really starts when you’re around six. It’s at six that grown folks don’t think you’re a cute little kid anymore, they talk to you and expect that you understand everything they mean.”

“The walls are lined with school photos. Finch in kindergarten. Finch in middle school. He looks different every year, not just agewise but personwise. Class-clown Finch. Awkward Finch. Cocky Finch. Jock Finch.”

“Childhood was nothing guaranteed. It seemed to me, in fact, like something more or less invented by white people and stuck onto the front end of grown-up life like a frill on a dress.”

“When and where you are born, what your parents did for a living, and what the circumstances of your upbringing were make a significant difference in how well you do in the world.”

″‘At last all such things must end,’ he said, ‘but I would have you wait a little while longer: for the end of the deeds that you have shared in has not yet come. A day draws near that I have looked for in all the years of my manhood, and when it comes I would have my friends beside me.‘”

“We were born in this society, we grew up in this society. And we learn to be like everyone else, playing nonsense all the time.”

“It was Leslie who had taken him from the cow pasture into Terabithia and turned him into a king. He had thought that was it. Wasn’t king the best you could be? Now it occurred to him that perhaps Terabithia was like a castle where you came to be knighted. After you stayed for a while and grew strong you had to move on.”

“Don’t be stupid,” he told himself. “You’re too old for monsters.”

″ A man needs a battle to fight; he needs a place for the warrior in him to come alive and be honored, trained, seasoned. 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.”

“He became quicker of movement than the other dogs, swifter of foot, craftier, deadlier, more lithe, more lean with ironlike muscle and sinew, more enduring, more cruel more ferocious, and more intelligent. He had to become all these things, else he would not have held his own nor survived the hostile environment in which he found himself.”

“‘There’s nobody to guide them through the process of becoming a man... to explain to them the meaning of manhood. And that’s a recipe for disaster.’”

“In 1920 Roscoe Button’s first child was born. During the attendant festivities, however, no one thought it “the thing” to mention, that the little grubby boy, apparently about ten years of age who played around the house with lead soldiers and a miniature circus, was the new baby’s own grandfather.”

“Please, God let me learn how to stop being a warrior. Sometimes I just need to be a girl.”

“As we got older, I didn’t seem to exist, except in relation to her.”

“When I was six I decided that my only chance of having a life half as exciting as Grandpa Portman’s was to become an explorer.”

“Both touched toward fourteen; it almost trembled in their hands. And that was the October week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young any more.”

“But I think when a person gets older she should be able to discuss her problems and thoughts with other people, instead of just with another part of herself as you have been to me.”

“I don’t want to get old. I have this very silly fear, dear friend, that one day I’ll be old, without ever having really been young.”

“Úrsula suddenly realized that the house had become full of people, that her children were on the point of marrying and having children, and that they would be obliged to scatter for lack of space. Then she took out the money she had accumulated over long years of hard labor, made some arrangements with her customers, and undertook the enlargement of the house.”

“We are living in an interdependent world where what our children hear, see, feel, and learn will affect how they grow up and who they turn out to be.”

“She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become.”

“It hadn’t been so long ago, yet sometimes she felt that she’d been an altogether different person back then.”

“tell them im strong tell them im a man good by mr wigin.”

“The day dawned, and already the time of youth was fleeing the house which the three giants of my dreams had built. ”

“For the first time, I would be away from the protection of my mother.”

“Mae called her parents . . . and there were tears . . . and some very embarrassing talk about how Mae had become a real adult, how her parents were ashamed and humbled to be leaning on her, leaning so heavily on their young daughter in this way, it’s just this messed-up system we’re all stuck in, they said. But thank you, they said, we’re so proud of you.”

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

“In profile, he could see both the young woman she was becoming and the little girl he remembered.”

“I’m supposed to make him a man. Who am I? God?”

“Understanding comes with life.”

“Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I’m still trying to find out how a man should live.”

“You are innocent until you understand.”

“Ay, every generation, every man is a part of his past.”

Camerlengo: So although you have the power to interfere and prevent your child’s pain, you would choose to show you love by letting him learn his own lessons? Chatrand: Of course. Pain is part of growing up. It’s how we learn. Camerlengo: Exactly.”

“We don’t have to look like everyone else, Tally, and act like everyone else. We’ve got a choice. We can grow up any way we want.”

″‘It’s like you said the other day,’ said Adam. ‘You grow up readin’ about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus’ when you think the world’s all full of amazin’ things, they tell you it’s really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nuclear waste hang-in’ about for millions of years. ’Snot worth growin’ up for, if you ask my opinion.‘”

“Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.”

“Growing up, I took so many cues from books . . . They were my teachers and my advisors.”

“I don’t want to miss the actual fabric of the interior of my life and the beautiful children growing up right this second in my own home because I’m working to please people somewhere out there. I’m afraid I’m missing it, I’m afraid I’m doing it wrong, and I want to know that I can change.”

“I’ve heard it said that the week in which a young girl prepares for her debut as an apprentice geisha is like when a caterpillar turns into a butterfly.”

“Every time I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass of a shop, I felt I was someone to be taken seriously; not a girl anymore, but a young woman.”

″‘Don’t tell me from genetics. What’ve they got to do with it?’ said Crowley. ‘Look at Satan. Created as an angel, grows up to be the Great Adversary. Hey, if you’re going to go on about genetics, you might as well say the kid will grow up to be an angel. After all, his father was really big in Heaven in the old days. Saying he’ll grow up to be a demon just because his dad became one is like saying a mouse with its tail cut off will give birth to tailless mice. No. Upbringing is everything. Take it from me.‘”

“What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you’re so wrecked it’s hard to believe you ever were a child.”

“It was nothing like what I’d dreamed of when I was a little girl—what I had hoped for myself growing up. But it was the only life I had, and it was mine. The days of waiting around for someone else to ride in and save the day for me were over.”

“He realized that much of his torment of the years past had been self-inflicted, and an inevitable part of growing up.”

“Maybe growing up means disappointing the people we love.”

“And, most important of all for one who had taken so long to grow up, he thought he had learned not to be the slave to his emotions.”

“Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older! or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters. Nothing made up for the loss.”

“‘I guess after tonight Boots won’t think the whole world is her friend,‘” thought Gregor. She had to find out sometime, but it still made him sad.”

″ If I were going to be something when I grew up, an architect is what I would be.”

“Remember the person you’re supposed to be, and remember well…You are pretending to be raised Red, but you’re Silver by blood. You are now Red in the head, Silver in the heart….From now until the end of your days, you must lie. Your life depends on it, little lightning girl.”

“We have to remember everything. If we don’t, by the time we grow up it’ll be gone forever.”

“The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized. Another war came, World War II, and I wanted to get in it. The war looked like my chance to realize my old dream of flying.

“What do you want to learn to drive for anyway?” she said. “Don’t you go around Chicago in taxicabs and trolleys?” I couldn’t explain it to Grandma. I was getting too old to be a boy, and driving meant you were a man. Something like that. ”

“Mary Alice turned back. “You look good,” she said. “The hat’s dumb, but you look good.” “So do you.” Though I’d never noticed before, Mary Alice was going to be quite a nice-looking girl. I supposed boys would be hanging around her pretty soon. It was a thought I’d never had.”

“Crying, semi-hysterically, Mom made a number of points: •Your friend is dying •It’s just so hard to watch a child die •And it’s much harder to watch a friend’s daughter die •But the hardest is watching your son watching his friend die •You have to make your own decisions now •It’s so hard for me to let you make your own decisions •But I have to let you make your own decisions •I am so proud of you •Your friend is dying, and you have been so strong.”

“I still don’t know what it really means to grow up. However, if I happen to meet you, one day in the future, by then, I want to become someone you can be proud to know.”

“I’m, being the girls’ mother, should understand them more than anyone. But that’s what’s so frightening. I don’t know. Once they’re out of you, they’re different, kids are. Leaving their home, they will become another’s.”

“Well, one can’t get over the habit of being a little girl all at once.”

″‘Don’t be so quick to grow up boy,’ the Brownshirt told Josef. ‘We’ll come for you soon enough.‘”

“The house looks exactly like it did when I was a kid. And my girl did that.”

“I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.”

“Researchers find that whatever a family does do to influence a child’s personality, it affects each child differently, as if each is growing up in a completely different family.”

“This is my first visit to the moon. I’m like a kid in a candy store! I’ve always been a fan of science fiction. I grew up watching Star Trek. Now I get to live it!”

“Grow up, my sister said after she took a bite of Grape-Nuts that she had shaken salt on, knowing I had put sugar in the shaker, but actually I had switched it back so it really was salt in the shaker. Grow Up.”

“In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf. ”

“Well, as it turned out, he was just a really ugly duckling. And he grew up to be just a really ugly duck. The end.”

“Mom opened her arms and Fudge jumped into them. He rested his head on Mom’s shoulder, shoved his fingers into his mouth, and slurped on them. I know it’s stupid, but just for a minute I wished I could be Mom’s baby again, too.”

“As the years went by Ferdinand grew and grew until he was very big and strong.”

“There was his snug little bed with a new baby in it. Small Bear had outgrown his snug little bed just in time for his new baby sister. And now he was a big brother!”

“Small Bear, you have outgrown your little bed”

“There is more to this thing of love than meets the eye... I think maybe they’re all right when they say there are some things I won’t know anything about until I’m older.”

“Lilly ran and skipped and hopped and flew all the way home, she was so happy. And she really did want to be a teacher when she grew up-- That is, when she didn’t want to be a dancer or a surgeon or an ambulance driver or a diva or a pilot or a hairdresser or a scuba diver...”

“We will have a new baby soon who will need that little bed.”

“What will happen to my little bed?”

“Grown-up people find it very difficult to believe really wonderful things, unless they have what they call proof. But children will believe almost anything, and grown-ups know this. That is why they tell you that the earth is round like an orange, when you can see perfectly well that it is flat and lumpy; and why they say that the earth goes round the sun, when you can see for yourself any day that the sun gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night like a good sun it is, and the earth knows its place, and lies as still as a mouse.”

“Grown-up people find it very difficult to believe really wonderful things, unless they have what they call proof.”

“I am Mary. I am a witch. Or so some would call me. ‘Spawn of the Devil,’ ‘Witch child,’ they hiss in the street, although I know neither father nor mother. I know only my grandmother, Eliza Nuttall; Mother Nuttall to her neighbors. She brought me up from a baby. If she knew who my parents are, she never told me.”

″‘Alone?’ ‘Alone. I’m afraid that from here on you will have to do a lot of things alone. Take your passport, because I think you’re going on an adventure with my mother.‘”

“I felt a touch sorry for him because it might be his last day of being the baby of the family and his coddling days could be done. He was too small and knowledgeless to know it, though, so I guessed the loss couldn’t hurt him.”

“I turned fifteen and my mother began to lose our wrestling matches. I grew six inches in a year, and by the time I was sixteen I was taller than my stepfather. He grumbled more often, that I should settle down, stop roaming the mountain like a wild monkey, marry into one fo the village families.”

“To tell you the truth, I didn’t feel any different. I don’t think you ever do. I think one day you just become sixty or seventy, and it must be a shock to be so old because it’s still the same you on the inside; it’s just that all the outside of you has got wrinkled from the weather.”

“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.”

“To grow up is to wonder about things; to be grown up is to slowly forget the things you wondered about as a child. He has realized this. And he doesn’t want to become a grown-up like that.”

“It’s easy to mistake understanding for empathy - we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It’s hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.”

“I think it’s easy to mistake understanding for empathy - we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It’s hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.”

“But the painting he’s working on now is not in his usual style, and this one has a name: “River Boy.” He’s never named one of his paintings before. To make matters even stranger, he has insisted his son and daughter-in-law and granddaughter Jess go on a vacation to the place he lived growing up. ”

″...Ronia had seen little more than this during her short life. She knew nothing of what lay outside Matt’s Fort. And one fine day Matt realized- however little he liked it- that the time had come. ‘Lovis,’ he said to his wife, ‘our child must learn what it’s like living in Matt’s Forest. Let her go!‘”

“Bereaved by the death of their parents, five sisters live in a seaside villa--growing up together, sharing their grief, experiences, and love.”

“The whole point of growing up is learning to stay on the laughing side.”

“Nothing makes you grow up quicker than discovering your father is not the man you think he is.”

“I knew nothing but love and devotion while I was growing up. Trust me, it makes everything easier.”

″...the Dustman and his wife were proud of their numerous girls and boys, all-growing-up-fine-and-strong-one-behind-the-other-like-steps-in-a-ladder...”

“There is Jessika, a young girl who grows up without a father. ”

“His gratitude to my kind friends knew no limit, yet I think all the same he felt it hard that he should miss those years of my life when I was receiving my most vivid impressions...”

“Those baby lips, the pure young heart, a year may work sad change in their words and thoughts!”

“I love the way trees grow up and down at the same time. I wish we could do that.”

″‘Never grow up,’ she said, ‘always down.‘”

“He grew out of seven collars in a row.”

“Baby Rufus is growing up, and Sylvie is getting ready to marry Reverend Mr. Abbot. Soon Joey will be taking a full-time job.”

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

Suddenly Christopher Robin began to tell Pooh about some of the things: People called Kings and Queens and something called Factors, and a place called Europe, and an island in the middle of the sea where no ships came, and how you make a Suction Pump (if you want to), and when Knights were Knighted, and what comes from Brazil. And Pooh, his back against one of the sixty-something trees, and his paws folded in front of him, said “Oh!” and “I didn’t know,” and thought how wonderful it would be to have a Real Brain which could tell you things. And by-and-by Christopher Robin came to an end of the things, and was silent, and he sat there looking out over the world, and wishing it wouldn’t stop.

Still with his eyes on the world Christopher Robin put out a hand and felt for Pooh’s paw. “Pooh,” said Christopher Robin earnestly, “if I—if I’m not quite——” he stopped and tried again—“Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won’t you?” “Understand what?” “Oh, nothing.” He laughed and jumped to his feet. “Come on!” “Where?” said Pooh. “Anywhere,” said Christopher Robin.

“Pooh, promise you won’t forget about me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred.” Pooh thought for a little. “How old shall I be then?” “Ninety-nine.” Pooh nodded. “I promise,” he said.

Then, suddenly again, Christopher Robin, who was still looking at the world, with his chin in his hands, called out “Pooh!” “Yes?” said Pooh. “When I’m—when——Pooh!” “Yes, Christopher Robin?” “I’m not going to do Nothing any more.” “Never again?” “Well, not so much. They don’t let you.” Pooh waited for him to go on, but he was silent again. “Yes, Christopher Robin?” said Pooh helpfully. “Pooh, when I’m—you know—when I’m not doing Nothing, will you come up here sometimes?” “Just Me?” “Yes, Pooh.” “Will you be here too?” “Yes, Pooh, I will be, really. I promise I will be, Pooh.” “That’s good,” said Pooh.

“I love Diana so, Marilla. I cannot ever live without her. But I know very well when we grow up that Diana will get married and go away and leave me. And oh, what shall I do? I hate her husband—I just hate him furiously.”

“Well, anyway, when I am grown up,” said Anne decidedly, “I’m always going to talk to little girls as if they were too, and I’ll never laugh when they use big words. I know from sorrowful experience how that hurts one’s feelings.”

“I rather miss my wild girl, but if I get a strong, helpful, tenderhearted woman in her place, I shall feel quite satisfied.”

“Oh dear, we are growing up with a vengeance. Here’s Meg married and a mamma, Amy flourishing away at Paris, and Beth in love. I’m the only one that has sense enough to keep out of mischief.”