“Out of curiosity, when do I grow up and become a fullfledged man with a penis?” “When words like ‘hump day’ don’t make you giggle like a twelve-year-old,” he retorted, blowing smoke my way. “Wow, that long?”
“The older I get, the more I hold multiple emotions at the same time.”
“Sometimes you’re 23 and standing in the kitchen of your house making breakfast and brewing coffee and listening to music that for some reason is really getting to your heart. You’re just standing there thinking about going to work and picking up your dry cleaning. And also more exciting things like books you’re reading and trips you plan on taking and relationships that are springing into existence. Or fading from your memory, which is far less exciting. And suddenly you just don’t feel at home in your skin or in your house and you just want home but “Mom’s” probably wouldn’t feel like home anymore either. There used to be the comfort of a number in your phone and ears that listened every day and arms that were never for anyone else. But just to calm you down when you started feeling trapped in a five-minute period where nostalgia is too much and thoughts of this person you are feel foreign. When you realize that you’ll never be this young again but this is the first time you’ve ever been this old. When you can’t remember how you got from sixteen to here and all the same feel like sixteen is just as much of a stranger to you now. The song is over. The coffee’s done. You’re going to breath in and out. You’re going to be fine in about five minutes.”
“You learn over time that the world isn’t broken. It’s just… got more pieces to it than you thought. They all fit together, just maybe not the way you pictured when you were young.”
“Relax. You will become an adult. You will figure out your career. You will find someone who loves you. You have a whole lifetime; time takes time. The only way to fail at life is to abstain.”
“You grow up the day you have your first real laugh -- at yourself.”
“When you were too young and naïve to see the risks, I incurred your wrath to protect you. Scream at me for it if you must. Thank me for it when you finally grow up.”
“That s one of the things we learn as we grow older -- how to forgive. It comes easier at forty than it did at twenty.”
“Nothing special has happened today; no one can say she was more provoked than usual. It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman. Step by step until it is done.”
“Maybe it’s just getting older. You become so palpably aware this is not a dress rehearsal. There’s a big sign in blazing neon that says You Haven’t Got Long. But I think it takes a beat to learn that. Life has to knock you down in order for you to realise it, because when you’re a kid you think you’re immortal.”
“A child isn’t born bitter. I point no fingers as to who tainted the clean, pure pool of my childhood. Let’s just say that when I realized that I didn’t want to grow up, the damage was already done. Knowing that being grown up was no swell place to be means that you are grown up enough to notice. And you can’t go back from there. You have to forge another route, draw your own map.”
“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.”
“The groove is so mysterious. We re born with it and we lose it and the world seems to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the world unifies around us, and both stupid and cool fall away. I am grateful to those who are keepers of the groove. The babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all.”
“I knew that I had reached the end of childhood once I realized that adults in my life didn t know anymore than I did.”
“Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they d be different”
“I stopped speaking. There was no point trying to argue. There was no way she was going to even attempt to listen to me. They never do, do they? They never even try to listen to you.”
“There will always be those who say you are too young and delicate to make anything happen for yourself. They don t see the part of you that smolders. Don t let their doubting drown out the sound of your own heartbeat. You are the first drop of rain in a hurricane. Your bravery builds beyond you. You are needed by all the little girls still living in secret, writing oceans made of monsters, and throwing like lightning. You don t need to grow up to find greatness. You are so much stronger than the world has ever believed you could be. The world is waiting for you to set it on fire. Trust in yourself and burn.”