#adulthood

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum. ↗

— Thomas Szasz

#age #aim #apparent #between #childhood

Tragically, the White House Task Force on Disadvantaged Youth reported that one-quarter of our young people are at serious risk of not achieving productive adulthood. ↗

— Ruben Hinojosa

#adulthood #disadvantaged #force #house #one-quarter

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook. ↗

— C.G. Jung

#jung #psychology #religion #age

The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia. Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites. ↗

— Katherine Dunn

#age #childhood #age

This goes along with another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#age

Whenever someone brings up the traits associated with being a functional human otherwise known as an "adult," I think, is this even possible for me? Probably not, is what I conclude. I mean, I'll eventually pay off my college loans at the age of forty-five by selling what's left of my liver, and I'll probably manage to find sustenance and remember to breathe oxygen constantly. I'll survive. However, for people like me...There will be years of struggle to keep myself afloat. ↗

— Alida Nugent

#age

Soon, he would become an adult. And when he did, there would be not going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about being a war hero: one you became one, you died one. ↗

— Khaled Hosseini

#childhood #coming-of-age #age

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I'm starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life's sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it's my own choices that'll lock me in, it seems unavoidable--if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#aging #choices #life #life-paths #regrets

Don't you find it odd," she continued, "that when you're a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you're older, somehow they act offended if you even try. ↗

— Ethan Hawke

#childhood #dreams #ethan-hawke #follow-your-dreams #growing-up

As a man begins to understand the sacrifices he must make to live the life he dreams of, he often loses his courage for such a life. ↗

— Josie Sigler

#courage #fears #growing-up #courage