Adulthood Quotes

Intern will resonate not only with doctors, but with anyone who has struggled with the grand question 'What should I do with my life?' In a voice of profound honesty and intelligence, Sandeep Jauhar gives us an insider's look at the medical profession and also a dramatic account of the psychological challenges of early adulthood. ~ Akhil Sharma

A porpoise sounded twenty yards away from us in an explosion of breath, startling us. . . . Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and a fourth porpoise neared the board and we could feel great secret shapes eyeing us from below. I reached out to touch the back of one, its skin the color of jade, but as I reached the porpoise dove and my hand touched moonlight where the dorsal fin had been cutting through the silken waters. The dolphins had obviously smelled the flood tide of boyhood in the sea and heard the hormones singing in the boy0scented water. None of us spoke as the porpoises circled us. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak – and then, as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us, moved south where there were fish to be hunted.
"Each of us would remember that night floating on the waves all during our lives. It was the year before we went to high school when we were poised on the slippery brink between childhood and adulthood, admiring our own daring as we floated free from the vigilance and approval of adult eyes, ruled only by the indifference of stars and fate. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set among us the night of the porpoises. ~ Pat Conroy

It's a Little Leaguers game that major leaguers play extraordinarily well, a game that excites us throughout adulthood. The crack of the bat and the scent of the horsehide on leather bring back our own memories that have been washed away with the sweat and tears of summers long gone ... even as the setting sun pushes the shadows past home plate. ~ Mario Cuomo

We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared. ~ Michael Chabon

This is why Max loved Mr. Beckmann: he was an equal. He seemed to have navigated his way through seven or so decades of adulthood without forgetting one moment of his childhood- what he loved and hated, feared and coveted. ~ Dave Eggers

This, you see, is the danger of children: they are ambushes, each and every one of them. A person may look at someone else's child and see only the surface, the shiny shoes or the perfect curls. They do not see the tears and the tantrums, the late nights, the sleepless hours, the worry. They do not even really see the love, not really. It can be easy, when looking at children from the outside, the believe that they are things, dolls designed and programmed by their parents to behave in one manner, following one set of rules. It can be easy, when standing on the lofty shores of adulthood, not to remember that every adult was once a child, with ideas and ambitions of their own.

It can be easy, in the end, to forget that children are people, and that people will do what people will do, the consequences be damned. ~ Seanan McGuire

I thought of my father's wisdom, as though it were buried in a box under a tree. As in the old song - a gold box with a silver pin. Some day I should be grown up, and I should dig up the box and turn the pin. ~ Mary Butts

Women in troubled marriages frequently try to work out their problems through their children. Whether a woman does this through the extremes of overwhelming demands, severe rejection, or smothering control, the results are the same: the boy becomes too dependent on her. Without realizing it, in adulthood he transfers this dependency, as well as the conflicts and fears that go with it, onto the woman in his life. The misogynist saw his mother as having the power to frustrate him, to withhold love from him, to smother him, to make him feel weak, or to make insatiable demands on him - and he now views his partner as having those same powers. The father who doesn't provide his son with any alternative to his mother's influence leaves the boy alone with his fears and his panicky feelings of vulnerability and neediness. ~ Susan Forward

Somewhere along the line, between the idealisms of youth and the realities of adulthood, we become pacified by our jobs; we tolerate how we hurt the world so that we can sustain our lives. At some point, blurred in the past, we traded the greater good for ourselves. ~ Richard Beckham II

I was born in Mumbai, but I grew up in England, and then my adulthood has been in the States. I'm an American stuffed with an English person with an Indian person inside. I feel like those things kind of inform me in some way, which I think helps me as an actor. ~ Aasif Mandvi

Now that I'm feeling the responsibilities of adulthood, the choices we make become an incredible weight. ~ Laura Marling

I've tried to teach what I learned all those years in my mother and father's house, all those things I didn't realize I was learning and that I never knew I'd be so grateful for. When you have love and it's proffered every day in a kind of tender, yet stern insistence and even reckless laughter, when it is given to you and you accept it in life as a thing as natural as rain or snow, or the littler of leaves in fall, you can't help but take it for granted. For a bewildered while you incorrectly understand that the world has given you this becuase it's there in equal measure, everywhere. You never knowuntil it's too late to do anything about it, how seet the effort is: how lasting the human will to love can be in the breast of people who want to make it for you, who want to give it to you, without calculating what's in it fo them, without thinking at all of what it will mean when you grow to full adulthood, see the world as it is, and forget to mention what you have been given.

Ever day of my grown-up life, I have wanted to do what my parents did. I have wanted to widen the province of love and weaken hate and bitterness in the hearts of my children. And I've done these things because of what I got from my family, all those lovely years when I was growing up, being loved and cherished and, unbeknown to me, and in the best way, honored, for myself. ~ Marian Wright Edelman

Most people want peace without the aloneness of [spiritual] power. And they want the self-confidence of adulthood without having to grow up. ~ M. Scott Peck

Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) is defined as "a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood. ~ Kevin Dutton

When we strive to remove all risk from childhood we also remove the foundations of a rational adulthood, and we eliminate the very experiences that will help kids grow up to be the empowered, creative, brave problem-solvers that they can and must be. ~ Gever Tulley

I don't think age has much to do with adulthood. ~ Alice Oseman

WHAT 28 FEELS LIKE

Every year of your 20s is subject to a very specific set of emotions, at least that's what I think. 21 is great for obvious, surface-level reasons. 22 is a train wreck if you graduated in four years, and are then thrust into real life. 25 is when pretty much everything changes – from your priorities to your body. And, then, there's 28. I don't know what it is about this age in particular, but I've deemed it "The Crisis Year" and here's why.

1. The realization that you're now officially in your "late 20s" is enough to send you straight into the climax of a full-blown panic attack. You don't even get to start at the beginning of the said attack, no. You wake up on your 28th birthday, screaming and dry heaving. It's an instinctual reaction to knowing that, for the next 365 days of your life, you will be teetering on the fine line between actual adulthood and clutching on desperately to your youth.

2. Because you're now in your late 20s, your parents start to treat you more like an GULP adult. Even if you've been paying your own way since forever, maybe you both secretly knew deep down that, in case of a huge emergency, asking them for help wasn't off-limits. But, when 28 hits, it's no longer an option.

3. You just feel old(er). There's something about the curvy lines of the number "8" that cast a darker and much more serious shadow over things. You'll still go out to popular nightlife establishments, but you will be ~ Joseph Ejiro

that life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences, that their marvelous years were not behind them. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Now this is a most satisfactory and important thing to think about, for brutality will not, - cannot, - accomplish what a kindly disposition will; and, if folks could only know how quickly a "balky" child will, through loving and cuddling, grow into a charming, happy youth, much childish gloom and sorrow would vanish; for a man or woman who is ugly to a child is too low to rank as highly as a wild animal; for no animal will stand, for an instant, anything approaching an attack, or any form of harm to its young. But what a lot of tots find slaps, yanks and hard words for conditions which do not call for such harsh tactics! No child is naturally ugly or "cranky." And big, gulping sobs, or sad, unhappy young minds, in a tiny body should not occur in any community of civilization. Adulthood holds many an opportunity for such conditions. Childhood should not. ~ Ernest Vincent Wright

Studies show that girls - especially smarter ones - have severe problems in the area of self-confidence.
They consistently underestimate their own ability. When asked how they think they'll do on different tasks - whether the tasks are untried or ones they've encountered before - they give lower estimates than boys do, and in general underestimate their actual performance as well. One study even showed that the brighter the girl, the less expectations she has of being successful at intellectual tasks. (...)
Low self-confidence is the plague of many girls, and it leads to a host of related problems. Girls are highly suggestible and tend to change their minds about perceptual judgments if someone disagrees with them. They set lower standards for themselves. While boys are challenged by difficult tasks, girls try to avoid them. (...) Given her felt incompetence, it's not surprising that the little girl would hotfoot it to the nearest Other and cling for dear life. (...) As we can see, the problems of excessive dependence follow female children right into adulthood. ~ Colette Dowling

In India, the sapling was planted by the nation's founders, who lived long enough (and worked hard enough) to nurture it to adulthood. Those who came afterwards could disturb and degrade the tree of democracy but, try as they might, could not uproot or destroy it. ~ Ramachandra Guha

and were willing to suffer pain if necessary." A young woman in the spring and summer of 1967 was walking toward a door just as that door was springing open. A stage was set for her adulthood that was so accommodatingly extreme - so whimsical, sensual, and urgent - that behavior that in any other era would carry a penalty for the daring was shielded and encouraged. There was safety in numbers for every gorgeous madness; good girls wanting to be bad hadn't had so much cover since the Jazz Age. San Francisco - glowing with psychedelic mystique, the whole city plastered with Fillmore and Avalon posters of tangle-haired goddess girls - was preparing for a convocation (of hapless runaways from provincial suburbs, it would turn out), the Summer of Love, through which the term "flower children" would be coined, while in harsh, emotion-sparking contrast, helicopters were dropping thousands of U.S. boys into the swamps of Vietnam. ~ Sheila Weller

What is an adult? A child blown up by age. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

When you're a child the world forbears you, allows you your flights of imagination, your feelings of specialness. But sooner or later the privileges are withdrawn, and all you're left with is a stunned bitterness at the realisation that you're just the same as everybody else. ~ Michael Marshall Smith

I'm pretty squeaky clean. No big tragedies in my childhood or adolescence or adulthood. I've had a very easygoing, simple life. ~ Vera Farmiga

QUIRK THEORY: Many of the differences that cause a student to be excluded in school are the same traits or real-world skills that others will value, love, respect, or find compelling about that person in adulthood and outside of the school setting. ~ Alexandra Robbins

They sealed this promise by hooking pinkies, the way they used to, long ago, when promises didn't hurt as much. ~ Alice Hoffman

God designed the church to be a community of lifelong learners under the earthly guidance of leaders who are teachers at heart. The Christian faith is not a finite course of study for the front-end of adulthood. Our mind-set shouldn't be to first do our learning and then spend the rest of our lives drawing from that original deposit of knowledge. Rather, ongoing health in the Christian life is inextricably linked to ongoing learning. ~ David Mathis

I feel that adolescence has served its purpose when a person arrives at adulthood with a strong sense of self-esteem, the ability to relate intimately, to communicate congruently, to take responsibility, and to take risks. The end of adolescence is the beginning of adulthood. What hasn't been finished then will have to be finished later. ~ Virginia Satir

That is where we stand as a nation today. Twenty years ago, our society began regularly prescribing psychiatric drugs to children and adolescents, and now one out of every fifteen Americans enters adulthood with a "serious mental illness." That is proof of the most tragic sort that our drug-based paradigm of care is doing a great deal more harm than good. The medicating of children and youth became commonplace only a short time ago, and already it has put millions onto a path of lifelong illness. (246) ~ Robert Whitaker

Bullying is an attack upon the runts of the litter - the weak of the species, and it is predicated on a lack of bond with the parents. If a child has a secure bond with the parents, that forms a force-field around the child in terms of bullying. If the child does not have a strong bond with the parents, then it's like being separated from the herd - those
are the ones who get picked off by the human predators in childhood and adulthood. So keep your contacts as close as you can, they provide an amazing shield against bullies and users. ~ Stefan Molyneux

People who don't get excited about receiving gifts are tired of life. ~ Anna Maxted

-'Would it help if I said I was very drunk?'
Brachio shook his head. - 'We all were'
-'Shitty childhood?'
-'Mummy used to leave me in a cupboard.'
-'Shitty adulthood?'
-'Whose isn't? ~ Joe Abercrombie

We are all entitled to our own share of mistakes and learning experiences in life. No one should take them away from us. Not even our parents. ~ Lukasz Laniecki

If the behaviour of babies and small children is any guide, we emerge into the world with our tendencies to imbalance already well entrenched. In our playpens and high chairs, we are rarely far from displaying either hysterical happiness or savage disappointment, love or rage, mania or exhaustion
and, despite the growth of a more temperate exterior in adulthood, we seldom succeed in laying claim to lasting equilibrium, traversing our lives like stubbornly listing ships on choppy seas. ~ Alain De Botton

Lies are for adults who are sad in their lives. ~ Jesse Eisenberg

The man was a bully. A bully who'd elevated himself to a high-level position, but a bully just the same. No amount of flattery would change how I saw him. ~ Gwenda Bond

Diplomas are ill-purposed. What should be celebrated is not the culmination of twelve years sitting in a school desk; what an 18-year-old should be recognized for is making it through young adulthood without getting herself killed. ~ Kari Martindale

Rearing a family is probably the most difficult job in the world. It resembles two business firms merging their respective resources to make a single product. All the potential headaches of that operation are present when an adult male and an adult female join to steer a child from infancy to adulthood. ~ Virginia Satir

Hearing this, I get a flash of pride at the fact that Peter wanted to be with my mother more than she wanted to be with him. This pride comes from the same internal place as the delusion I spent much of my young adulthood believing: that it is better to be the one desired more, rather than the one doing more desiring. As if love were a contest; as if desire were fixed, or absolute; as if either position could insulate you from being harmed or causing harm; as if being in control could insulate you from anything. ~ Leslie Jamison

Kimberly Reed explains why this love has transferred to adulthood, saying, "When you love something as a kid, you never stop loving it; you just tuck that love away in a different spot in your heart. ~ Nikki Van Noy

It was the great evil of plays that every character had some kind of purpose. Absorb too much of them, and you could go about believing there was something wrong with you if you drifted unremarked towards your thirties, and coasted into a quiet beach of no interest to anyone. ~ Natasha Pulley

Factors Influencing Us as Empaths
There are a number of factors affecting how we pick up energy from other people:
●Receiving
Our sensitivity as receivers will factor into how much energy we pick up.
●Sending
Some people transmit their energy more strongly than others, and the depth of the emotions that they are experiencing will also turn up the volume that they are sending out.
●Awareness
The unaware person may be just as sensitive as the aware person. The latter will understand why they have mood swings; the former will not.
●Bloodline
Blood relatives will affect us regardless of where in the world we are and whether we are thinking about them or not. The link between sender and receiver is often stronger where there is a blood connection. Often, empath children may process the emotions of their parents or siblings long into adulthood.
●Emotional Connection
Friends and acquaintances will impact us primarily based on the strength of the emotional connection we have to them, largely without regard to physical proximity. The stronger the emotional connection is, the less important the physical proximity is. Having worked from home for many years with teams spread all over the country, I have picked up energy from managers and teammates regardless of location.
●Physical Proximity
Neighbors and strangers will influence us based on physical proximity. This is true for the people living in our neighborhood and the ~ Trevor N. Lewis, Abbigayle McKinney

Their world is governed by children, little despots whose needs - school and camp and activities and tutors - dictate every decision, and will for the next ten, fifteen, eighteen years[...] Having children has provided their adulthood with an instant and nonnegotiable sense of purpose and direction. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty. ~ Neil Gaiman

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum. ~ Thomas Szasz

Borders are always tricky, intriguing things. [...] Feral children fascinate because they stand at the border of the animal world. Gorillas and dolphins fascinate because they stand at the border of the human world. [...] Shakespeare's fools fascinate because they live at the border between sanity and madness. The heroes of tragedy fascinate because they walk the border between triumph and defeat. The borders between prehuman and human, between childhood and adulthood, between generations, between nations and peoples, between social and political paradigms - all of these are intensely fascinating. ~ Daniel Quinn

Optimism was for children. Once you reached adulthood then you had to join the rest of the world as a realist - life was a bag of shit you were expected to pay for. ~ NikNak

And what am I? I'm forever stuck in a nonexistent place where no time passes and I do so much and learn so much but I don't grow. I'm still teenage me wanting more. Wanting less. Wanting anything and everything and I think I should grow up now. Grow out of childish anxiety and sorrows for all things past and everyone has moved on from schools and neighbourhoods and I moved first and swore the loudest on never coming back but now I dream about all things past. Going back. How do you transition from being a lost teenager, to one of those calm and serene souls of integrity and certainty? Because that's what I must do, now, soon. Do others feel left behind too, or is it just me? Like the train left with everyone on it and I'm still standing on the platform trying to decide if I should watch the sky for another hour or go change my ticket. Maybe sometimes you need to just close your eyes and jump on the train without feeling ready, and grow your steady breath on the way. I think sometimes you don't know how much you're capable of until you're forced to grow into it. ~ Charlotte Eriksson

If we value play and imagination in the early years because they promote healthy minds and contribute to a strong sense of self, why are they not an essential part of adulthood? ~ Ben Michaelis

You couldn't learn age, but adulthood was there for all. ~ Toni Morrison

As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts. ~ David Sedaris

I remember a new heaviness in my body, but maybe that's the work of time and my looking back. ~ Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

But we should open our eyes to the many ways in which hypervigilance keeps them penned in from the more liberated life they deserve to live and that in turn would prepare them for adulthood. ~ Julie Lythcott-Haims

Into adulthood through which everyone is always in a different way. Do not feel left out because of it. So, do not worry about it. Since everyone has experienced the same thing. ~ Ziyah

...our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood. ~ Jennifer Egan

But however the forms of family life have changed and the number expanded, the role of the family has remained constant and it continues to be the major institution through which children pass en route to adulthood. ~ Bernice Weissbourd

Most kids who don't feel enough love and nurturance carry around this kind of inner rage- a rage that often lasts throughout adulthood. The people who should have cared for them didn't. The lesson to take away: All people are shit. This is why troubled youth walk around with chips on their shoulders and why they are so hard to help.
Early on they learn that people can't be trusted. They often spend the rest of their lives embracing this damaging belief. Seeing the world through shit-coloured glasses, they are hypersensitive to every possible slight or judgement, and they believe anyone friendly or kind must have an ulterior motive.
Despite all this, wounded people desperately want and need love. But, terrified to trust, they constantly do thing to test and sabotage their relationships. This push-pull dance is well-known to anyone who's ever been close to a victim of abuse, neglect, or abandonment. Those who suffer from BPD are hypersensitive to perceived slights from others and can grow notoriously hostile when they feel dissed....
For survivors of abuse, who you trust is a matter of survival. Its black and white. There can be no apologies. There can be no gray. There are no exceptions.-Scared Selfless ~ Michelle Stevens

Other cultures make a clear delineation between childhood and adulthood; there are rites of passages and initiation ceremonies to mark these transitions. People expect and are willing to expose young people to hardship and pain, because it helps them grow. ~ Jeff Goins

As children we all wonder - we wonder all the time. And that gets lost in adulthood. It gets beaten out, it gets filtered out or diluted out. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Today, I slept in until 10,
Cleaned every dish I own,
Fought with the bank,
Took care of paperwork.
You and I might have different definitions of adulthood.
I don't work for salary, I didn't graduate from college,
But I don't speak for others anymore,
And I don't regret anything I can't genuinely apologize for.
And my mother is proud of me.
I burnt down a house of depression,
I painted over murals of greyscale,
And it was hard to rewrite my life into one I wanted to live
But today, I want to live.
I didn't salivate over sharp knives,
Or envy the boy who tossed himself off the Brooklyn bridge.
I just cleaned my bathroom,
did the laundry,
called my brother.
Told him, "it was a good day. ~ Kait Rokowski

A life-long blessing for children is to fill them with warm memories of times together. Happy memories become treasures in the heart to pull out on the tough days of adulthood. ~ Charlotte Kasl

And so he had begun his adulthood, the last three years spent bobbing from bank to bank in a muck-bottomed pond, the trees above and around him blotting out the light, making it too dark for him to see whether the lake he was in opened up into a river or whether it was contained, its own small universe in which he might spend years, decades - his life - searching bumblingly for a way out that didn't exist, had never existed. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

What I want is to have people's notion of adulthood no longer be so defined by being a parent. There is some kind of conventional wisdom that you're not really a mature person until you become a parent. ~ Meghan Daum

Infants have around 30,000 tastebuds, only about a third of which survive into adulthood, so a child's sensitivity towards extremes of sweet, sour and bitter flavours is heightened. ~ Yotam Ottolenghi

Dance. Dance for the joy and breath of childhood. Dance for all children, including that child who is still somewhere entombed beneath the responsibility and skepticism of adulthood. Embrace the moment before it escapes from our grasp. For the only promise of childhood, of any childhood, is that it will someday end. And in the end, we must ask ourselves what we have given our children to take its place. And is it enough? ~ Richard Paul Evans

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. ~ Thomas Mann

Many of the differences that cause students to be excluded in school are actually the same qualities or skills that other people are going to admire, respect or value about that person in adulthood. ~ Alexandra Robbins

Not old enough to feel like an adult , really, but old enough to look like one, and to know the distinction between being carefree and careless. ~ Gregory Maguire

Adults need to teach the children they love about sexual abuse so they know what to do if they encounter it. We need to prepare them so they know who to tell, should a violation occur, so they don't have to live with a painful secret, long into adulthood. ~ Carolyn Byers Ruch

It always amazes me that once you cut through the clutter, people are pretty much the same. Especially through adolescence and early adulthood. For the most part, people go through the same experiences and think the same things, but somehow no one ever escapes the belief that his experience is unique in every conceivable way. ~ Nicholas Sparks

In a 2007 study published in the Journal of Family Psychology,3 researchers asked eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds which criteria they felt were most indicative of adulthood. Their criteria were, in order of importance: (1) accepting responsibility for the consequences of your actions; (2) establishing a relationship with parents as an equal adult; (3) being financially independent from parents; and (4) deciding on beliefs/values independently of parents/other influences. ~ Julie Lythcott-Haims

A pony is a childhood dream. A horse is an adulthood treasure. ~ Rebecca Carroll

A major push is under way to figure out the molecular basis of those "critical" or "sensitive" periods, to figure out how the brain changes as certain learning abilities come and go. In some, if not all, of those mammals that have the alternating stripes in the visual cortex known as ocular dominance columns, those columns can be adjusted early in development, but not in adulthood. A juvenile monkey that has one eye covered for an extended period of time can gradually readjust its brain wiring to favor the open eye; an adult monkey cannot adjust its wiring. At the end of a critical period, a set of sticky sugar-protein hybrids known as proteoglycans condenses into a tight net around the dendrites and cell bodies of some of the relevant neurons, and in so doing those proteoglycans appear to impede axons that would otherwise be wriggling around as part of the process of readjusting the ocular dominance columns; no wriggling, no learning. In a 2002 study with rats, Italian neuroscientist Tommaso Pizzorusso and his colleagues dissolved the excess proteoglycans with an antiproteoglycan enzyme known as "chABC," and in so doing managed to reopen the critical period. After the chABC treatment, even adult rats could recalibrate their ocular dominance columns. ChABC probably won't help us learn second languages anytime soon, but its antiproteoglycan function may have important medical implications in the not-too-distant future. Another 2002 study, also with rats, showed that chABC can ~ Gary F. Marcus

For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be. ~ John Connolly

Wonder at what point a child becomes a person. Does it happen all at once, or slowly, in stages? Is there an age, a week, a moment, at which all the secrets of the universe are revealed and adulthood descends on a cloud from heaven, altering the brain forever? Will the child-me slink off one day, never to return? ~ Meg Rosoff

But the gates of my happy childhood had clanged shut behind me; I had become adult enough to recognize the need to conceal unbearable emotions for the sake of others. ~ Eva Figes

Nature's ultimate goal is to foster the growth of the individual from absolute dependence to independence - or, more exactly, to the interdependence of mature adults living in community. Development is a process of moving from complete external regulation to self-regulation, as far as our genetic programming allows. Well-self-regulated people are the most capable of interacting fruitfully with others in a community and of nurturing children who will also grow into self-regulated adults. Anything that interferes with that natural agenda threatens the organism's chances for long-term survival.

Almost from the beginning of life we see a tension between the complementary needs for security and for autonomy. Development requires a gradual and ageappropriate shift from security needs toward the drive for autonomy, from attachment to individuation. Neither is ever completely lost, and neither is meant to predominate at the expense of the other. With an increased capacity for self-regulation in adulthood comes also a heightened need for autonomy - for the freedom to make genuine choices. Whatever undermines autonomy will be experienced as a source of stress. Stress is magnified whenever the power to respond effectively to the social or physical environment is lacking or when the tested animal or human being feels helpless, without meaningful choices - in other words, when autonomy is undermined.

Autonomy, however, needs to be exercised in a way that does ~ Gabor Mate

If you protect your children from the pain of irresponsibility, you set them up for many struggles in adulthood. ~ Henry Cloud

Marriage is such a mark of adulthood in my mind. ~ Mandy Moore

All infants and children require and deserve comfort in order to develop properly. Soft cooing voices, gentle touch, smiles, cleanliness, and wholesome food all contribute to the growing body/mind. And when these basic conditions are absent in childhood, our need for comfort in adulthood can be so profound that it becomes pathological, driving us to seek mothering from anyone who will have us, to use others to fill our emptiness with sex or love, and to risk becoming addicted to a perceived source of comfort. ~ Alexandra Katehakis

Not to grow up properly is to retain our 'caterpillar' quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our caterpillar nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists and quacks. The genius of the human child, mental caterpillar extraordinary, is for soaking up information and ideas, not for criticizing them. If critical faculties later grow it will be in spite of, not because of, the inclinations of childhood. The blotting paper of the child's brain is the unpromising seedbed, the base upon which later the sceptical attitude, like a struggling mustard plant, may possibly grow. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive scepticism of adult science. ~ Richard Dawkins

Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn't miss an appointment, it never has. ~ Juan Gabriel Vasquez

People viewed me as an adult but I was just shit.
I always expected adulthood to happen, to make, like, a popping or dinging sound when it did. ~ Sam Pink

The transition into adulthood is so exciting and remarkable to witness as parent. ~ Polixeni Papapetrou

We are on red alert when it comes to how we are perceiving ourselves as a species. There's no desire to be an adult. Adulthood is not a goal. It's not seen as a gift. ~ Frances McDormand

Associated with this weight gain are increased risks
in adulthood for joint problems, angina, high blood pressure, heart
attacks, strokes, type 2 diabetes and, ultimately, premature death.
Outside of the human costs, health experts estimate that treating
adult obesity-related ailments will cost the American economy
nearly $150 billion in 2009. ~ Jeff Schweitzer

But wouldn't it be nice if we all smuggled a few childlike instincts across the border into adulthood? We'd spend more time saying what we mean and asking questions we care about; ~ Steven D. Levitt

They [high school students] all seemed quite excited to be there [a formal dance], like they were finally getting a glimpse of this magical new world they assumed was adulthood. As if adults regularly got together at large dances, all dressed up in fancy new clothes. ~ Cheryl Cory

As a child, that had meant looking forward to holidays and birthdays and, most of all, becoming a grown-up. Upon achieving adulthood she had discovered that being a grown-up wasn't nearly as satisfying as she had anticipated. What was more, the future was uncomfortably unpredictable. At ~ Jayne Ann Krentz

Getting calcium from plants might seem a little strange in a society that is so focused on dairy foods as a source of calcium, but some research suggests that even omnivores get as much as 40 percent of their calcium from plant foods. While a strong dairy lobby has convinced many consumers that milk and other dairy foods are essential for a healthy diet, the ability to drink milk into adulthood is not the norm throughout the world. Normal development throughout most of the world involves a gradual loss of the enzyme needed to digest milk sugar after children are weaned from breast milk. We refer to the lack of this enzyme as "lactose intolerance." But that's definitely a western bias since this "intolerance" is not a lack or an abnormality; it's part of normal human development in most people. ~ Jack Norris

If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils. ~ P.D. James

He was making one of the advances typical of early adulthood: the discovery that there were new values by which he preferred to be judged. ~ Ian McEwan

If you want to draw some advantage from your history, you must accept not only this miracle but also many others. In memory, everything can become miraculous. All you have to do is wish it, and freezing winter turns into spring, miserable rooms fill up with golden tapestries, murderers turn good, and children who cry out of loneliness receive caring teachers who are really the children themselves moved back from adulthood to their early years. Yes, my daughter, the past is not fixed and unalterable. With faith and will we can change it, not erasing its darkness but adding lights to it to make it more and more beautiful, the way a diamond is cut. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

Billy sipped the last of his coffee from the mug and shut down his laptop. 1,000 words wasn't great but it also wasn't as bad as no words at all. It hadn't exactly been a great couple of years and the royalties from his first few books were only going to hold out so much longer. Even if he didn't have anything else to worry about there was always Sara to consider. Sara with her big blue eyes so like her mother's.
He sat for a moment longer thinking about his daughter and all they'd been through since Wendy had passed. Then he picked up his mug with a long sigh and carried it to the kitchen to rinse it in the sink.
When he came back into his little living room and the quiet of 1 AM he wasn't surprised to find her there over to the side of the bookshelf hovering close to the floor just beyond the couch.
Wendy.
Her eyes were cold and intense in death, angry and spiteful in a way he'd never seen them when she was alive. What once had been beautiful was now a horror and a threat, one that he'd known far too well in the years since she'd died. He and Sara both.
He stood where he was looking at her as she glared up at him. Part of her smaller vantage point was caused by kneeling next to the shelf but he knew from the many times she'd walked or run through a room that death had also reduced her, made her no higher than 4 or 4 and half feet when she'd been 6 in life. She was like a child trapped there on the cusp between youth and coming adulthood. Crushe ~ Amanda M. Lyons

Many people don't have relationships to their siblings in adulthood, or they have superficial ones. It's sort of unfashionable, particularly in America, to be close to your family. ~ Kiki Smith

We're all adolescents now," writes Thomas Bergler. "When are we going to grow up?"17 Bergler explains that churches and parachurch organizations first began to provide youth-oriented programs - mainly to help at-risk kids in the cities (e.g., the YMCA). Then the "teenager" was invented as a unique demographic in society. As a result, the youth group was created, offering adolescent-friendly versions of church. "In the second stage, a new adulthood emerged that looked a lot like the old adolescence. Fewer and fewer people outgrew the adolescent Christian spiritualities they had learned in youth groups; instead, churches began to cater to them." Eventually, churches became them. ~ Michael S. Horton

Soon, he would become an adult. And when he did, there would be not going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about being a war hero: one you became one, you died one. ~ Khaled Hosseini

I grew up in a family of Republicans. And when I was 18 and registering to vote, my mom's only instruction was 'You just go in and pull the big Republican lever.' That's my welcome to adulthood. She's like, 'No, don't even read it. Just pull the Republican lever. ~ Tina Fey

Adolescence is the conjugator of childhood and adulthood. ~ Louise J. Kaplan