maturity

Hand, nobody told me about the weight. Why didn't our parents tell us about the weight?__hat weight?__he fucking weight, Hand. How does the woman Ingres live? The one from Marrakesh? If we're vessels, and we are, then we, you and I, are overfull, and that means she's at the bottom of a deep cold lake. How can she stand the hissing of all that water?__e are not vessels; we are missiles.__e're static and we're empty. We are overfull and leaden.__e are airtight and we are missiles and all-powerful.

If you happen to be white in a white country; pretty according to the dictates of fashion; rich in a country where money is adored, it__ almost impossible to grow up and to grow up honest inside. It is almost impossible. Most people don__ grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging. But to grow up, to take responsibility for the time you take up, and the space you occupy, to honor every living person for his or her humanity, that is to grow up.

Maturing is realizing how many things don__ require your comment.

Fathers were supposed to be invulnerable - but that attitude was childish, he now saw. Irritatingly, he might have to change his outlook. He could no longer be merely indignant and resentful. He was not the only sufferer. Dad had hurt him, but he had hurt Dad as well, and they were both responsible. Feeling responsible was not as comfortable as feeling outraged.

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.

Sometimes or most of the time, we need to remind ourselves that we're not a KID anymore.

Sometimes or most of the times, we need to remind ourselves that we're not a KID anymore.

He knew he could never jingle change in his pocket or park his car like a confident adult, he was the Adrian he had always been, casting a guilty look over a furtive shoulder, living in eternal dread of a grown-up striding forward to clip his ear.But there again, when he sipped at the whiskey his eyes failed to water and his throat forgot to burn. The body shamelessly welcomed what once it would have rejected. At breakfast he demanded not Ricicles and chocolate spread, but coffee and unbuttered toast. And if the coffee was sugared he leapt from it like a colt from an electric fence. He ate the crust and left the filling, guzzled the olives and spurned the cherries. Yet inside he remained the same Adrian who fought down the urge to stand and shout 'Bullocks' during church services, smelt his own farts and wasted hours skimming through National Geographic on the off-chance of seeing a few naked bodies.

I, on the other hand, still might not be considered a proper adult. I had been very grown-up in primary school. But as I continued through secondary school, I in fact became less grown-up. And then as the years passed, I turned into quite a childlike person. I suppose I just wasn't able to ally myself with time.

It__ hard to have done all one__ growing up since 33 _ but that__ a damn sight better than not growing up at all.

Some days, Kaylin fervently wished that she had already passed Adult 101 and could get on with being the person she wanted to be.

I think I may have to grow up without growing old. I think we're going to have to define differently what I'm going to be. We're going to have to define my growing up differently.

Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.

Maturity is when your world opens up and you realize that you are not the center of it.

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.

That boy made me realize, for a while at least, that my parents were wrong, and I didn't have to be like them.

... I guessed that when you are nearly a man, you have to learn to put up with a lot of aggravation from little old bitty kids.

For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!