#dole

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

— Margaret Atwood

#adulthood #peter-pan-syndrome #age

So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#childhood #coming-of-age #earthsea #age

He'd been given an assignment to write about teen beauty pageants [...], which he'd accepted because he enjoyed blood sports as much as the next person. ↗

— David Baldacci

#ambition #beauty-pageants #ruthlessness #sarcasm #satire

He was fiercely beautiful in the way some young males are, as if their whole being were being lived through their eyes, and their large noses, and their ungainly limbs. ↗

— Eloisa James

#beauty

I'm most disturbed by the theory of rubber resilience in children; as if its much easier to bounce back with youth. I see them more like Steel. When heated, they can be bent either which way. But if it's not corrected by the time things cool down, they can be forever changed. ↗

— Zack W. Van

#bullying #children #psychology-spirituality #change

...And so we go and I meet his parents. And it's a very strange thing meeting your girlfriend's boyfriend's parents for the first time. Part of you is angry for obvious reasons and part of you still wants to make a good impression. On a side note, they seemed in perfect health. ↗

— Mike Birbiglia

#dating #humor #dating

Before I lost my father, I never understood the rituals surrounding funerals: the wake, the service itself, the reception afterward,the dinners prepared by well-meaning friends and delivered in plastic containers, even the popular habit of making poster boards filled with photos of the dear departed. But now I know why we do those things. It's busywork, all of it. I had so much to take care of, so many arrangements to make, so many people to inform, I didn't have a moment to be engulfed by the ocean of grief that was lapping at my heels. Instead, I waded through the shallows, performing task after task, grateful to have duties to propel me forward. ↗

— Wendy Webb

#condolence #death #grief #kindness #sympathy

May this be your final sorrow. ↗

— Anita Amirrezvani

#death #death

I must console him for the distance we have moved from the place where he stopped. ↗

— Anne Enright

#death #death

What drew him back was something altogether more personal, to a history where, in the pain and longing of adolescence, he was still standing on the corner of Queen and Albert Streets waiting for someone that he knew would never appear. He had long understood that one of his selves, the earliest and most vulnerable, had never left this place, and this original and clearest view of things could be recovered only through what had first come to him in the glow of its ordinary light and weather...it was the light they appeared in that was the point, and that at least had not changed. ↗

— David Malouf

#history #past #personal-history #waiting #change