Explore Quotes on Growing Up

The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.

I think you don't grow up until you stop worrying about other people's purposes or lack of them and find the purposes you believe in for yourself.

When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.

They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.

I wonder if other mothers feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people they themselves wanted so badly to be.

I want to be a scientist who studies the ocean when I grow up. I would go out to sea, and scuba dive, and find new things, and National Geographic will hire me.” Sure, Nudge. Probably around the time I become president.

Well, I don't know how astute I am, but I did want to be a journalist when I was growing up.

I wish my mother had left me something about how she felt growing up. I wish my grandmother had done the same. I wanted my girls to know me.

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

I watched them, thinking that little girls who make their mothers live grow up to be such powerful women.

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.

Maybe children just want whatever it is they don't get. And then they grow up and give their children what they wanted, be it silence or information, affection or independence--so that child, in turn, craves something else. With every generation the pendulum swings from opposite to opposite, stillness and peace so elusive.

And I don’t want his body touching something I wear. He’ll contaminate it. (Sasha) Oh, good grief, Sasha. Grow up. You’re four hundred years old and you’re acting like a whelp. It’s not like he has cooties or anything. (Astrid) Yes he does! (Sasha)

We cheated, you and me, and someone noticed. I noticed you; someone else noticed me. It hurts us. That's not so bad. So many people cheat. Everywhere on every level. Everyone's cheated. I'm just saying that you don't need to see yourself as a cheater. Because that's not who you are. You're someone who cheated. There's a difference, and you should try to get that difference, or that's who you'll grow up to be.

Growing up in India, I knew all I needed to change the world was one good opportunity, and I prepared myself for it. When that opportunity came - in the form of the chance to earn an engineering degree - I was ready.

Rarely do members of the same family grow up under the same roof.

As a young boy growing up in rural India, most of what I knew of the world was what I could see around me. But each night, I would look at the Moon - it was impossibly far away, yet it held a special attraction because it allowed me to dream beyond my village and country, and think about the rest of the world and space.

My father is a real idealist, and he's all about learning. If I asked for a pair of Nikes growing up, it was just a resounding 'No.' But if I asked for a saxophone, one would appear and next day and I'd be signed up for lessons. So anything to do with education or learning, my father would spare no expense.

But in another world, another life, probably growing up in another country, I might have been more of a dancer.

All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.