Growing up is an intricate dance of embracing change, pursuing dreams, and navigating the inevitable ups and downs of life. It's a time filled with both excitement and uncertainty, where each step forward offers new opportunities for growth and self-discovery. To inspire and guide you through this journey, we've curated a collection of 36 powerful quotes that capture the essence of growing up. These words of wisdom come from a diverse array of voices, each offering unique insights into the challenges and triumphs of maturing. Whether you're seeking motivation, comfort, or a fresh perspective, these inspirational quotes are sure to resonate with anyone standing at the crossroads of life.
1. “I walked over to the hill where we used to go and sled. There were a lot of little kids there. I watched them flying. Doing jumps and having races. And I thought that all those little kids are going to grow up someday. And all of those little kids are going to do the things that we do. And they will all kiss someone someday. But for now, sledding is enough. I think it would be great if sledding were always enough, but it isn't.” - Stephen Chbosky
2. “It's about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone.. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out.” - Jodi Picoult
3. “You grow up the day you have your first real laugh -- at yourself.” - Ethel Barrymore
4. “You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they're going.” - P. J. O'Rourke
5. “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
6. “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
7. “I'm at that age where I watch such things with two minds, one that cackles at these capers and another that never gets much beyond a rather jaded and self-conscious smile, like the Mona Lisa.” - Alan Bradley
8. “Wow you've grown!" Yeah, that tends to happen...” - janelle cooper
9. “Oh", she thought, "how horrible it is that people have to grow up-and marry-and change!” - L.M. Montgomery
10. “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
11. “One of the oddest things about being grown-up was looking back at something you thought you knew and finding out the truth of it was completely different from what you had always believed.” - Patricia Briggs
12. “She didn't like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she'd been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all.” - Alice Hoffman
13. “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
14. “Scott: I don't think I'm ready to be a grown-up.Kim: I don't think you are either, buddy. But hey, you'll get it. It just takes practice.” - Bryan Lee O'Malley
15. “Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn't happen. It was all dream stuff. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer?” - Betty Smith
16. “I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like "What I'm Going to be If I Grow Up” - Lenny Bruce
17. “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
18. “To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.” - David Foster Wallace
19. “What I've found about it is that there are some folks you can talk to until you're blue in the face--they're never going to get it and they're never going to change. But every once in a while, you'll run into someone who is eager to listen, eager to learn, and willing to try new things. Those are the people we need to reach. We have a responsibility as parents, older people, teachers, people in the neighborhood to recognize that.” - Tyler Perry
20. “I felt for the first time, maybe ever, how much harder it was to be the adults. And I wasn't sure I could do that when it was my turn.” - Barbara Hall
21. “Most of our parents wanted the best for us, I knew, but we also wanted the best for them.” - Deb Caletti
22. “Isn't that the tragedy of growing up though? One day you wake up and realize that everything you are and everything you feel is not much different from what everyone else feels.” - Nadine Rose Larter
23. “Unfortunately, some family members are so psychotic that no matter how hard you try to forge a healthy relationship, nothing will help. Now that you're an adult, take refuge in the fact that some things are beyond your control. You owe it to yourself to steer clear of people who are harmful to your health.” - Andrea Lavinthal
24. “A lot of childhood effort, worry, and whispering goes into cracking the codes of adult life. Children have to be accomplished spies.” - Vera B. Williams
25. “It’s kind of sad, if you think about it. Like there’s no continuity in people at all. Like something ruptures when you hit twelve, or thirteen, or whatever the age is when you’re no longer a kid but a “young adult,” and after that you’re a totally different person. Maybe even a less happy person. Maybe even a worse one.” - Lauren Oliver
26. “Maybe universal nostalgia doesn't exist. Maybe each of us carries our own personal version of the better times. It's at about twnety-two years that we all begin to think of our childhood as the good ol' days and everything afterwards exists as a slow-motion face plant. The fall continues, through marriage, through career building, through parenthood, through old age, until we finally touch nose to ground. At twenty-two years old, I've just started, but I think I can already smell my own grave.” - Caleb J. Ross
27. “She told herself that she longed greatly to go back to those dear merry days when life was seen through a rosy mist of hope and illusion, and possessed an indefinable something that had passed away forever. Where was it now--the glory and the dream?” - L.M. Montgomery
28. “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
29. “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
30. “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
31. “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
32. “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
33. “Sometimes, when you were thinking about something, trying to understand it, it opened up in your head without you expecting it to, like it was a soft spongy light unfolding, and you understood, it made sense forever…” - Roddy Doyle
34. “At fifteen, I have taken up the burdens of a woman, and have come to feel I am one. Furthermore, I am glad of it. For I now no longer have the time to fall into such sins as I committed as a girl, when hours that were my own to spend spread before me like a gift.” - Geraldine Brooks
35. “When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.” - Aldo Leopold
36. “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
