#adulthood

When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you ↗

— Gail Carson Levine

#bridge #childhood #childhood

You love because you want to need someone the way you did when you were a child, and have them need you too. You eat well because the intensity of taste reminds you of a need satisfied, a pain relieved. The finest paintings are nothing more than the red head of a flower, nodding in the breeze, when you were two years old; the most exciting film is just the way everything was, back in the days when you stared goggle-eyed at the whirling chaos all around you. All these things do is get the adult to shut up for a while, to open for just a moment a tiny sliding window in the cell deep inside, letting the pallid child peep hungrily out and drink the world in before darkness falls again. ↗

— Michael Marshall Smith

#art #childhood #love #art

I always looked forward to being an adult, because I thought the adult world was, well—adult. That adults weren’t cliquey or nasty, that the whole notion of being cool, or in, or popular would case to be the arbiter of all things social, but I was beginning to realize that the adult world was as nonsensically brutal and socially perilous as the kingdom of childhood. ↗

— Peter Cameron

#nonsense

The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood. ↗

— Germaine Greer

#fertility #functions #important #management #most

O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales. ↗

— Leo Rosten

#fairy-tales #life

How can it be, after all this concentrated effort and separation, how can it be that I still resemble, so very closely, my own detestable mother? ↗

— Gabrielle Hamilton

#becoming-your-parents #family #growing-up #humor #parents

Public schools were designed as the great equalizers of our society - the place where all children could have access to educational opportunities to make something of themselves in adulthood. ↗

— Janet Napolitano

#adulthood #children #could #designed #educational

I think you should be a child for as long as you can. I have been successful for 74 years being able to do that. Don't rush into adulthood, it isn't all that much fun. ↗

— Bob Newhart

#adulthood #been #being #child #fun

Indeed, an entire generation of Americans has grown to adulthood since the Roe decision of 1973, which held that the right to choose an abortion was a privacy right protected by our Constitution. ↗

— Robert Casey

#adulthood #choose #constitution #decision #entire

People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite. ↗

— Chad Harbach

#adulthood #consequences-life-lessons #life #meaninglessness #art