coming-of-age

_girls were like poems: weird, incomprehensible and boring, but those __n the know_ assured me that they were beautiful.

We make people into Gods, desperate that they never leave us and hopeful that someday, if we ever deserve it, maybe they__l love us back even half way.

I know more about my father than I used to know: I know he wanted to be a pilot in the war but could not, because the work he did was considered essential to the war effort_ I know he grew up on a farm in the backwoods of Nova Scotia, where they didn__ have running water or electricity. This is why he can build things and chop things_ He did his high school courses by correspondence, sitting at the kitchen table and studying by the light by a kerosene lamp; he put himself through university by working in lumber camps and cleaning out rabbit hutches, and was so poor he lived in a tent in the summers to save money_ All this is known, but unimaginable. Also I wish I did not know it. I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.

Cry your guts out because nothing is sadder than an adult who forgets how to be a child.

I guess that__ what growing up is. Saying good-by to a lot of things. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it isn__. But it is all right.

Your own life starts the moment you're born. Before that, even.""I just, I feel like as long as I live with you, I won't... I'm not... It's like George Jefferson.""From the TV show?""Right. George Jefferson. As long as he was on 'All in the Family', he was just somebody who made Archie Bunker's story more interesting. He didn't have anything of his own. He didn't have a plot or supporting characters. I don't know if you ever even got to see his house. But after he got his own show, George had his own living room and kitchen... and bedroom, I think. He even had his own elevator. Places for him to exist in, for his story to happen. Like this apartment. This is something that's mine.

The second hardest part about growing up is trying to figure out who you are. The hardest part comes after you've figured it out and the rest of the world wants to pull you in a different direction.

I don't know why I didn't have this sixth sense or whatever it is all along, but part of me thinks maybe it means I'm growing up, evolving into a real superhero. Like maybe the world knew I couldn't handle it before, but now, now I'm finally becoming me an the world know sit -- or maybe I'm just learning to listen to myself.

When they reached the top of the hill they turned and looked down at the valley. Moominhouse was just a blue dot, and the river a narrow ribbon of green: the swing they couldn't see at all. "We've never been such a long way from home before," said Moomintroll, and a little goose-fleshy thrill of excitement came over them at the thought.

You'll never have to fend for yourself like that, Lincoln. You never have to be alone. Why would you want to?"He leaned back against his bedroom wall and slunk down until he was sitting on the cast-iron radiator. "I just...," he said. "Just?""I need to live my life.""You aren't living your own life now?" she asked. "I certainly never tell you what to do.""No, I know, it's just...""Just?""It doesn't feel like I'm living my own life.""What?""It feels like, as long as I stay home, I'm still living your life. like I'm still a kid.""That's silly," she said."Maybe," he said.

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.

It's really best not to tell people when you feel bad. Growing up is about keeping secrets, and pretending everything is fine.

I learned that adults were not soaring gods, but rather back-yard birds with broken wingtips.When you are thirteen, about to free-fall into the real world, discovering the broken wingtips is terrifying.

Have you ever noticed how as an adult, all the bright colors go out of your life? Now that I__ not a kid anymore, things always look gray, like a clothesline draped with laundry that__ been washed too many times and left to stand in the wind. I guess that__ what growing up is_ it__ a fading photograph.

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.

It is hard to be true to yourself because it is hard to be yourself.

There's always one sure way of finding out that you're a misfit. When you're eleven years old, and your friends are telling you that they just sneaked into the theater to watch 'Twilight' and that it was "sooooo emotional and sooooo terrifying and soooooo romantic!" - but you've been spending the summer watching 'Rosemary's Baby' and 'Don't Look Now' and knowing the lines to all the Alfred Hitchcock films by heart - that's the moment you realize that you're a misfit.

It__ not easy to be God.