Coming Of Age Novel Quotes

He had not been sleeping well over Christmas. Actually, he hadn't been doing anything well over Christmas – eating, sleeping, exercising, talking, looking after himself, laughing, crying… No, he hadn't really been crying despite all the pain he felt. It was just tearing him up inside, quietly. It was like his insides were being ripped up by an angered tiger. ~ Pamela Harju

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

I am careful with the arguas (tomato caterpillars). Be careful with your mothers' hearts too, por favor.
THE PINATA-MAKER'S DAUGHTER ~ Eileen Granfors

A magical blending of mystery, romance, and deep and dangerous secrets. Kelly Parra's Invisible Touch is an action-packed coming-of-age novel, sure to keep readers turning pages and begging for a sequel. ~ Laurie Faria Stolarz

With every beat of my heart, I believe she thought keeping her secret was in everyone's best interest. She thought the secret would be buried with her, never to be revealed. She thought wrong. ~ Misa Rush

Dear Diary:
I have a confession to make: I've become a total idiot over French pastries.
They're my new favorite food.
My new-found edible souvenir.
My new favorite sin.
Dunkin Donuts is so yesterday. ~ Kimberley Montpetit

I think I knew from the first moment I met her, she would be the one to replace me. I didn't think it would happen that fast, but it did. ~ Megan Duke

I'm going to turn my life around. Make a complete three sixty."
"Don't you mean one eighty?" he corrected. "If you do that, you'll end up right back where you started."
"Maybe. But at least I'll have a chance of coming out of it a different person - a better version of me. ~ Megan Duke

Congratulations," she said. "You win. ~ Megan Duke

Oh, if necessity is the mother of invention, who is the Father? Fantasy. ~ Gregory Maguire

True love is what makes life worth living. ~ D.F. Jones

She might have been there for you in the aftermath, but I was there when everything came crashing down. ~ Megan Duke

Yessir, some things is sin 'cause God says so. Some things is sin 'cause they hurt other people. And some things is just pure-dee stupid. ~ David Hopper

This is the age," she explained to me once as we walked home from school, "when we're the purest forms of ourselves we'll ever be. We haven't been complicated by everything yet. I want to keep a clear record of who I am, so that down the road I'll be able to see who I was. Maybe I can avoid losing myself completely."

She sighed, biting her lip pensively. "Things happen," she said. "Small things and large things, and they just keep changing you, little by little, until there's no trace of who you used to be. If I get lost, this journal will be like a record of who I was, a trail of bread crumbs to find my way back. ~ Jonathan Tropper

I loved you yesterday. I love you today. I'll love you tomorrow ... forever. ~ Lynetta Halat

Bobby's back yard hadn't changed since she was knee-high. It was still littered with bicycle bits and pieces of engine that he was always tinkering with. It looked like the same relentless weeds bravely struggled through the cracked flagstones; the same array of socks and T-shirts flapped on the washing line, though somewhat bigger, and even the same wasps droned around the dustbin. That's how it seemed – a place immune to time. ~ Bernie Morris

You understand. I don't know. I am not sure how I would feel in your shoes. My mother wanted me. ~ Donna K. Childree

I see us milling around our lockers in Tri-County High, laughing and joking and making plans for the weekend, whispering about girls and sex and other undiscovered territories, slapping five, talking cool, dreaming our pretty little high school dreams. ~ James Michael Rice

She licked cinnamon sugar off her fingers, sun-heavy and happy, the type of happiness that before might have felt ordinary, but now seemed fragile, like if she stood too quickly, it might slide off her shoulders and break. ~ Brit Bennett

My illusion, the idea of a soul mate, was so entrenched in my fantasy that the thought of letting him go, wrecked me. ~ M.R. Field

It feels like I'm trapped in quicksand. The more I struggle, the more I sink. So I stop struggling. I stop trying to free myself; because the more I struggle the scarier it becomes. Then - and only then did panic yield long enough for a numbness to spread and stick to me like a second skin. ~ Jannet Casas

A lady is a female person who has the grace to consider the feelings of others before her own, at all times, and in all places. It has nothing to do with fine clothes or posh accent, or how much money her father's got. And it don't even matter if she smokes, drinks, or never observes the finer points of unnecessary etiquette. None of these things have anything to do with it unless they conflict with the first rule. In other words, it depends who she's with. A lady is naturally born and cannot be moulded or trained to be anything else. She just is. ~ Bernie Morris

Sometimes Karl, you have to realize your weeknesses and be willing to discuss them with adults. ~ Molly Maguire McGill

I was physically attacked by a woman who didn't even know me. Yes, my boyfriend was her former husband, but she tried to ruin me. ~ Brenda Perlin

All Jane Austen novels have a common storyline: an attractive and virtuous young woman surmounts difficulties to achieve marriage to the man of her choice. This is the age-long convention of the romantic novel, but with Jane Austen, what we have is Mills & Boon written by a genius. ~ P.D. James

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. ~ John Steinbeck

Paine suffered then, as now he suffers not so much because of what he wrote as from the misinterpretations of others...

He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds - or on persons devoted to them - have served to darken his memory, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life.

When Theodore Roosevelt termed Tom Paine a 'dirty little atheist' he surely spoke from lack of understanding. It was a stricture, an inaccurate charge of the sort that has dimmed the greatness of this eminent American. But the true measure of his stature will yet be appreciated. The torch which he handed on will not be extinguished. If Paine had ceased his writings with 'The Rights of Man' he would have been hailed today as one of the two or three outstanding figures of the Revolution. But 'The Age of Reason' cost him glory at the hands of his countrymen - a greater loss to them than to Tom Paine.

I was always interested in Paine the inventor. He conceived and designed the iron bridge and the hollow candle; the principle of the modern central draught burner. The man had a sort of universal genius. He was interested in a diversity of things; but his special creed, his first thought, was liberty.

Traducers have said that he spent his last days drinking in pothouses. They have pictured him as a wicked old man coming to a sorry end. But I am persuaded that Paine must have looked with magnanim ~ Thomas A. Edison

Coming of queer age in the 1990s, to love queers was to love damage. To love damage was a path to loving yourself. ...Queers do not come out of the minefield of homophobia without scars. We do not live through out families' rejection of us, our stunted life options, the violence we've faced, the ways in which we've violated ourselves for survival, our harmful coping mechanisms, our lifesaving delusions, the altered brain chemistry we have sustained as a result of this, the low income and survival states we've endured as a result of society's loathing, unharmed. Whatever of theses wounds I didn't experience firsthand, my lovers did, and so I say that, for a time, it was not possible to have queer love that was not ins some way damaged or defined by damage sustained, even as it desperately fought through that damage to access, hopefully, increasingly frequent moments of sustaining, lifesaving love, true love, and loyalty, and electric sex. ~ Michelle Tea

For the first time I realized adults could back themselves into corners so remote that love, or its memory, could no longer reach them. ~ Kirby Wright

Perhaps death is just a big lie. ~ Bella James

I'm just open to doing all different kinds of movies. I have a movie called Scout coming out and it's a coming of age story. [] I have a very small role in it, but it was really fun to make and really light, but I do want darker roles. ~ Shelley Hennig

One summer when Carol was attending day camp, Greta had an affair with a man named Mel Carter. He was an Eastern publicity representative for a film studio, and often instructed dinner parties to which we went in those days with accounts of the movies' coming of age. 'We have a picture coming up,' he said once, 'in which a character says "son of a bitch." Lots of exciting things are happening. Still, it's only a beginning. Much remains to be done. ~ Peter De Vries

As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age. ~ Henry David Thoreau

When I was coming of age, I remembered reading and studying the initial ideas within the feminist movement. There was this idea with my parents' generation that in order to find equality, a woman would need to behave like a man. ~ Bryce Dallas Howard

We are brilliant shades of light, we can not be contained"
-Boys of the Fatherless- ~ David C. Riggins

Almost everyone first realized they were becoming a grown woman when some dude did something nasty to them ... It was mostly men yelling shit from cars. Are they a patrol sent out to let girls know they've crossed into puberty? If so, it's working. ~ Tina Fey

Old age is, it occurs to Busner as he lies stranded on his side staring at the clock radio, a form of institutionalisation
it deprives you of your identity and supplies another, simpler one, it takes away your clothing and issues you with a uniform of slack-waisted trousers, threadbare jackets and moth-eaten cardigans, togs that are either coming from or going to charity shops. This done, it commits you to a realm at once confined and unbounded, an atrophying circuit of corridors that connect strip-lit and overheating rooms where you fade away your days reading day-old newspapers and specialist magazines
albeit not ones relating to the specialty that awaits you. ~ Will Self

I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift, and I regret the prospect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man's destiny - if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image - tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I've tried to demonstrate in my examination of the postliterate culture, the story begins only when the book closes. ~ Marshall McLuhan

He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then the distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Picture a summer stolen whole from some coming-of-age film set in the small-town 1950s. This is none of Ireland's subtle seasons mixed for a connoisseur's palate, watercolor nuances within a pinch-sized range of cloud and soft rain; this is summer full-throated and extravagant in a hot pure silkscreen blue. This summer explodes on your tongue tasting of chewed blades of long grass, your own clean sweat, Marie biscuits with butter squirting through the holes and shaken bottles of red lemonade picnicked in tree houses. It tingles on your skin with BMX wind in your face, ladybug feet up your arm; it packs every breath full of mown grass and billowing wash lines; it chimes and fountains with birdcalls, bees, leaves and football-bounces and skipping-chants, One! two! three! This summer will never end. It starts every day with a shower of Mr. Whippy notes and your best friend's knock at the door, finishes it with long slow twilight and mothers silhouetted in doorways calling you to come in, through the bats shrilling among the black lace trees. This is Everysummer decked in all its best glory. ~ Tana French

The trees are bedecked with snow, the air is perfumed; how sweet, how dark the sultry fragrance. Forever hypnotising, always haunting. I want to inhale the fragrance of your skin, drink from your open mouth. ~ Suzy Davies

wasn't no bit of me willing to ride shotgun to my own funeral. ~ J.D. Jordan

The morning Mom tells me my skirt is too short, I find the lawn full of dead fledglings. ~ Kyle Labe

I journeyed alone for almost ten years before I found home. Adoptions are like very delicate gardening with transplants and grafts. Mine took hold, rooted, and bloomed, even though there were inevitable adjustments to the new soil and climate. Yet I have not forgotten where my roots started. ~ Ashley Rhodes-Courter

When are you going to get a fella?" Lily asks Rose after a year or two of dancing. "I have one who wants to take me kissing, but I think I should wait for you to have one."
Rose flushes. "I don't think I'll ever have a fella."
"Why not?" Lily bristles. "We're plenty pretty."
"I don't like the look of them," Rose says.
Lily purses her lips at the dance floor, appraising.
After a moment long, Rose says, "Any of them."
Lily looks at her a long time, as Rose tries not to hyperventilate.
Then Lily shrugs and says, "Well, then it's you who should have learned to lead, isn't it?" and when Rose clasps Lily's hand, she clasps it back.
It's the closest they've ever been. ~ Genevieve Valentine

I pull his hand up to my chest. "It's okay. Some of my best friends are in the mob. It must be really tough with your husband in prison."
"You THINK?" He pulls away, as if I've been insensitive, picks up a stone and throws it at a crow walking around in the grass.
As the crow screeches bloody murder and takes flight, escaping unscathed, Joshua darts in front of me, hits Tiger in the nuts and calls him a bitch.
Pulling Joshua back to my right, I glare down at him asking- WHAT did you CALL HIM?
"A BITCH."
"He's not a bitch."
"YES HE IS."
Tiger, coming to the rescue, kneels and places his hand on Joshua's shoulder. "Sorry little buddy. I didn't mean to make you go all APE shit. You like those little flying RATS."
Joshua shakes his finger at him. "THEY'RE NOT RATS... YOU BITCH."
As I start to give Joshua a lecture, Tiger stands up and stops me. "It's okay," he said. "Believe it or not- he's not the first to call me a bitch." Taking Joshua's free hand, he walks on his other side, while Joshua glares up at him with distrust. "Bitch isn't a word that you should be using. Not at your AGE."
"That's right," I agreed. "When you get older, you can call your girlfriend a bitch, but only in bed."
Joshua giggles. ~ Giorge Leedy

Although Lucifer had accelerated the process, it has begun decades earlier, when the coming of the jet age had triggered and explosion of global tourism ~ Arthur C. Clarke

If I were a vampire, I'd want to bite someone. I'd be thirsty for blood," I said in a last ditch attempt to interject reason into a discussion that had devolved into the absurd.
"You will come into your true nature," Lucius promised. "You are coming of age right now. And when I bite you for the first time, then you will be a vampire. I've brought you a book - a guide, so to speak - which will explain everything - "
I stood up so fast my chair tipped over, smashing to the floor. "He is not going to bite me," I interrupted, pointing a shaky finger at Lucius. "And I'm not going to Romania and marrying him! I don't care what kind of 'betrothal ceremony' they had!"
"You will all honor the pact," Lucius growled. It wasn't a suggestion. ~ Beth Fantaskey

And that was the thing, wasn't it? When life rode on its highs, you wanted it to go on forever. But in the depths of the invariable dives, you'd be happy to be put out of your misery, because whatever awaited beyond this life had to be better than this shit on Earth. ~ G.M.T. Schuilling

Something happens between a novel and its reader which is similar to the process of developing photographs, the way they did it before the digital age. The photograph, as it was printed in the darkroom, became visible bit by bit. As you read your way through a novel, the same chemical process takes place. ~ Patrick Modiano

- ... before I was going to college, my secret plan was to one day not tell anybody and just get on some bus to some random city and just move there and become this totally different person.
- Then what?
- ... and not come back until I had totally become this person ... I used to think about it all the time ...
- I don't get it ...
- That's because you don't uterlly loathe yourself ~ Daniel Clowes

In the book of Alma is a story that has fascinated e since I first read it. it is about a very colorful character named Moroni--not to be confused with the last survivor of the Nephites, who was also named Moroni. This man was a brilliant military commander, and he rose to be supreme commander of all the Nephite forces at the age of twenty-five. For the next fourteen years he was off to the wars continuously except for two very short periods of peace during which he worked feverishly at reinforcing the Nephite defenses. When peace finally came, he was thirty-nine years old, and the story goes that at the age of forty-three he died. Sometime before this he had given the chief command of the armies of the Nephites to his son Moronihah. Now, if he had a son, he had a wife. I've often wondered where she was and how she fared during those fourteen years of almost continuous warfare, and how she felt to have him die so soon after coming home. I am sure there are many, many stories of patience and sacrifice that have never been told. We each do our part, and we each have our story. ~ Marjorie Pay Hinckley

Zachary smiles, and I wonder if he's felling different. Because standing out here waist deep in Gossimer Lake, next to my best friend, I'm feeling different-light and good and maybe even holy. ~ Kimberly Willis Holt

Coming into our own humanity often takes enormous effort, commitment and bravery. I believe we should be taught that at an early age. I believe part of the violence of our culture stirs from the myth is kindness is natural. I think kindness would only be natural in a world where no one is hurt, and everyone is hurt. So kindness is work. Kindness is knees in the garden weeding our bites, our apathies, our cold shoulders, our silences, our cruelties, whatever taught us the world 'ugly'. ~ Andrea Gibson

How'd you know that would help, Grandma?

Used to have a regular who had attacks like that all the time. Poor guy. He was an accountant, loveless marriage-most of em were back then-and vaginas scared the bejeezus outta him. ~ Jennifer LeBlanc

My dear Rosie,

Unbeknownst to you I took this chance before, many, many years ago. You never received that letter and I'm glad because my feelings since then have changed dramatically. They have intensified with every passing day.
I'll get straight to the point because if I don't say what I have to say now, I fear it will never be said. And I need to say it.
Today I love you more than ever; I want you more than ever. I'm a man of fifty years of age coming to you, feeling like a teenager in love, asking you to give me a chance and love me back.
Rosie Dunne, I love you with all my heart. I have always loved you, even when I was seven years old and I lied about falling asleep on Santa watch, when I was ten years old and didn't invite you to my birthday party, when I was eighteen and had to move away, even on my wedding days, on your wedding day, on christenings, birthdays and when we fought. I loved you through it all. Make me the happiest man on this earth by being with me.
Please reply to me.

All my love,
Alex ~ Cecelia Ahern

Maybe it wasn't that job particularly; maybe it was just working for someone else. It's so brutal and tiring, the way it can push you down and knock the heart out of you. It's not getting up at a certain time and arriving at a certain place at a certain time and leaving at a certain time and coming back again at a certain time - it's knowing that you have to. What's worse is that, through age or job-experience or academic qualification or sheer good luck, one adult is in a position to order and insult and abuse and shout at another adult who isn't in a position to reply in kind. It makes everyone a tin god. Everyone likes having slaves to beat, as they're beaten themselves. And working on the grind wears you out. After a week of it you're so tired that you use the weekend just to catch up on your rest before going back to another week of it. ~ Barry Graham

Yet I had become very attached to George Roc. I liked him, not for the joy of playing with him, not for some talent that made him stand out from the rest, not even for his kindness: above all, I liked him because he was always sad and because the things he told me caused me a degree of pain.....George Roc was the first being that I'd met who saw and felt himself unhappy. ~ Joseph Zobel

I became a good writer when I saw the age of forty coming at me ~ Pat Mora

Children's and YA books are about being brave and kind, about learning wisdom and love, about that journey into and through maturity that we all keep starting, and starting again, no matter how old we get. I think that's why so many adults read YA: we're never done coming of age. ~ Betsy Cornwell

Ariana strikes me as the type of girl who is attracted to authenticity. ~ Siobhan Davis

At the earliest age, when I saw a 'wet paint' sign, I had to touch the paint to see if it was wet. When I get stopped at the stoplight in the middle of the night, and there's just no cars coming, and the light is red, I go. I don't think I'm putting anyone in harm's way, and I'll just take the consequences. Because I'm a Libertarian. ~ Gary Johnson

I had not expected the gentle, tentative surge of gratitude I began to feel...for St. Paul's School, the spring, and the early morning. I needed the morning light and the warbling birds. I needed to find a way to live in this place for a moment and get the good of it. I had tried to hold myself apart, and the aloneness proved more terrible than what I had tried to escape. ~ Lorene Cary

Was coming to that troubled twilight time, a time of regrets that resemble hopes, of hopes that resemble regrets, when youth is past but old age has not yet come. ~ Ivan Turgenev

I guess when you live somewhere every day you forget just how wonderful it can be. Or maybe you forget just how good some of the other things in the world are, like great friends.", Loving Summer by Kailin Gow ~ Kailin Gow