"Youth is wasted on the young."
— Oscar Wilde

"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 (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"Dear God," she prayed, "let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere - be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost."
— Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)

"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

"You need not be sorry for her. She was one of the kind that likes to grow up. In the end she grew up of her own free will a day quicker than the other girls."
— J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)

"Growing up is loosing some illusions, in order to acquire others."
— Virginia Woolf

"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. (Bone Crossed)"
— Patricia Briggs (Bone Crossed)

"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 (Lullabies for Little Criminals: A Novel)

"This is growing up, having to stomp out love, this is how people turn terrible."
— Michelle Tea

"That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity - the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don't attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself."
— Nick Hornby (How to Be Good)

"The youthful body untouched decays the fastest, for no living hands record its splendor; and here youth and time are wasted."
— Roman Payne (Hope and Despair)

"He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times."
— Neil Gaiman (Stardust)

"What young people didn’t know, she thought, lying down beside this man, his hand on her shoulder, her arm; oh, what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn’t choose it. And if her platter had been full with the goodness of Henry and she had found it burdensome, had flicked it off crumbs at a time, it was because she had not known what one should know: that day after day was unconsciously squandered.
And so, if this man next to her now was not a man she would have chosen before this time, what did it matter: He most likely wouldn’t have chosen her either. But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union—what pieces life took out of you.
Her eyes were closed, and throughout her tired self swept waves of gratitude—and regret. She pictured the sunny room, the sun-washed wall, the bayberry outside. It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.
"
— Elizabeth Strout

"How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?"
— John Updike (Rabbit Is Rich)

"Growing up is mandatory, but growing up isn't."
— K.L. and C.S.

"'I am growing up,' she thought, taking her taper. 'I am losing my illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones."
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"The mark of an inmature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause. The mark of a mature man is that he wants to die humbly for one.
"
— J.D. Salinger

"You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they come from and refuse to tell you where they're going.
"
— P.J. O'Rourke

"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 (The Story Sisters)

"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 The Story Sisters

"She didn't like being twelve. It was someplace between who she'd been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all."
— Alice Hoffman