#growing

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all. ↗

— Cormac McCarthy

#growing-up #innocence #life #loss-of-innocence #truths

Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realise that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [...] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our licence to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home. ↗

— Gregory Maguire

#home #isolation #experience

To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#growing-up #death

Personally, I'd rather grow old alone than in the company of anyone I've met so far. I don't experience myself as lonely, incomplete, or unfulfilled, but I don't talk about that much. It seems to piss people off--especially men. (Kinsey Millhone) ↗

— Sue Grafton

#independent-women #men-and-women #other-people #single-women #solitude

Sometimes the comfort of being in a relationship lulls you into mundane complacency; you become irrelevant in each other’s lives. We call this phenomenon 'growing apart'. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#inspirational #life #love #marriage #relationship

Learning is one letter short of maturity. ↗

— Eddie Mhone

#growing-up #experience

It would be inappropiate, undignified, at 38, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour or intensity of a 22 year old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry? Crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photobooths? Taking a whole day to make a compilation tape? Asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or TS Eliot or, god forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at 38, to expect a song or book or film to change your life. ↗

— David Nicholls

#growing-up #music #change

Two things happen when you get to be old. One, you gather experience and knowledge. You learn from your mistakes, and thereby offer wisdom to others. The second thing that happens is that you grow forgetful, ornery and senile, and when you offer advice, well, you sometimes just don't know what you're talking about. Often it's hard for everyone-including me-to know the difference. ↗

— Camron Wright

#humor #experience

I wanted only a familiar voice, someone who knew me. Not some earlier, larval version of myself. . . ↗

— Jennifer Haigh

#companionship #family #growing-up #secrets #sisters

Sometimes in storm weather the shore had fluttered with disabled swallows. They crouched lower for his approach, without strength to escape. In his hands they pulsed with that same pulse. He had taken a bird and warmed it between his hands or inside his jacket, brought the life back until it was able to fly. Sometimes, released from his hands, they circled once around him before flying away; in gratitude, or so the child had believed--and the belief had survived all the man's science. ↗

— Barry Unsworth

#growing-up #reason #faith