Coming Of Age Quotes - Page 3

This is the fairytale of my life, the mythology of my existence, and, as I only have one story to tell, there is only one way to tell it. You may find it a little melodramatic at moments and you may not like who I was at times. But, princes frequently start out as frogs and, perhaps, by the time I reach my end, you will understand why. And so, as we all must have a beginning, a middle and an end, I will start at the beginning. Once upon a time...

James Campion Conway

The morning after my mother’s death, I was surprised to see the sunrise. From behind the curtain of my bedroom window I was surprised to see the people leave their homes and begin the day. Downstairs, the hands of the grandfather clock continued to tick, marking each passing hour with a chime that echoed over the black and white chessboard tiles of the front hall. I was surprised to see the mail come at the same time as the day before and, later that evening, the sun set once more as it did since the beginning of time. My mother’s death did not disturb the planets in their courses. And, though everything kept moving like she never existed at all, my world erupted into chaos until the universe swirled around me like a whirlpool of scattering stars.

James Campion Conway

It's sad that bad things have to happen in order for us to stop and look around.

Megan Duke

Mending a broken heart isn't easy. It's messy and complicated, but when it's finished, it's stronger than ever.

Megan Duke

Happiness comes in many forms. Whether through a passion for something or someone, it makes no difference. The results are the same: you live.

Megan Duke

As for learning to wear high heels, no need to worry. I've got no tolerance for those dreadful things. If God wanted us girls tottering around like a bunch of drunken sailors, we'd have been born wearing stilts!

Jenny Lundquist

I have certainly heard of the Subtle Art of Shutting Up, but I can't say I've practiced it all that much. I greatly prefer the underappreciated genius of Speaking My Mind. I figure if someone doesn't like what I have to say, they shouldn't put their ears in close proximity to my mouth.

Jenny Lundquist

What's all this nonsense about odd vision and not fitting in? There are plenty worse things in this world than not fitting in--like fitting in way too much. You strike me as a real original, Izzy Malone, in a world that loves carbon copies. If you think you beautified something, I believe you. I've never understood why folks love safe, neutral colors so much. Colors are what make this world worth living in.

Jenny Lundquist

Sometimes I think teachers like Ms. Harmer view creativity as something dirty and slightly embarrassing, and would prefer to turn kids into people who color inside the lines.Generally speaking, I don't care much for lines.

Jenny Lundquist

P.S. Please don't call me Isabella. That name belongs to a really pretty girl who never wrecks her clothes and who never gets dirt under her fingernails. That's definitely not me. My name is Izzy.

Jenny Lundquist

Your mother would have more luck winning her election than teaching you how to be charming. Izzy Malone, going to charm school! Are you going to walk across the room with a book stuck on your head?""No, it's not like that at all," I said as he doubled over with laughter. "And I really don't see what's so funny.""It's just that"--he gasped--"it would be like teaching a hippo to wear high heels!

Jenny Lundquist

Words are a weapon, and rotten kids like Tyler Jones get a free pass when it comes to using them because the marks they leave are invisible. Why don't more adults realize that?

Jenny Lundquist

Turns out, most girls would rather put on lip gloss than play with sand toads.

Jenny Lundquist

The bracelet and the first charm appeared the day I punched Austin Jackson in the nose. I didn't mean to slug him. His face just got in my way. It was a bruising end to a disastrous first month in middle school.

Jenny Lundquist

I’m looking to make a miracle

Dana Reinhardt

It was during that journey to Via Orazio that I began to be made unhappy by my own alienness. I had grown up with those boys, I considered their behavior normal, their violent language was mine. But for six years now I had also been following daily a path that they were completely ignorant of and in the end I had confronted it brilliantly. With them I couldn’t use any of what I learned every day, I had to suppress myself, in some way diminish myself. What I was in school I was there obliged to put aside or use treacherously, to intimidate them. I asked myself what I was doing in that car. They were my friends, of course, my boyfriend was there, we were going to Lila’s wedding celebration. But that very celebration confirmed that Lila, the only person I still felt was essential even though our lives had diverged, no longer belonged to us and, without her, every intermediary between me and those youths, that car racing through the streets, was gone. Why then wasn’t I with Alfonso, with whom I shared both origin and flight? Why, above all, hadn’t I stopped to say to Nino, Stay, come to the reception, tell me when the magazine with my article’s coming out, let’s talk, let’s dig ourselves a cave that can protect us from Pasquale’s driving, from his vulgarity, from the violent tones of Carmela and Enzo, and also—yes, also—of Antonio?

Elena Ferrante

What did I think? Right then I was thinking about my father, specifically his habit of treating everyone with courtesy and consideration, of how he used to stop on lower Division Street and converse genially with old black men from the Hill whom he knew from his early days as a route man. His kindness and interest weren't feigned, nor did they derive, I'm convinced, from any perceived send of duty. His behavior was merely an extension of who he was. But here's the thing about my father that I've come to understand only reluctantly and very recently. If he wasn't the cause of what ailed his fellow man, neither was he the solution. He believed in "Do unto Others." It was a good, indeed golden, rule to by and it never occurred to him that perhaps it wasn't enough. "You ain't gotta love people," I remember him proclaiming to the Elite Coffee Club guys at Ikey's back in the early days. Confused by mean-spirited behavior, he was forever explaining how little it cost to be polite, to be nice to people. Make them feel good then they're down because maybe tomorrow you'll be down. Such a small thing. Love, he seemed to understand, was a very big thing indeed, its cost enormous and maybe more than you could afford if you were spendthrift. Nobody expects that of you, asny more than they expected you to hand out hundred-dollar bills on the street corner. And I remember my mother's response when he repeated over dinner what he'd told the men at the store. "Really, Lou? Isn't that exactly what we're supposed to do? Love people? Isn't that what the Bible says?

Richard Russo

The God of Imagination lived in fairytales. And the best fairytales made you fall in love. It was while flicking through "Sleeping Beauty" that I met my first love, Ivar. He was a six-year-old bello ragazzo with blond hair and eyebrows. He had bomb-blue eyes and his two front teeth were missing.The road to Happily Ever After, however, was paved with political barbed wire. Three things stood in my way.1. The object of my affection didn't know he was the object of my affection.2. The object of my affection preferred Action Man to Princess Aurora.3. The object of my affection was a boy and I wasn't allowed to love a boy.

Diriye Osman

She bought seeds and raided nurseries and mulched and composted and spent full days with her hands full of earth, coaxing life our of the dry, dull grass my father had spent years pushing a mower over.

Sarah Dessen

Both the two of us knew it. We watched the lie go up big and slow between us, then it burst like a spit bubble. They always burst before too long.

Stephen Kelman

College isn't half as much fun as they told us it was going to be.""It's not one-hundredth as much fun.

Molly Ringle

Can’t count on no miracles. Sometimes, you just got to have a plan.

J.D. Jordan

A motorcycle is a vehicle of change, after all. It puts the wheels beneath a midlife crisis, or a coming-of-age saga, or even just the discovery of something new, something you didn't realize was there. It provides the means to cross over, to transition, or to revitalize; motorcycles are self-discovery's favorite vehicle.

Lily Brooks-Dalton

He lies there listening to it, absorbing this sense of his own quiet drone transmuted into something of certain substance, something large, magnificent and grand—no longer him, no, but something bursting from him, leaving his split carcass behind as a monument to its source, its host, its feeding ground.

Patrick Bryant

The kinds of jobs a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old can get are not worth doing. They pay shit and suck.

A.D. Aliwat

I wonder if he’d been as beautiful as Dante. And I wondered why I thought that.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Don't think about that. Just believe I'll be okay.

Shane K. Morgan

As I watch Nicholas make his way back to his truck, I know one thing: this boy is going to make my life very interesting. I feel as if a fragment of the old me broke away tonight and disappeared, and I’m finally, truly beginning my new life.

Marie Landry

But sometimes you have to make a decision with your heart instead of your head, and that’s what I did. I know I’ve made the right decision even if it takes my brain a little while to catch up to my heart.

Marie Landry

I remember thinking that I could disguise the way I am by somehow filtering my expression for the sake of juvenile social acceptance or I could say to the world, “Here I am, if you don’t like it, don’t clap.” -Boys of the Fatherless-

David C. Riggins

We are brilliant shades of light, we can not be contained"-Boys of the Fatherless-

David C. Riggins

There is a secret layer of humanity that lies just beneath the surface of man, a secret layer where our fears and insecurities hide, that when touched in this secret place men and woman are somehow liberated.

David Riggins

Samir loves Joe’s face. He studies it every day in class: a face as old as his own but already, in eighteen years, the cliffs and hills and odd proportions of its geography have been shaped by life’s weather. Samir likes to observe the ever-watchful green eyes, hidden in their shadowy alcoves over the at nose and cheekbones, and the heavy brow that scrunches up with Joe’s moods – all those sculptural planes could have been carved by Easter Islanders. en there’s the pout of his lips, the pucker of their concentration or the twist of their anger. But most of all, Samir examines the thoughts as they cross the wide-open landscape of the face. Tries hard to read their cloud shapes from the merest shadow.

Peter Bunzl

Something—he wondered later if it was simply his youth—something that had weighed upon him until that moment broke off him, the way a piece of rock slides slowly into the sea and disappears in a spray of foam.

Patrick Modiano

I'm too old to be ignorant as I am." --Twelve-year-old Gabriella to the general, who does not want her to know about Emmett Till and the world's brutality.

Elle Thornton

Iâ€™ve lived for nothing and might soon die for less. My Life, Part One will be cancelled midway through the first season

R.S. Gompertz

I work in a restaurant in an airport in Taiwan. I am eighteen years old and I don’t like my job because everyone gets on planes and leaves. And I want to leave too.

Kerem Mermutlu

Perhaps that was the point; life, if you did it right, meant learning and changing. If you didn't, you died- or stopped growing - which amounted to more or less the same thing. So I would slide in and out of different roles until I discovered the one that fit me best.-Deuce, (183)

Ann Aguirre

I had come to the conclusion that everyone took sex far too seriously. I mean, it's only sex.

Chloe Thurlow

But when she looked at Prue tonight, she saw this was not now quite true of her. She was just beginning, just moving, just descending.

Virginia Woolf

Life was like that when you were fifteen and knobby-kneed and you only had a handful of choices. Your world was small and cruel and narrow-minded and breathtaking.

Colleen Curran

In Venice, things not always as they first appear. I contemplate this observation from my post on the aft deck of one of Master Fumagalli’s gondolas, taking in the panorama of bridges, domes, bell towers, and quaysides of my native city. I row into the neck of the Grand Canal, and, one by one, the reflection of each colorful façade appears, only to dissipate into wavering, shimmering shards under my oar.

Laura Morelli

I am looking through a lace curtain at a dead man's feet. I am ten years old, the mist is rising on a fall morning in 1944 in Sawyer, Georgia, and I am standing on a front porch painted gray with white trim.

Anne Lovett

There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

There's something to say about inspiration - when it comes into your life...the feeling is insatiable.

Ann Marie Frohoff

Only half a page left now. Shall I fill it with 'I love you, I love you'-- like father's page of cats on the mat? No. Even a broken heart doesn't warrant a waste of good paper.

Dodie Smith

I have really sinned. I am going to pause now, and sit here on the mound repenting in deepest shame...

Dodie Smith

Say no! I thought. Say you want yourself all for your own self. Say that you have no specific country, say that you are important without any story from above, say that your home is with me and the other girls up in the sky.

Darcey Steinke

Judge that boy if you must; for debauchery, for objectifying innocence... but before you finalize your verdict, oh innocent reader, I beg you to scan again that last stanza. What you and I overlooked in our cloud of perversion and nasty objectification was the unrestrained joy of a little girl playing dress-up for the very first time.

Jake Vander-Ark

Every time I think about that girl, my mind commits a sin.

Jake Vander-Ark

The night seemed suddenly defiled by the absence of music, as if the silence itself was injecting a sickness that only another song could cure.

Jake Vander-Ark

Last night I dreamt Moses and I were rowing underwater.We could breathe and talk to one another.We rowed past schools of fish and sea anemones and Moses named them for me.”—Jules Finn

J Dylan Yates

what I like and what I need’s two different things.

J.D. Jordan

And if revenge was all I had, then I was goddamned if it wouldn’t be enough.

J.D. Jordan

Time collapsed into a delicate dark pencil brushed against oureyebrows, the emergent rumble of crowds gathering above our heads. Weslid into our costumes. Pirate, outlaw, futuristic rebels. Red,purple, gold. Chains hanging from our belts, tight black trousers. Wewere moved upstairs, closer to the stage. Finally, we heard thecannon's roar: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome... Tanzarrecording artists... THE MASTER PLANETS!" The world shot forward. Westepped into the spotlight.

Donald Gallinger

There comes a time in everyone’s life—and I do mean in everyone’s life—when you ask yourself what it is that you’ve been doing with your life. Sometimes you even realize that whatever you’ve been doing all your life, you’ve been doing it wrong. Dead wrong… Son, you want that realization to hit you when you’re 70? Or 50? Or when you’re still young, with your whole life still ahead of you?

Ali Sheikh

...You are a little boy. You want the moon to drink from as a golden cup; and so, it is very likely that you will become a great man -- if only you remain a little child. All the world'sgreat have been little boys who wanted the moon; running and climbing, they sometimes catch a firefly. But if one grow to a man's mind, that mind must see that it cannot have the moon and would not want it if it could -- and so, it catches no fireflies.' [Merlin]

John Steinbeck

I'd wrestled against the inner voice of my mother, the voice of caution, of duty, of fear of the unknown, the voice that said the world was dangerous and safety was always the first measure and that often confused pleasure with danger, the mother who had, when I'd moved to the city, sent me clippings about young women who were raped and murdered there, who elaborated on obscure perils and injuries that had never happened to her all her life, and who feared mistakes even when the consequences were minor. Why go to Paradise when the dishes aren't done? What if the dirty dishes clamor more loudly than Paradise?

Rebecca Solnit

There comes a time in a girl’s life where she finds her heart broken, what matters is not the boy who broke it but the boy who stitches it back together

Kara Lee Hunter

You see, there is a major downfall to living in a tourist town. You guessed it, the constant turnover of new people. You cannot really connect with anyone because no one is ever here for more than two weeks every year, if they comeback at all. The intruders never thought about what happens once they leave. ~ Stella

Michele Richard

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Coming Of Age Quotes - Page 3

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