adulthood

The beige linoleum floor turned into the ocean, crashed and crashed against Lotto's shins. He sat down. How swiftly things spun. Two minutes ago he'd been a kid, thinking about his nintendo system, worried about asymptotes and signs. Now he was, heavy, adult.

A child who grows up too closely aligned with adults assumes knowledge of a life she hasn__ yet experienced.

I didn't grasp that desire and duty could rival each other, least of all that they most often did.

There, sitting cross-legged on the floor, he stared absently at his legs. They began to look strange. They no longer seemed to grow from his trunk at all, but rather, completely unconnected, they sprawled rudely before him. When he got this far, he realized something he had never noticed before__hat his legs were unbearably hideous. With hair growing unevenly and blue streaks running rampant, they were terribly strange creatures.

At thirty a man steps out of the darkness and wasteland of preparation into active life it is the time to show oneself, the time of fulfillment.

The most difficult journey any of us ever take in our adulthood is the return to our parents_ house. A home visit makes us recall all of the childhood events that formed us. Returning home reacquaints us with family members and our former self.

That was when it was all made painfully clear to me. When you are a child, there is joy. There is laughter. And most of all, there is trust. Trust in your fellows. When you are an adult...then comes suspicion, hatred, and fear. If children ran the world, it would be a place of eternal bliss and cheer. Adults run the world; and there is war, and enmity, and destruction unending. Adults who take charge of things muck them up, and then produce a new generation of children and say, "The children are the hope of the future." And they are right. Children are the hope of the future. But adults are the damnation of the present, and children become adults as surely as adults become worm food. Adults are the death of hope.

A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.

You go through so many changes as a child, then you grow up and discover that none of that stuff mattered, except for the impression it made on your mind.

My father moved out a week later. I hugged him at our front door and couldn't bear to watch him leave with so much luggage.

If you manage to make it to some semblance of adulthood, just showing up turns out to be one of the kindest, most selfless things you can do for someone.

You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

Stupid girl. You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

There is magic everywhere around you, but most people are too busy being grownup to notice it.

We look at the world once, in childhood.The rest is memory

I had been riding horses before my memory kicked in, so my life with horses had no beginning. It simply appeared from the fog of infancy. I survived a difficult childhood by traveling on the backs of horses, and in adulthood the pattern didn't change.

Oh, monsters are scared', said Lettie. 'And as for grown-ups...' She stopped talking, rubbed her freckled nose with a finger. Then, 'I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.'...We sat there, side by side, on the old wooden bench, not saying anything. I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long books. The kind with no pictures or conversations.

There was a time when that kind of thing looked like the kingdom of heaven, but somewhere along the line it had lost its glow. Maybe that was just the cost of growing up. And maybe the cost of growing up was too high.