66 Growing Up Quotes

Growing up is a universal experience, filled with a mix of joy, challenges, and valuable lessons. The journey from childhood to adulthood is unique for everyone, yet certain themes resonate across different lives and cultures. In this post, we've curated a thoughtful collection of the top 66 Growing Up Quotes. These quotes capture the essence of maturing, reflecting on the past, embracing change, and looking forward to the future. Whether you seek inspiration, reflection, or a touch of nostalgia, these quotes are sure to strike a chord and remind you of the beauty and complexity of growing up.

1. “You grow up the day you have your first real laugh -- at yourself.” - Ethel Barrymore

2. “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

3. “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

4. “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

5. “In a desperate attempt to stay young forever we have achieved eternal childishness, rather than eternal youth.” - Daniel Prokop

6. “Growing up is never straight forward.There are moments when everything is fine, and other moments where you realize that there are certain memories that you'll never get back, and certain people that are going to change, and the hardest part is knowing thatthere's nothing you can do except watch them.” - Alden Nowlan

7. “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

8. “They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.” - Margaret Atwood

9. “Wow you've grown!" Yeah, that tends to happen...” - janelle cooper

10. “I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.Brian Fitzgerald, talking about his children.” - Jodi Picoult

11. “Where'd the days go, when all we did was play? And the stress that we were under wasn't stress at all just a run and a jump into a harmless fall” - Paolo Nutini

12. “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

13. “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

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

15. “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

16. “He nods, as if to acknowledge that endings are almost always a little sad, even when there is something to look forward to on the other side.” - Emily Giffin

17. “You said you want to became Hokage. I have become the Kazekage. If you are willing to bear the name Kage, you have to do what you must do.” - Masashi Kishimoto

18. “Most of us won't see one another after graduation, and even if we do it will be different. We'll be different. We'll be adults--cured, tagged and labeled and paired and identified and placed neatly on our life path, perfectly round marbles set to roll down even, well-defined slopes.” - Lauren Oliver

19. “I used to think that when I grew up there wouldn't be so many rules. Back in elementary school there were rules about what entrance you used in the morning, what door you used going home, when you could talk in the library, how many paper towels you could use in the rest room, and how many drinks of water you could get during recess. And there was always somebody watching to make sure.What I'm finding out about growing older is that there are just as many rules about lots of things, but there's nobody watching.” - Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

20. “Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they'd be different” - Tana French

21. “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

22. “Life has a funny way of turning you into the one thing you don't want to be.” - Jonathan Levine

23. “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

24. “It wasn't until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison cell that it really hit home that he was vanishing out of our lives and into his own.” - Bill Bryson

25. “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

26. “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

27. “My friend Madea has "attitude" that comes with wisdom. Back in our teens and twenties, we thought we knew everything and made all those foolish mistakes. Then, when we got a little older, at thirty, we started getting these flashes of light, revelations of what a great and lucky thing it is that we didn't get caught doing those stupid things back then. Around forty, if we are lucky, we stop lying to ourselves. Fifty and above, we've run out of patience for foolishness. Take me to the bottom line.” - Tyler Perry

28. “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

29. “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

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

31. “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

32. “Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.” - Ernest Hemingway

33. “Most of our parents wanted the best for us, I knew, but we also wanted the best for them.” - Deb Caletti

34. “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

35. “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

36. “It is so demanding to be born into a house full of women, where everyone loves you so overwhelmingly that they end up suffocating with their love; a house where you, as the only child, have to be more mature than all the adults around....But the problem is that they want me to become everything they themselves couldn't accomplish in life.....As a result, I had to work my butt off to fulfill all their dreams at the same time.” - Elif Shafak

37. “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

38. “I never left because a part of me will always be in that house...” - J.X. Burros

39. “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

40. “Everyone always knows what they're doing," he says abruptly, still not looking up from his hands, the little plastic pot and the old tattoo and the new white dressing on his left wrist. "You know what you're doing, you got your work and your friends and everything and miserable headfucky little teenage girly boys think you're amazing and, I don't know, you might've saved my life, who knows? I might be dead if it weren't for you and Olly but people can't keep looking after me all the time cos that ain't healthy neither, that's just as bad as people not giving a fuck at all. And, like... I'm trying to sort my head out and be a proper grown-up and get my degree and go to work and look after them kids and make sure my dad ain't kicking my sister round the house like a football but it's just so hard all the time, and I know I ain't got no right to complain cos that's just life, ain't it? Everyone's the same, least I ain't got money worries or nothing. I just don't know what I'm doing, everything's too hard. I can try and try forever but I can't be good enough for no one so what the fuck's the point?” - Richard Rider

41. “The boy and the man must be raised to see the possibility of self worth, then meet a few others who provide the vision of a road toward it, then spend a lifetime pursing that worth through action and relationship. One of the great tragedies in human life is to be born a male and not be guided toward the value of a man.” - Michael Gurian

42. “‎She was not a little girl heart-broken about him; she was a grown woman smiling at it all, but they were wet smiles.” - J.M. Barrie

43. “When we grow up, we find ways to hide our anxieties, our loneliness, our fear and sorrow. But children hide nothing, putting everything into their tears, which they spread liberally about for the whole world to see.” - Yoko Ogawa

44. “At their core, Tiger Eyes, Forever..., and Sally J. Freeman are all books about teenage issues, but to an adult reader, the parents' story lines seem to almost overshadow their daughters. I'm bringing an entirely new set of experiences to these novels now, and my reward is a fresh set of story lines that i missed the first time around. I'm sure that in twenty or thirty years I'll read these books again and completely identify with all the grandparent characteristics. That's the wonderful thing about Judy Blume - you can revisit her stories at any stage in life and find a character who strikes a deep chord of recognition. I've been there, I'm in the middle of this, someday that'll be me. The same characters, yet somehow completely different. (Beth Kendrick)” - Jennifer O'Connell

45. “I wish wearing flat-irons on our heads would keep us from growing up. But buds will be roses, and kittens, cats, - more's the pity!” - Louisa May Alcott

46. “Sometimes, life threw up problems that even the wisest, most trusted mentor couldn't solve for you. It was part of the pain of growing up.And having to stand by and watch was part of being a mentor.” - John Flanagan

47. “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

48. “That night, Gregory dreamt of his mother. It was a dream that he'd have carried to his therapist like a raw, precious egg if he'd had a therapist, and the dream made him wish he had one. In the dream, he sat in the kitchen of his mother's house at the table on his usual place. He could hear her handle pots and pans and sigh occasionally. Sitting there filled his heart with sadness and also with a long missed feeling of comfort until he realised that the chair and the table were much too small for him: it was a child's chair and he could barely fit his long legs under the table. He was worried that his mother might scold him for being so large and for not wearing pants. Gregory, in the dream, felt his manhood press against his belly while he was crouching uncomfortably, not daring to move.” - Marcus Speh

49. “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

50. “I think that's every unresolved person's dream, to wake up one day and know what they want to do the rest of their life.” - Ashley D. Wallis

51. “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

52. “The right thing to do is so easy to see when you're seventeen years old and don't have to make any big decisions. When you know that no matter what you do, someone will take care of you and fix everything. But when you're grown up, the world is not that black and white, and the right thing doesn't a tidy little arrow pointing to it.” - Huntley Fitzpatrick

53. “That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.” - Nick Hornby

54. “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

55. “... 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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “The groove is so mysterious. We're born with it and we lose it and the world seems to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the world unifies around us, and both stupid and cool fall away.I am grateful to those who are keepers of the groove. The babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all.” - Lynda Barry

59. “When the most important things in our life happen we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is going on. A man does not always say to himself, "hullo! i'm growing up." It is only when he looks back that he realises what has happened and recognises it as what people call "growing up.” - C.S. Lewis

60. “Plans never go as planned, ever; that’s just how life is. People spend way too much time dreaming about a future they should be having more nightmares warning them against. But that doesn't mean you should let those bad dreams scare you away; all those nightmares want is respect. If you give them that, they’ll give you the space you need. Unless, of course, they’re the type of nightmares that have an appetite, then you’re fucked.” - Dave Matthes

61. “Out of curiosity, when do I grow up and become a fullfledgedman with a penis?”“When words like ‘hump day’ don’t make you giggle like atwelve-year-old,” he retorted, blowing smoke my way.“Wow, that long?” - Dani Alexander

62. “I believe in knowing who you are but without limiting yourself to your own expectation of who you are.” - Charlotte Eriksson

63. “You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be.” - Charlotte Eriksson

64. “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

65. “When I was young, I used to wish I would fit in… I’m glad I didn’t get my wish.” - Steve Maraboli

66. “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