growing-up

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.

September felt panic burn through her like gasoline. Why couldn't he understand her? "But I didn't [choose]! I have hardly had a chance to breathe since I got here and it's always like that in Fairyland. Everything is always happening and all at once. And I am growing up, Saturday! I am growing up and I have read books, so many books, and I know that growing up means you can't keep going to Fairyland the way you did when you were a child! Something happens to you and suddenly you have to keep a straight face and a straight line and I am afraid! I want something grand and I don't want to know what it is before it happens!

I realized if I didn__ just go, I__ never go. Going was the key. It didn__ matter where I was headed just as long as I was headed somewhere. ~ Ben Davis

Jocelyn did not want to always remain the same. Where was the adventure in that?

...that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn__ know who I was__ was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I__ never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn__ know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn__ scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that__ why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.

Before you know it you'll be my age telling your own granddaughter the story of your life and you wanna make it an interesting one, don't you? You wanna be able to tell her some adventures, some excitements, some something. How you live your life, little one, is a gift for those who come after you, a kind of inheritance.

I was happy, but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.

Love is growing up.

I'm going to go throw up now, because ive turned into my dad. If vomiting doesn't work, I'll see if I can get an exorcism.

When Uncle W. G. held out his hand to take my money, I dropped the dead mouse in his hand.

She had been a teenager once, and she knew that, despite the apparent contradictions, a person's teenage years lasted well into their fifties.

I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility.

She__ always pictured her future self as a lone wolf traveling around the world, ensnaring romantic conquests and achieving her wildest and most ambitious goals. She didn__ think that at nineteen she would be so dependent on other people; she pictured herself as an autonomous and untouchable force that occasionally flitted back home to show off her new feathers before flying away to her life that was much more exciting than theirs.

Laura knew then that she was not a little girl any more. Now she was alone; she must take care of herself. When you must do that, then you do it and you are grown up. Laura was not very big, but she was almost thirteen years old, and no one was there to depend on. Pa and Jack had gone, and Ma needed help to take care of Mary and the little girls, and somehow to get them all safely to the west on a train.

Boys annoyed her. Girls annoyed her. She should have been a cat.

It didn't matter what anyone else saw in me. For the first time, I felt like I was seeing myself.

Part of me is afraid that everyone will laugh, that I__ a caricature of myself.

I wasn__ ready to think about the other yet: that it wasn__ that I wasn__ right for Macon, but that maybe he wasn__ right for me. There was a difference. Even for someone who things didn__ come easy for, someone like me.