“hat s the worst of growing up, and I m beginning to realize it. The things you wanted so much when you were a child don t seem half so wonderful to you when you get them.”
“For years I was deathly afraid of my own weaknesses, but when I closed my eyes and let myself be vulnerable to them it allowed miracles to take place. Miracles that were only alive when I accessed my BLIND faith.”
“However, now she was a schoolgirl no longer. She had discovered how to manage her hair, had been to one or two parties and a night club, and laid on lipstick with the idea that each layer was a layer of sophistication.”
“I never tired of picturing sharks.”
“I don t want to be a man, said Jace. I want to be an angst-ridden teenager who can t confront his own inner demons and takes it out verbally on other people instead. Well, said Luke, you re doing a fantastic job.”
“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
“Life many gay people of my generation, I would not behave like a teenager until I was in my twenties.”
“I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant”
“When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.”
“Adolescence. Is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?”
“She insisted that they focus their energies on raising a little girl who was, by nature, a tangle of mischief and motion and curiosity.”
“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
“Dear God, she prayed, let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere - be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.”
“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”
“Most people don t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.”
“My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.”
“When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”