Selected adulthood quotes

1. So, what's it like in the real world? Well, the food is better, but beyond that, I don't recommend it.

2. The great challenge of adulthood is holding on to your idealism after you lose your innocence.

3. I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there.

4. I never met anyone who didn't have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?

5. When I grow up I want to be a little boy.

6. Children are tough, though we tend to think of them as fragile. They have to be tough. Childhood is not easy. We sentimentalize children, but they know what's real and what's not. They understand metaphor and symbol. If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.

7. How little is the promise of the child fulfilled in the man.

8. The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.

9. Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life.... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.

10. Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste... years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just... take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that and walk away. But that's hard.

11. Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

12. We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

13. One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

14. One cannot really be Catholic & grown-up.

15. Then I got Mary pregnant and man that was all she wrote. And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat. We went down to the courthouse and the judge put it all to rest. No wedding day smiles, no walk down the aisle, No flowers, no wedding dress. That night we went down to the river and into the river we'd dive, Oh down to the river we did ride.

16. Just because we're adults doesn't automatically mean we can save you...

17. Such children. So young, so playful. I'm glad they can still be that way. Someday, when the real adult responsibilities settle on them, they'll lose that. It will be replaces by a slower, quieter kind of play. But for now, they can cast away care and remember how good it is to be alive.... That's what happiness means, isn't it?

18. To be without Doon, that was what frightened Jason the most. Doon was the foundation for his life, for good or ill; ever since Doon had found him, Jason had known nothing could go wrong in his life - Doon was watching. Now when he stumbled, who would lift him up? This was freedom after all, Jason realized, because from now on no one would save him from the consequences of his own acts. It wasn't freedom that I yearned for, was it? It was childhood that I wanted, and Doon is barring me from my refuge; he has been my father all these years, and now he's thrusting me away. 'Ill never forgive you for this'

19. I had sat [in schools] long enough. I would be an adult among other adults--I had never liked being young, and contested the company of delayed adolescents as I thought most college students to be. I would earn a living and be financially independent. [recollections from age 17]

20. He was growing up. Soon he would be a man. He wondered what that would mean. Surely he could not have more required of him as an adult that had been required of him as a child. There could not be more

21. It is the stupidest children who are the most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are the most grown-up.

22. I'm not sure I'm an adult yet.

23. If you haven't made some mistakes by 28, it's abnormal.

24. A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die.

25. Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.

26. What is an adult? A child blown up by age.

27. She was a grown up now, and she discovered that being a grown up was not quite what she had suspected it would be when she was a child. She had thought then that she would make a conscious decision one day to simply put her toys and games and little make-believes away. Now she discovered that was not what happened at all. Instead, she discovered, interest simply faded. It became less and less and less, until a dust of years drew over the bright pleasures of childhood, and they were forgotten.

28. Don't live in this place. If you're a grad student or if you have a few more courses to pick up, fine. But if you're still hanging out in Orono or Old Town three years from now, living like an undergraduate in some sleazy apartment or trailer park, there's something wrong with you. This is not Never-Neverland. Peter Pan graduated back in '73 and now has a nice little farm in Bethel. You are not the Lost Boys and Lost Girls, but if you stay here too long, you will grow the equivalent of donkey ears. For most of you, it's time to move on. If you didn't have a better time here than you did in high school, you're weird. If you want to stay here and keep being an undergraduate, you're very weird.

29. At twenty you know you're not going to be a rock star... by twenty-five you know you're not going to be a dentist or a professional... by thirty, a darkness starts moving in - you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy or successful... by thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing the rest of your life; you become resigned to your fate.