“Where d the days go, when all we did was play? And the stress that we were under wasn t stress at all just a run and a jump into a harmless fall”
“Growing up is hard, love. Otherwise everyone would do it.”
“when we were kids laying around the lawn on our bellies we often talked about how we d like to die and we all agreed on the same thing; we d all like to die fucking (although none of us had done any fucking) and now that we are hardly kids any longer we think more about how not to die and although we re ready most of us would prefer to do it alone under the sheets now that most of us have fucked our lives away.”
“As a child there s a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one...each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment.”
“It s not always easy being her daughter. I think, she said, sometimes it s hard no matter whose daughter you are.”
“The right thing to do is so easy to see when you re seventeen years old and don t have to make any big decisions. When you know that no matter what you do, someone will take care of you and fix everything. But when you re grown up, the world is not that black and white, and the right thing doesn t a tidy little arrow pointing to it.”
“I don’t want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I’ll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it’s possible to be. I’m growing and I don’t know how to grow. I’m living but I haven’t started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it’s like I’m not here in the world at all and I simply don’t exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid.”
“I am not a broken heart. I am not collarbones or drunken letters never sent. I am not the way I leave or left or didn’t know how to handle anything, at any time, and I am not your fault.”
“They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.”
“I still don t know what it really means to grow up. However, if I happen to meet you, one day in the future, by then, I want to become someone you can be proud to know.”
“As for the fact that Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle apeared to be going their different ways when they were usually inseparable, these things happened as people got older--Ron and Hermione, Harry reflected sadly, were living proof.”
“There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don t lose yourself at happy hour, but don t lose yourself on the corporate ladder, either.”
“It was cold out here in this world beyond childhood.”
“I am not collarbones or drunken letters never sent. I am not the way I leave or left or didn’t know how to handle anything, at any time, and I am not your fault.”
“Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional.”
“Most of us won t see one another after graduation, and even if we do it will be different. We ll be different. We ll be adults--cured, tagged and labeled and paired and identified and placed neatly on our life path, perfectly round marbles set to roll down even, well-defined slopes.”
“I wasn’t ready to think about the other yet: that it wasn’t that I wasn’t right for Macon, but that maybe he wasn’t right for me. There was a difference. Even for someone who things didn’t come easy for, someone like me.”