109 Growing Up Quotes

Growing up is an inevitable part of life, filled with an array of emotions, experiences, and lessons that shape who we become. Whether it's the carefree days of childhood, the tumultuous journey through adolescence, or the reflective moments of adulthood, each phase holds its unique charm and challenges. To celebrate this incredible journey, we've compiled a curated collection of the top 109 growing up quotes. These quotes capture the essence of what it means to mature, evolve, and navigate the complexities of life, offering wisdom, comfort, and a touch of nostalgia along the way. Dive in and let these words inspire you to reflect on your own path and the milestones that have defined your growth.

1. “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

2. “Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.” - Anne Frank

3. “I don't want to be a man," said Jace. "I want to be an angst-ridden teenager who can't confront his own inner demons and takes it out verbally on other people instead.""Well," said Luke, "you're doing a fantastic job.” - Cassandra Clare

4. “I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.You never bake bread, he wrote, and we were still joking.Then it's like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we won't be joking? And what would it look like? And how would that feel?When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.I spent my life learning to feel less.Every day I felt less.Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

5. “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” - C.S. Lewis

6. “Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.” - Maya Angelou

7. “For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

8. “Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you're young. But I don't think we make any fewer when we're grown up.” - Jodi Picoult

9. “People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could.” - Heather O'Neill

10. “This is growing up, having to stomp out love, this is how people turn terrible.” - Michelle Tea

11. “When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.” - Patrick Rothfuss

12. “If onlyyou could have witnessed howmuch I have changed: sit alonein a disused theatre and feel whatI have felt, see how the world hastransformed me, like the metamorphosisof a caterpillar.” - Kiera Woodhull

13. “I just wanted to see if... we were okay," she said, feeling relief. "Just to make sure we can be friends. I don't want it to be weird, you know?" Friends? Different parts of Birdie died as she said it. It was like stars exploding and burning one by one. She wondered if this was part of getting older. Parts of your heart exploded and died.” - Jodi Lynn Anderson

14. “I am convinced that most people do not grow up...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.” - Maya Angelou

15. “Growing apart doesn't change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I'm glad for that.” - Ally Condie

16. “In the boundaryless forests, there’re dancers of nude.Yet in the confines of pasture, there’s promise of food.On which is your side?Ô, but tarry and bide,ere you decide,in both do confide.” - Roman Payne

17. “From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame...” - Henry B. Adams

18. “We live in an adolescent society, Neverland, where never growing up seems more the norm than the exception. Little boys wearing expensive suits and adult bodies should not be allowed to run big corporations. They shouldn’t be allowed to run governments, armies, religions, small businesses and charities either and just quietly, they make pretty shabby husbands and fathers too. Mankind has become Pankind and whilst “lost boys” abound, there is also an alarming increase in the number of “lost girls.” - Daniel Prokop

19. “Oh", she thought, "how horrible it is that people have to grow up-and marry-and change!” - L.M. Montgomery

20. “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” - J.D. Salinger

21. “Adulthood is accretive by nature, a thing which arrives in ragged stages and uneven overlaps.” - Stephen King

22. “It would be inappropiate, undignified, at 38, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour or intensity of a 22 year old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry? Crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photobooths? Taking a whole day to make a compilation tape? Asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or TS Eliot or, god forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at 38, to expect a song or book or film to change your life.” - David Nicholls

23. “Or maybe memories are like karaoke - where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen's bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn't even know the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning - and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it's better not to know the lyrics to your life.” - Douglas Coupland

24. “Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't (...) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That's me and my memories.” - Douglas Coupland

25. “Despite the fact that I have no regrets about how things turned out in my life, I still can't help wanting to understand my intense relationship with Leo, as well as that turbulent time between adolescence and adulthood when everything feels raw and invigorating and scary-and why those feelings are all coming back to me now.” - Emily Giffin

26. “The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, Slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized.” - Richard Peck

27. “I've screwed everything up royally. I remember you saying that growing up happens when you start having things you look back on and wish you could change.” - Cassandra Clare

28. “A child isn’t born bitter. I point no fingers as to who tainted the clean, pure pool of my childhood. Let’s just say that when I realized that I didn’t want to grow up, the damage was already done. Knowing that being grown up was no swell place to be means that you are grown up enough to notice. And you can’t go back from there. You have to forge another route, draw your own map.” - Hiromi Goto

29. “I nodded again, but I knew I would not grow up to drive a bulldozer. It would be awful to be dirty all day like these men. I didn't say it, but at best I would keep one in the backyard, like a goat.” - Augusten Burroughs

30. “[Jo to her mother] I knew there was mischief brewing. I felt it and now it's worse than I imagined. I just wish I could marry Meg myself, and keep her safe in the family.” - Louisa May Alcott

31. “I don’t want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I’ll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it’s possible to be. I’m growing and I don’t know how to grow. I’m living but I haven’t started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it’s like I’m not here in the world at all and I simply don’t exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid.” - David Almond

32. “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

33. “Don't try to make me grow up before my time…” - Louisa May Alcott

34. “I was born with more power inside myself than I ever dreamed. But along with it there came no more sense than any other idiotic kid. Somewhere along in here I need to grow up into a man I can stand to live with. A man who doesn't just survive, but deserves to.” - Orson Scott Card

35. “A dim antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty: and when it passed, cloudlike, leaving his mind serene and dutiful towards her again, he was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives.” - James Joyce

36. “It was a sign of growing up, when the dark made no more difference to you than the day.” - Roddy Doyle

37. “They soon stopped being ten years old. But whatever age they were seemed to be exactly the right age for having fun.” - Maud Hart Lovelace

38. “Thoughts are such fleet magic things. Betsy's thoughts swept a wide arc while Uncle Keith read her poem aloud. She thought of Julia learning to sing with Mrs. Poppy. She thought of Tib learning to dance. She thought of herself and Tacy and Tib going into their 'teens. She even thought of Tom and Herbert and of how, by and by, they would be carrying her books and Tacy's and Tib's up the hill from high school.” - Maud Hart Lovelace

39. “The invention of the teenager was a mistake. Once you identify a period of life in which people get to stay out late but don't have to pay taxes - naturally, no one wants to live any other way.” - Judith Martin

40. “If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge.” - Junot Diaz

41. “I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I can simply guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone?” - Lorrie Moore

42. “She had been a teenager once, and she knew that, despite the apparent contradictions, a person's teenage years lasted well into their fifties.” - Derek Landy

43. “I never tired of picturing sharks.” - Eileen Granfors

44. “I wanted only a familiar voice, someone who knew me. Not some earlier, larval version of myself. . .” - Jennifer Haigh

45. “Some days you go bear hunting and you get eaten. Some days you come home with a nice rug to roll around on, and bear steaks. What they don't tell you as a kid is that sometimes you get the rug and steaks, but you also get some nice scars to go with them. As a child you don't understand that you can win, but that's it's not always worth the price. Once you understand and accept that possibility you become a real grown up, and the world becomes a much more serious place. Not less fun, but once you realize what can go wrong, it's a lot scarier to go hunting "bears".” - Laurell K. Hamilton

46. “This memory was both happy and sad: happy because it was so pleasant, and sad because it made Penelope think about how much she missed Swanburne--the girls, the teachers, Miss Mortimer. Or perhaps it was her own much younger self, that pint-sized person whom she could never be again, whom she missed. It was hard to say.” - Maryrose Wood

47. “You must pay the penalty of growing-up, Paul. You must leave fairyland behind you.” - L.M. Montgomery

48. “They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. "I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't."Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. "You grew up, Alex," he said, "just like the rest of us.” - Jennifer Egan

49. “Sometimes you have to grow up before you appreciate how you grew up.” - Daniel Black

50. “Don't you find it odd," she continued, "that when you're a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you're older, somehow they act offended if you even try.” - Ethan Hawke

51. “It's easy to grow old if you haven't grown up” - John Hively

52. “Milkers don’t spend half as long with their mothers." Eli spread his chore coat over Little Joe. "Not more than a few weeks. Sometimes one day. Maybe not even ... If you were a peeper, it’d be even worse. They don’t even get to see their mamas. They’re still jelly beans when they’re left alone to hatch.” - Sandra Neil Wallace

53. “Adults tend to repress their pleasure. Sad to say, I think we become adults only through disappointment, grief, and lies. So of course gradually we become tough, less sensitive.” - Jean-Louis Gassee

54. “Growing up is such a barbarous business, full of inconvenience... and pimples.” - J.M. Barrie

55. “They said growing up was watching your breasts grow, your waist widen and hairs sprout on your erogenous ones. You became aware of the warmness that spread in circles in your stomach when that fine boy smiled at you. But that was not growing to me. Growing up was watching Papa drift away from us, and Mama grow drastically older from frying Akara balls just to cater for our home.” - Ukamaka Olisakwe

56. “There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don't lose yourself at happy hour, but don't lose yourself on the corporate ladder, either.” - Shauna Niequist

57. “Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth.” - Maya Angelou

58. “On occasion, it occurs to adults that they are allowed to do all the things that being a child prevented them from doing. But those desires change when you're not looking. There was a time when your favorite color transferred from purple to blue to whatever shade it is when you realize having a favorite color is a trite personality crutch, an unstable cultivation of quirk and a possible cry for help. You just don't notice the time of your own metamorphosis. Until you do. Every once in a while time dissolves and you remember what you liked as a kid. You jump on your hotel bed, order dessert first, decide to put every piece of jewelry you own on your body and leave the house. Why? Because you can. Because you're the boss. Because . . . Ooooh. Shiny. ” - Sloane Crosley

59. “Maybe I've moved to the dark side, but it's clean and nice and we never run out of toilet paper.” - Jen Lancaster

60. “Despite being what would now be called a deprived child in a one parent family, I did not grow up with an urge to smash windows or to bash old ladies over the head in order to steal handbags.” - Eva Hart

61. “It was only high school after all, definitely one of the most bizarre periods in a person’s life. How anyone can come through that time well adjusted on any level is an absolute miracle.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

62. “That boy made me realize, for a while at least, that my parents were wrong, and I didn't have to be like them.” - J.X. Burros

63. “Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear...Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world.” - Jeanette Winterson

64. “As a man begins to understand the sacrifices he must make to live the life he dreams of, he often loses his courage for such a life.” - Josie Sigler

65. “It's not very easy to grow up into a woman. We are always taught, almost bombarded, with ideals of what we should be at every age in our lives: "This is what you should wear at age twenty", "That is what you must act like at age twenty-five", "This is what you should be doing when you are seventeen." But amidst all the many voices that bark all these orders and set all of these ideals for girls today, there lacks the voice of assurance. There is no comfort and assurance. I want to be able to say, that there are four things admirable for a woman to be, at any age! Whether you are four or forty-four or nineteen! It's always wonderful to be elegant, it's always fashionable to have grace, it's always glamorous to be brave, and it's always important to own a delectable perfume! Yes, wearing a beautiful fragrance is in style at any age!” - C. JoyBell C.

66. “6. Sleep with a bra on every night in fear of your boobs dropping should you forget. Intermediate: Don't wear a bra in the daytime. Advanced: Forget bras and wear the Hear Comes Trouble T-shirt you got for your eighth birthday. Act offended if anyone stares at the new shape of the word Trouble. Wear the shirt until your mother asks what smells.” - Tupelo Hassman

67. “She's growing up," Sister Evangeline said.And I wanted to tell her no, I'm not. Everything is exactly the same.” - Ann Patchett

68. “hat'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.” - L.M. Montgomery

69. “The people of jewel," said Olga Ciavolga,"treat their children like delicate flowers. They think they will not survive without constant protection. But there are parts of the world where young boys and girls spend weeks at a time with no company except a herd of goats. They chase away wolves. They take care of themselves, and they take care of the herd. And so, when hard times come - as they always do in the end - those children are resourceful and brave. If they have to walk from one end of the county to the other, carrying their baby brother and sisters, they will do it. If they have to hide during the day and travel at night to avoid soldiers, they will do it. They do not give up easily." The tunnel took a sharp right-hand turn and, for a moment, the old woman s voice was lost. Something dropped onto Goldie's arm, and she opened her mouth to yelp - and thought of those children carrying their baby brothers and sisters through the night - and closed her mouth and kept going. She rounded the corner in time to hear Olga Ciavolga murmur,"Of course, I am not saying that it is a good thing to give children such heavy responsibility's. They must be allowed to have a childhood. But they must also be allowed to find their courage and their wisdom, and learn when to stand and when to run away. After all, if they are not permitted to climb the trees, how will they ever see the great and wonderful world that lies before them?” - Lian Tanner

70. “People always think something's all true. I don't give a damn, except that I get bored when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am, I really do. But people never notice. People never notice anything.” - J.D. Salinger

71. “I focused on the passing houses filled with couples who’d somehow survived this teenage craziness of ‘he likes her but she likes him and he likes somebody else, you just can’t win.’ How did they do it? How did they end up in their golden, warm and cozy living rooms with their 2.3 children and dogs and cats? Because getting from where I was to where they were seemed millions of light years away.” - Sarah Strohmeyer

72. “Era um dos efeitos colaterais da juventude: sair da inocência e ingenuidade da infância e cair na alienação umbigocêntrica daquela fase em que acreditamos que já somos adultos. Mas é somente isso, achismo e autoengano. Ainda há um longo caminho pela frente e muito a aprender. Muito mesmo.” - Camilo Gomes Jr

73. “Let us not be bored” - Joe Buberger

74. “It was strange walking through the empty apartment. My battered purple room was gone, Brittany’s bruised blue was gone. Two coats covered everything. It was like none of it had ever happened.” - Kimberly Novosel

75. “She has given me a way out.” - Alison Bechdel

76. “Όταν προτιμούνται τα αγόρια από τα κορίτσια, τα συμπλέγματα κατωτερότητας στα κορίτσια είναι σχεδόν αναπόφευκτα. Τα παιδιά είναι πολύ ευαίσθητα και ακόμα και ένα πολύ καλό παιδί μπορεί να πάρει μια ολότελα λαθεμένη κατεύθυνση στη ζωή εξαιτίας της υποψίας του ότι προτιμούν τους άλλους.” - Άλφρεντ Άντλερ

77. “Look forward to the wonderment of growing up, raising a family and driving by the gas station where the popular kids now work.” - Tim Dorsey

78. “I jumped on Sinbad's bottle. Nothing happened. I didn't do it again. Sometimes when nothing happened it was really getting ready to happen” - Roddy Doyle

79. “the much-sought prize of eternal youthIs just arrested growth.” - Edgar Lee Masters

80. “It was too late. Maybe yesterday, while I was still a child, but not now. I knew too much, had seen too much, I was a child no longer now; innocence and childhood were forever lost, forever gone from me.” - William Faulkner

81. “Anna is part of a generation that often seems frozen in place by their unreleting sense of irony. Virtually everything people believe in can be exposed as possessing laughable inconsistencies. And so they laugh. And stand still.” - Scott Turow

82. “I didn't begin life hating my grandmother. Like every child, I adored her. Until I formed a brain and got to know her.” - Augusten Burroughs

83. “What’s so beautiful about girls?” I would implore.And the secret society of adults would reply with a smirk and wink as if I was merely a boy who couldn’t possibly have the mental maturity to comprehend such grown-up concepts as love and bleeding vaginas; “You’ll understand someday, James.” - Jake Vander Ark

84. “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” - Anonymous

85. “There’s a different flavor to children’s literature you read after you grow up than there was reading it as a child. Things that were sweet as a child become bitter once you grow up.” - Mizuki Nomura

86. “But memories were fragile and not to be trusted. They were a weight that Faolin did not need to carry with him when he set out that morning. Things of the past, like the fragile boy he had been, had no place on a man’s journey towards his future.” - Madeline Claire Franklin

87. “Why is a caterpillar wrapped in silk while it changes into a butterfly? So the other caterpillars can't hear the screams. Change hurts” - Rory Miller

88. “nobody tells us as little girls that we may fall in love and have moments of hating our beloved, or have ridiculous arguments at 2 AM over something that neither person understands.” - SARK

89. “... I wrote about ... my childhood, when dreams were small and attainable for all. When sweets were a penny and god was a rabbit.” - Sarah Winman

90. “A Fairy must make her own way in the world, for the world will never make way for her. That, incidentally, is the First Theorem of Questing Physicks, which you’ll learn all about when you’re older and don’t care anymore.” - Catherynne M. Valente

91. “Not to grow up properly is to retain our 'caterpillar' quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our caterpillar nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists and quacks. The genius of the human child, mental caterpillar extraordinary, is for soaking up information and ideas, not for criticizing them. If critical faculties later grow it will be in spite of, not because of, the inclinations of childhood. The blotting paper of the child's brain is the unpromising seedbed, the base upon which later the sceptical attitude, like a struggling mustard plant, may possibly grow. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive scepticism of adult science.” - Richard Dawkins

92. “Hand, nobody told me about the weight. Why didn't our parents tell us about the weight?—What weight?—The fucking weight, Hand. How does the woman Ingres live? The one from Marrakesh? If we're vessels, and we are, then we, you and I, are overfull, and that means she's at the bottom of a deep cold lake. How can she stand the hissing of all that water?—We are not vessels; we are missiles.—We're static and we're empty. We are overfull and leaden.—We are airtight and we are missiles and all-powerful.” - Dave Eggers

93. “As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one...each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment.” - Mark Lawrence

94. “Don’t grow old to give up and don’t give up growing up” - Bernard Kelvin Clive

95. “I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.” - Victor Hugo

96. “It was such a strange tormenting feeling when your daemon was pulling at the link between you; part physical pain deep in the chest, part intense sadness and love. Everyone tested it when they were growing up: seeing how far they could pull apart, coming back with intense relief.” - Philip Pullman

97. “What must I do now?” Mrs. Muller considered her silently for a while. “You are still a child. You must go where you are told and do as you are told. But it won’t always be so. Soon you will be in charge of yourself. Until that time: Be aware. Listen. Look. Touch. Smell. And remember. But for now, you must go home.” - Masha du Toit

98. “We are not sure what we will become, only what we want to and don’t want to. We often become what we never thought we could, then we become fine with that.” - Darnell Lamont Walker

99. “Magda looks at me as if I've gone mad. Or I've grown up. It's kind of the same thing.” - Victoria Schwab

100. “Such is life. We grow up. Planets like Tiny get new moons. Moons like me get new planets.” - John Green

101. “The idea of not being a kid anymore terrifies me. I am an adult and I have been hurled out of the world of boys and girls into the fray of men and women, and expected to function as a grown-up when I never functioned very well as a kid.” - Kelley York

102. “Most parents try really hard to give their kids the best possible life. They give them the best food and clothes they can afford, take their own kind of take on training kids to be honest and polite. But what they don't realize is no matter how much they try, their kids will get out there. Out to this complicated little world. If they are lucky they will survive, through backstabbers, broken hearts, failures and all the kinds of invisible insane pressures out there. But most kids get lost in them. They will get caught up in all kinds of bubbles. Trouble bubbles. Bubbles that continuously tell them that they are not good enough. Bubbles that get them carried away with what they think is love, give them broken hearts. Bubbles that will blur the rest of the world to them, make them feel like that is it, that they've reached the end. Sometimes, even the really smart kids, make stupid decisions. They lose control. Parents need to realize that the world is getting complicated every second of every day. With new problems, new diseases, new habits. They have to realize the vast probability of their kids being victims of this age, this complicated era. Your kids could be exposed to problems that no kind of therapy can help. Your kids could be brainwashed by themselves to believe in insane theories that drive them crazy. Most kids will go through this stage. The lucky ones will understand. They will grow out of them. The unlucky ones will live in these problems. Grow in them and never move forward. They will cut themselves, overdose on drugs, take up excessive drinking and smoking, for the slightest problems in their lives. You can't blame these kids for not being thankful or satisfied with what they have. Their mentality eludes them from the reality.” - Thisuri Wanniarachchi

103. “All I wanted was my art and the chance to be the creator of my own world, my own reality.” - Charlotte Eriksson

104. “Maybe I can learn to live in a way that makes it worth writing about, and maybe I can actually become something more than this empty shell.” - Charlotte Eriksson

105. “I want my life to be the greatest story. My very existence will be the greatest poem.Watch me burn.Love always, Charlotte” - Charlotte Eriksson

106. “I think of me and Melanie when we were younger, on the high dive at the pool in Mexico. We would always hold hands as we jumped, but by the time we swam back up to the surface, we'd have let go. No matter how we tried, once we started swimming, we always let go. But after we bobbed to the surface, we'd climb out of the pool, clamber up the high-dive ladder, clasp hands, and do it again. We're swimming separately now. I get that. Maybe it's just what you have to do to keep above water. But who knows? Maybe one day, we'll climb out, grab hands, and jumo again.” - Gayle Forman

107. “I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.” - Roger Zelazny

108. “Oh God, I'm miss­ing the gene which makes you grow up and buy a flat in Streatham and start visiting Homebase every weekend. Everyone's moving on without me, into a world I don't understand.” - Sophie Kinsella

109. “I'm not sure I'll ever know the meaning of life or what comes for us after death, but I know it's more than the hysteria people make it out to be. It's about freeing your soul when no one else can; turning thirty and still feeling like you're seventeen. It's about taking chances on a whim, embracing the rain during the storm, and smiling so damn much that you start to cry. It's never regretting, never forgetting, and always being.It's kissing underwater and touching in the dark. Loving even when you think it's emotionally impossible and surviving someway and somehow. It's about living life with a full heart and an overflowing glass.I live life on the edge. I dream, I care, and I belong.I know there's a here and now.I know that I want it.” - Nadège Richards