Quotes About Maturity

Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.

Now I become myself. It's taken time, many years and places.

Youth is given. One must put it awaylike a doll in a closet,take it out and play with it onlyon holidays.How to Be Old [1963]

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.

Some lessons you learned by the book. Others you learned from cold hard experience. The latter may not be the best way to learn, but it damn well stuck.

Me empezó a dar pena el pobre muchacho, empecé a cogerle simpatía. A fin de cuentas, él no tenía la culpa de contar para hombre tan temprano.

i shvatio sam kako ?ovjek može lako da posegne za gruboš?u ako nije dorastao nekome.

Kad sam prošao taj mu?ni put, doznavši i ono što mi nije bilo potrebno, moja naivnost je umrla, od stida.

Young people think love is mathematics. They think if you add it up and add it up and keep adding, you can save it until you're ready to cash it in. But it doesn't work that way. You might be making the deposits, but your whole life cashes the checks. Work, children, bills—it all takes its cut. Then you go back to love, thinking it'll be there, and sometimes it's not.

I wonder at what point a child becomes a person. Does it happen all at once, or slowly, in stages? Is there an age, a week, a moment, at which all the secrets of the universe are revealed and adulthood descends on a cloud from heaven, altering the brain forever? Will the child-me slink off one day, never to return?

Age is not always the best judge of competence.

wonder at what point a child becomes a person. Does it happen all at once, or slowly, in stages? Is there an age, a week, a moment, at which all the secrets of the universe are revealed and adulthood descends on a cloud from heaven, altering the brain forever? Will the child-me slink off one day, never to return?

So many people don't even know what hits them when they grow up. They feel clobbered over the head the minute the first thing goes wrong, and they spend the rest of their lives trying to avoid pain at all costs. But you all know that avoiding pain is impossible. And I think having that knowledge, plus the experiences you've lived through, make you definitely not fragile. They make you brave.

Everyone tended to believe everything was their fault; maybe it was just hard to imagine, when you were still fairly young, that there were some things in the world that were just not about you .

The men she met all seemed to say they were "several years out of Wesleyan." Their beds were never made, or else made poorly, when she climbed into them. No one yet had the time or inclination to take care of themselves, and it was unclear when that would ever begin.

Now, deep into the Reagan years, you should still feel the sad spillover from that quaintly vanished era, and you could go with your best friend to this friendly sex toy store located in an anonymous office building, and stand together, silently shaking with laughter, both teenaged and fully grown all at once, knowing that you would never have to choose between those different states of maturity, because you contained them both inside yourselves.

You're all equipped for the world, for adulthood, in a way that most people aren't," she continues. "So many people don't even know what hits them when they grow up. They feel clobbered over the head the minute the first thing goes wrong, and they spend the rest of their lives trying to avoid pain at all costs. But you all know that avoiding pain is impossible. And I think having that knowledge, plus the experiences you've lived through, make you definitely not fragile. They make you brave.

Then it wouldn't be long before they all found themselves shocked and sad to be fully grown into their thicker, finalized adult selves, with almost no chance for reinvention.

Everybody's grown-up, everybody's old, and the normal rules do apply.

What you knew, felt and wanted now, and the way you could love now, had a long valley of seriousness running through it that had always perhaps been there, though to a lesser extent.

Her letters were still bubbled and fat and juvenile, creating a disconnect between the content of what she was writing and the way she wrote it. Who would even take it seriously?

A second date always felt like an announcement at his age. And he never felt ready for the announcement.

The truth was that I'd been spending years running away from myself. I hid myself in drama, silliness, stupidity, banality. So afraid to grow up. So afraid to involve myself in relationships where I might be expected to give the same love I got - instead of sixth-grade shenanigans. I bored myself with all the when I grow up nonsense, but I was worried it would never happen even as I longed for it.

Adulthood is knowing that a fully realized character is always more important than the lines.