#adulthood

This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might not exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo’s sincerely godless generation, the question hasn’t come up. No one in his bright, plate-glass, forward-looking school ever asked him to pray, or sing an impenetrable cheery hymn. There’s no entity for him to doubt. His initiation, in front of the TV, before the dissolving towers, was intense but he adapted quickly. These days he scans the papers for fresh developments the way he might a listings magazine. As long as there’s nothing new, his mind is free. International terror, security cordons, preparations for war — these represent the steady state, the weather. Emerging into adult consciousness, this is the world he finds. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#innocence #terror #war #love

I love fashion. I always have. When I was a kid, I was in almost full-on costumes when I went to school, and I've retained a bit of that in my adulthood. ↗

— Lake Bell

#almost #always #bit #costumes #fashion

Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood. ↗

— Walt Disney

#adulthood #entertainment #ideals #influence #lives

Comedy was the key to everything. I grew up fast and controlled my future by bringing it on faster than it naturally unfolded. I cheated myself out of a childhood but then got a running headstart into adulthood that no one else could keep up with. ↗

— Margaret Cho

#bringing #cheated #childhood #comedy #controlled

Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit. ↗

— Robert Charles Wilson

#childhood #deceit #lying #art

Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them. ↗

— Dr. Seuss

#childhood #children

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 believe that everyone else my age is an adult whereas I am merely in disguise. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#adulthood #peter-pan-syndrome #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