Explore Quotes on Adults

[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.

It is only now, these years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight recognized the sweetness of that gesture. A grown man entertaining three raccoons, treating them like real ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness. Or affection. It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.

This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.

I try to sign for as many kids as possible. Kids come first, and I'll always sign for a kid before an adult. It's funny, because I was never big into autographs as a kid. The only player who I ever wanted an autograph from was Dave Winfield.

I care so passionately about improving the quality of life for women and girls, not just here in the United States, but internationally as well. I am a single mom and I raised a daughter who is now a young adult.

Even if there was such a thing as a half-price sale at the local Ming outlet shop, she would have to work ten lifetimes to make up such a sum. Always supposing that it wasn't one of a kind. Panic was no longer merely rearing. It was thundering through her at full throttle. There was only one thing to be done, she realized. The mature, responsible, adult thing to do. Hide the evidence.

I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.

I used to believe, although I don't now, that growing and growing up are analogous, that both are inevitable and uncontrollable processes. Now it seems to me that growing up is governed by the will, that one can choose to become an adult, but only at given moments. These moments come along fairly infrequently -during crises in relationships, for example, or when one has been given the chance to start afresh somewhere- and one can ignore them or seize them.

Why did adults have to be so thick? They always say “tell the truth,” and when you do, they don’t believe you. What’s the point?

Children are often envied for their supposed imaginations, but the truth is that adults imagine things far more than children do. Most adults wander the world deliberately blind, living only inside their heads, in their fantasies, in their memories and worries, oblivious to the present, only aware of the past or future.

I was frightened by the optimism of adults, their stupid trust in science to treat a troubled heart. Afraid of their obsession with believing they have to treat troubled kids. I just wanted them to leave me alone, so how come they didn't get it? But that's the way it always is.

But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so beautifully -- got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.

What is a child?" he asks her. The diamond gaze does not flinch. "Creatures that are sold on the street by their parents, to get the coin to make more children." She paused. "Adults sell themselves.

The darkness is calling. A little danger, a little risk. Feel your heart race. Listen to it. That’s the sound of being alive. It’s your time, Nick. Your one chance to have fun before it’s all stolen by them, the adults, with their cruelty and endless rules, their can’t-do-this, and can’t-do-that’s, their have-tos, and better-dos, their little boxes and cages all designed to break your spirit, to kill your magic.

Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up

Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love...it had all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet fixed to comparisons or chronologies or the ways by which adults measure such things...I just loved her. Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones -- that kind of love.

We had enough years in front of us to be serious and grown-up and respectable. Why rush it? But on the other hand we always complained when teachers and other adults treated us as kids. In fact there was nothing that annoyed me more. So it was a frustrating situation. What we needed was a two-sided badge that said 'Mature' on one side and 'Childish' on the other. Then at any moment we could turn it to whatever side we felt like being and the adults could treat us accordingly.

Adults are constantly telling teenagers that it's what's on the inside that matters. It's always painful to find out that adults have lied to you.

I'm not usually an eavesdropper,but i dare you to try not listening if you hear your best friend talking about you to an adult.

Once you look past the hype, actors are nothing more than fugitives from reality who specialize in contradiction: we are both children and hardened adults—wide-eyed pupils and jaded working stiffs.

It appeared clear to me - partly because of the lies that filled my history textbooks - that the intent of formal education was to inculcate obedience to a social order that did not deserve my loyalty. Defiance seemed the only dignified response to the adult world.