#adulthood

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

I am convinced that most people do not grow up...We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias. ↗

— Maya Angelou

#growing-up #life #maturity #life

Yet there be certain times in a young man’s life, when, through great sorrow or sin, all the boy in him is burnt and seared away so that he passes at one step to the more sorrowful state of manhood ↗

— Rudyard Kipling

#childhood #life

She had the feeling, the tingling, lingering sense that something or someone life altering was just over the horizon. She had no idea what it was, but she wanted to rush headlong to bring it to her. ↗

— Mandy Nachampassack-Maloney

#growing-up #hurry #life

Adults have the benefit of experience and know the trick will work as long as the technique is correct. When we “grow up” we gain this experience and knowledge, but we lose our innocence and sense of wonder. In other words, the price we pay for growing up is a permanent sense of loss. ↗

— Alberto Alvaro Ríos

#innocence #life #experience

Feeling young and old at the same time is the present." From FIFTY IS THE NEW FIFTY: 10 Life Lessons for Women in Second Adulthood ↗

— Suzanne Braun Levine

#life

Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#success #value #success

For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be. ↗

— John Connolly

#childhood #child

When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you ↗

— Gail Carson Levine

#bridge #childhood #childhood

I always looked forward to being an adult, because I thought the adult world was, well—adult. That adults weren’t cliquey or nasty, that the whole notion of being cool, or in, or popular would case to be the arbiter of all things social, but I was beginning to realize that the adult world was as nonsensically brutal and socially perilous as the kingdom of childhood. ↗

— Peter Cameron

#nonsense