Growing Up Human Quotes

I do... to this day, think that success is being able to look in the mirror and know that I'm alright on that day. I don't believe I've made it–I believe that I'm making it. I believe that I've found my past so that I can live in the present, it's the most important thing to me. The books and the plays and the touring and the gigs and the speeches and the cash...it all pales into insignificance when compared with knowing that I didn't do anything wrong, and I'm going to be okay now. ~ Lemn Sissay

I've never met anyone with a perfect upbringing. It seems to me that life on planet Earth just doesn't work that way. The basic challenges of getting our needs met and managing boundaries are inherent in growing up human. ~ David Simon

Judith Rey watches the young woman. Once upon a time, I had a baby daughter. I dressed her in frilly frocks, enrolled her for ballet classes, and sent her to horse-riding camp five summers in a row. But look at her. She turned into Lester anyway. She kisses Luisa's forehead. Luisa frowns, suspiciously, like a teenager. What? ~ David Mitchell

For your information, Lester, there are at least five wonderful parts of the female body that can be viewed by the owner only with a hand mirror. ~ Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

The villages were lighting up, constellations that greeted each other across the dusk. And, at the touch of his finger, his flying-lights flashed back a greeting to them. The earth grew spangled with light signals as each house lit its star, searching the vastness of the night as a lighthouse sweeps the sea. Now every place that sheltered human life was sparkling. And it rejoiced him to enter into this one night with a measured slowness, as into an anchorage. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

Only when I grew, did I understand what that strength was: the willpower, that ardent force only human souls can possess – the power to continue on one's path no matter the mistakes and obstacles, and never give up on one's true essence. ~ Tamuna Tsertsvadze

L.A. in the late sixties had a desolation about it, a disquiet. More than anything, that had to do with a feeling, one that you still find in parts of the San Fernando Valley. There was a sense of apocalyptic expanse, of sidewalks and houses centipeding over mountains and going on forever, combined with a shrugging kind of anchorlessness. Growing up I was always aware of L.A.'s diffuseness, its lack of an attachment to anything other than its own good reflection in the mirror. ~ Kim Gordon

I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up. ~ Sophia Loren

Because ... sometimes I think you meet people and they make you better, even if you're not with them forever. ~ Kris Noel

On occasion, it occurs to adults that they are allowed to do all the things that being a child prevented them from doing. But those desires change when you're not looking. There was a time when your favorite color transferred from purple to blue to whatever shade it is when you realize having a favorite color is a trite personality crutch, an unstable cultivation of quirk and a possible cry for help. You just don't notice the time of your own metamorphosis. Until you do. Every once in a while time dissolves and you remember what you liked as a kid. You jump on your hotel bed, order dessert first, decide to put every piece of jewelry you own on your body and leave the house. Why? Because you can. Because you're the boss. Because ... Ooooh. Shiny. ~ Sloane Crosley

Those were the girls she'd been most jealous of, growing up - not just the thin, fashionable ones, but the types who surfed or rock climbed, who lived in such obvious peace with their bodies. Took joy in using their bodies. Mastered them. Merry's had always felt like a bully. A great, heavy oaf pinning her to the ground, taunting. ~ Cara McKenna

For years one has to put up with the feeling that people do not care, really care, about one; then one day with growing alarm, one realizes that it is God who does not care; and not merely that he does not care, he does not care one way or the other. ~ Lawrence Durrell

My Uncle Alex, who is up in Heaven now, one of the things he found objectionable about human beings was that they so rarely noticed it when times were sweet. We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, "If this isn't nice, what is?"
So I hope that you will do the same for the rest of your lives. When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud, "If this isn't nice, what is? ~ Kurt Vonnegut

For no reason that she could discern, she put down the novel and picked up her cell phone. She was lonely, yes, but had been so for as long as she cared to remember, and nothing seemed to be pressing that particular bruise, one of many, at the moment. Her loneliness was at a comfortable echelon: not growing like a tree, nor multiplying as a moss, but just simply there. A permanent, weathered embedded rock. A boulder in the wheat field. A bullet inside of a body, too dangerous to remove, around which tissue grows. ~ Ron Parsons

If you're a white kid growing up and you see a Black player and he's got the name of your college or your town across his chest, that means something. ~ Frank Deford

You're no man." "No," said Coyote. "I am his unflattering reflection." He shook his head. "I have outlived billions of gallons of blood, and you think I somehow delight in the spilling of a few more pints. You see my hand in the affairs of a few mortals and you think that I've but wound them up so I can watch them bounce off one another in the night. Never have you asked yourself why I might do such a thing--to what end this bloodshed might serve. The trouble with human beings is that when examining the actions of others, they always apply their own ethics and point of view., hoping to understand them in the context of what they might do and why they might do such a thing. When no answer lies in that examination, they always ascribe malice. Malice, you see, is the only thing people understand without explanation. You are born with it and thus come to expect it. ~ C. Robert Cargill

Every man is sensitive. Some cover it up with brutality, others with cowardice and vanity, but a small few wear it bravely like armor ~ Solange Nicole

People would see a lot of times fighting as a ugly thing, as a thing that denigrates the human being. In reality, you see fighting on everything ... Everything's fighting. Doesn't matter what it is. You wake up in the morning, to get out of bed is a fight, believe it. So, fighting is actually the best thing a man can have in his soul. ~ Renzo Gracie

I didn't visit art galleries growing up. I didn't know anything about it. But at 17 I made the decision to leave home and explore. I've been using the Internet since I was 13, so I could see there was this whole world out there. ~ Kesh

The last few years I became a lot more into sports. Growing up, the sports I liked were independent sports, like skateboarding. I was really into skateboarding, and not necessarily team televised sports. ~ Mark Hoppus

It seems that the increased number of scientific workers, their being split up into groups whose studies are limited to a small subject, and over-specialization have brought about a shrinking of intelligence. There is no doubt that the quality of any human group decreases when the number of the individuals composing this group increases beyond certain limits ... The best way to increase the intelligence of scientists would be to decrease their number. ~ Alexis Carrel

MY BOSS SENDS me home because of all the dried blood on my pants, and I am overjoyed.
The hole punched through my cheek doesn't ever heal. I'm going to work, and my punched-out eye sockets are two swollen-up black bagels around the little piss holes I have left to see through. Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed. Still, I'm doing the little FAX thing. I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around to everyone. When I pass people in the hall at work, I get totally ZEN right in everyone's hostile little FACE.
Worker bees can leave
Even drones can fly away
The queen is their slave

You give up all your worldly possessions and your car and go live in a rented house in the toxic waste part of town where late at night, you can hear Marla and Tyler in his room, calling each other hum; butt wipe.
Take it, human butt wipe.
Do it, butt wipe.
Choke it down. Keep it down, baby.
Just by contrast, this makes me the calm little center of the world.
Me, with my punched-out eyes and dried blood in big black crusty stains on my pants, I'm saying HELLO to everybody at work. HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it's so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me.
Sigh.
Look. Outside the window. A bird.
My boss asked if the blood was my blood.
The bird flies downwind. I'm writing a ~ Chuck Palahniuk

I'm in a position now where I can play certain roles and when I get older, I won't be able to. So, I don't have a strategy of trying to grow up too quick, I just want to kind of look at everything. ~ Tom Welling

Don't settle for your human capacity. Live up to your God-given potential. ~ Benjamin Lotter

When I was growing up, I was teased for being too skinny. I went to summer camp when I was 11. I wore shorts, and the nurse said to me, in front of all my friends, that I was anorexic and that she had to monitor me to make sure I was eating. Because of that trauma, I never wore short pants or short skirts until I was 20. ~ Hani Furstenberg

I began writing my nonfiction memoir to explain why women, "don't just leave."
My exciting, narrative-driven memoir aspires to to save others from needless unhappiness: surviving isn't enough.Trauma can be overcome and joy recaptured.The book is written in a fresh, lively voice with lots of humor. The chapters of me growing up in the 50's and 60's and my college years at Penn State provide an intimate, historical trip through some of the most fascinating times in modern history. This is also a family saga depicting mental illness and shows how this could have happened to me: My husband and I were the dance. ~ Cassi Janzek

I really didn't have one particular athlete I liked growing up. ~ Masahiro Tanaka

I do not know which impulse was stronger in me when I began to think: the original thirst for knowledge or the urge to communicate with man. Knowledge attains its full meaning only through the bond that unites men; however, the urge to achieve agreement with another human being was so hard to satisfy. I was shocked by the lack of understanding, paralyzed, as it were, by every reconciliation in which what had gone before was not fully cleared up. Early in my life and then later again and again I was perplexed by people's rigid inaccessibility and their failure to listen to reasons, their disregard of facts, their indifference which prohibited discussion, their defensive attitude which kept you at a distance and at the decisive moment buried any possibility of a close approach, and finally their shamelessness, that bares its own soul without reserve, as though no one were present. When ready assent occurred I remained unsatisfied, because it was not based on true insight but on yielding to persuasion; because it was the consequence of friendly cooperation, not a meeting of two selves. True, I knew the glory of friendship (in common studies, in the cordial atmosphere of home or countryside). But then came the moments of strangeness, as if human beings lived in different worlds. Steadily the consciousness of loneliness grew upon me in my youth, yet nothing seemed more pernicious to me than loneliness, especially the loneliness in the midst of social intercourse that deceives itse ~ Karl Jaspers

One has to fight against the current; to battle every day and every hour against exhaustion, hunger, cold and the resulting inertia; to resist enemies and have no pity for rivals; to sharpen one's wits, build up one's patience, strengthen one's will-power. Or else to throttle all dignity and kill all conscience, to climb down into the arena as a beast against other beasts, to let oneself be guided by those unexpected subterranean forces which sustain families and individuals in cruel times. Many were the ways devised and put into effect by us in order not to die : as many as there are different human characters. All implied a weakening struggle of one against all, and a by no means small sum of aberrations and compromises. Survival without renunciation of any part of one's own moral world - apart from powerful and direct interventions by fortune - was conceded only to very few superior individuals, made of the stuff saints and martyrs. ~ Primo Levi

I ran a constant low fever waiting for my ride to come and take me away to something finer. I lay in bed at night, watching the red beacon on top of the water tower, a clear signal to me of the beauty and mystery of a life that waited for me far away, and thought of Housman's poem,
"Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom upon the bough.
It stands among the woodland ride,
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my three-score years and ten,
Twenty will not come again ... "
and would have run away to where people would appreciate me, had I known of such a place, had I thought my parents would understand. But if I had said, "Along the woodland I must go to see the cherry hung with snow," they would have said, "Oh,no, you don't. You're going to stay right here and finish up what I told you to do three hours ago. Besides, those aren't cherry trees, those are crab apples. ~ Garrison Keillor

Every time I see a girl, I search for that innocence that she lost while growing up, under the burden of being a 'Commodity' and pressure of 'Community ~ Rishiraj Sen

Growing up in a lower-income family, you don't have the resources to make ends meet and you have to find creative ways to get by. ~ Hilary Swank

If you want to access your power as a divine human being, you must search for the small inside of the big and for the big inside of the small. When you look up into the expanse of sky overhead, look for the stars, the planets, the birds that fly. Small things for the eye to spot. And when you look down into the the face of a streetside flower, look for joy, happiness, comfort, stillness, and a silent song. When you have mastered finding the small in the big and the big in the small, you will have mastered your own divinity. ~ C. JoyBell C.

I think everyone should pursue their dreams. Whether you want to play football, act, sing, become a writer or whatever you have burning inside you as you're growing up, you should pursue it. ~ Tom Hiddleston

I would love to do a musical. I would love that. I would have to find the right book, the right story, but some day I'm going to make one. I would really like to go off and direct a musical. That's what I would really like to do when I grow up. ~ Steven Spielberg

I wish friends held hands more often, like the children I see on the streets sometimes. I'm not sure why we have to grow up and get embarrassed about it. ~ Stephanie Perkins

There is nothing in the education of the average non-scientific human being to discourage him from the habit of generalizing from little or no evidence, and worse still and far more important, nothing to discourage him from the habit of starting with a generalization and ending up with the individual, instead of the other way round. ~ Gwethalyn Graham

There are no normal people, there are just different kinds of weird, all of it is human and all humanity is better than everything inhuman. So I urge you to keep expressing yourself as honestly as you can, and know that the backpedals and second-guesses really aren't necessary - they don't hurt but they're wasting your time - because when you are truly human, as we all are, and when that is your honest message to anyone, you are beyond reproach, there is no way to screw it up. ~ Dan Harmon

Unrestrained automobility, hedonism, individualism, and conspicuous consumption cannot be sustained because they take more than they give back. A spiritually impoverished world cannot be sustained because meaninglessness, anomie, and despair will corrode the desire to be sustained and the belief that humanity is worth sustaining. But these are the very things that distinguish the modern age from its predecessors, Genuine sustainability, in other words, will come not from superficial changes but from a deeper process akin to humankind growing up to a fuller stature. ~ David W. Orr

My parents tried to shield me from how famous they were when I was growing up on Long Island. I had no idea. ~ Alexa Ray Joel

If you grow up poor you're always going to worry about money, no matter how successful or lucky you become. I'm not moaning about what actors get paid - I'm very, very lucky - but the difference between what leading actors get paid and supporting actors get is a lot. ~ Jason Flemyng

Far from being aloof or detached from power, the church is all about power - the end of power, meaning the purpose of power, the taming of power, and the unleashing of power for true flourishing. The church proclaims the true story of power. By telling the whole story from Genesis to Revelation, with its astonishing bookends of good, very good and glorious news, the church recognizes and affirms our human ambitions and aspirations, placing them in the context where they truly make sense and can find their rightful place. By telling the full truth about idolatry and injustice, not least by recalling the stories of how our own heroes fell into compromise and foolishness, the church makes clear just how damaging our pride is to ourselves, our neighbors and the whole groaning creation. And by recounting over and over the immense cost of redemption, the church leads us to abashed and grateful humility before the one who gave up everything for us. ~ Andy Crouch