#growing

When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#fall-of-the-gods #growing-up #parents #age

Before you know it you'll be my age telling your own granddaughter the story of your life and you wanna make it an interesting one, don't you? You wanna be able to tell her some adventures, some excitements, some something. How you live your life, little one, is a gift for those who come after you, a kind of inheritance. ↗

— Cristina Garcia

#growing-up #age

Watching her, he saw again how she teetered between adolescence and adulthood, with a raw sensuality that had to deposit her in a kind of no-man's land--too much a woman for boys her own age, too young for fully adult men. ↗

— Keith Ablow

#age

Youth. I don't seek it through another because I have it within; it's a state of mind, a spirit that is free, and a mind that is playful. The shell of my being is altered by the effects of time, but nothing will tarnish a soul that will never forget what its like to experience creation with endless wonder and appreciation. Each time I see the first snowfall of the season I feel it's the first time I've seen it at all. ↗

— Donna Lynn Hope

#aging-gracefully #growing-old #age

When we became teenagers boredom grew like a moth in a cocoon fighting to escape, and the peace created by our parents became a prison. We sought excitement and adventure. We sought anything but the sinless, pure, and average of the faux idyllic. ↗

— Scott Thompson

#coming-of-age-stories #growing-up #southern-fiction #southern-gothic #southerners

Why can't a girl just want to know stuff and not do stuff? ↗

— Ellen Mulholland

#girls #growing-up #teen-fiction #teenagers #age

I ran a constant low fever waiting for my ride to come and take me away to something finer. I lay in bed at night, watching the red beacon on top of the water tower, a clear signal to me of the beauty and mystery of a life that waited for me far away, and thought of Housman's poem, "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom upon the bough. It stands among the woodland ride, Wearing white for Eastertide. Now, of my three-score years and ten, Twenty will not come again..." and would have run away to where people would appreciate me, had I known of such a place, had I thought my parents would understand. But if I had said, "Along the woodland I must go to see the cherry hung with snow," they would have said, "Oh,no, you don't. You're going to stay right here and finish up what I told you to do three hours ago. Besides, those aren't cherry trees, those are crab apples. ↗

— Garrison Keillor

#childhood #garrison-keillor #growing-up #lake-wobegon-days #beauty

That's how it started: a series of small hurts and excuses between two people that built up slowly, widening over time to form a vast and yawning divide. ↗

— Nenia Campbell

#growing-apart #hurt #friendship

I wanted to be a painter, really, when I was growing up as a kid. It was one thing that really took a grip on me. ↗

— Andy Serkis

#growing #growing up #i #kid #me

I remembered learning from my favorite professor at Belmont to “surround yourself with people who are better than you,” and I was now living that mantra. ↗

— Kimberly Novosel

#good-people #growing-up #inspirational #learning #lessons