Perfectly Crafted Coming Of Age Quotes

And how is your head? Better?" he asked.
"Very much. Sometimes it hurts." Right now it was throbbing. "But every day I am much improved."
"Where did you hit it? Are you bruised?"
I put a hand to the back of my head, a little to the left, where I had landed with such jarring force. "Here," I said. "It's still a little tender."
And leaning forward, he touched my hair right where I had just laid my hand. Such was he glamour that attended him that I expected the ache to instantly melt away, healed by his royal caress. But in fact, I felt a sudden leap in my heart that made the pain briefly more intense. ~ Sharon Shinn

J.R. Angelella is a truly gifted writer. Zombie is one of the smartest, strangest, and most beautifully crafted coming-of-age stories you will ever encounter. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

I love coming of age stories that have struggle. ~ Aaron Paul

What's so beautiful about girls?" I would implore.
And the secret society of adults would reply with a smirk and wink as if I was merely a boy who couldn't possibly have the mental maturity to comprehend such grown-up concepts as love and bleeding vaginas; "You'll understand someday, James. ~ Jake Vander Ark

- ... 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

Growing up, I never felt deprived. I was always happy. It seems only lately I've started seeing everything I didn't have. ~ Kasie West

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

Reclaiming ourselves usually means coming to recognize and accept that we have in us both sides of everything. We are capable of fear and courage, generosity and selfishness, vulnerability and strength. These things do not cancel each other out but offer us a full range of power and response to life. Life is as complex as we are. Sometimes our vulnerability is our strength, our fear develops our courage, and our woundedness is the road to our integrity. It is not an either/or world. It is a real world. In calling ourselves "heads" or "tails," we may never own and spend our human currency, the pure gold of which our coin is made.

But judgment may heal over time. One of the blessings of growing older is the discovery that many of the things I once believed to be my shortcomings have turned out in the long run to be my strengths, and other things of which I was unduly proud have revealed themselves in the end to be among my shortcomings. Things that I have hidden from others for years turn out to be the anchor and enrichment of my middle age. What a blessing it is to outlive your self-judgments and harvest your failures. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

The age of Grisha power is coming to an end. ~ Leigh Bardugo

We live in an age of apologies. Apologies, fake or true, are expected from the descendants of empire builders, slave owners and persecutors of heretics, and from men who -in our eyes- just got it all wrong. So, with the age of 85 coming up shortly, I want to make an apology. It appears I must apologize for being male, white, and European. ~ Alec Guinness

The Drab Age is over. Color is coming into its own again. Until very recently people were literally scared out of their wits by color. Perhaps this was a hangover from our Puritan ancestors. But whatever the reason, brown, grays and neutrals were the only shades considered 'safe.' Now we know that lovely, clear colors have a vital effect on our mental happiness. Modern doctors and psychiatrists are convinced of this! ~ Dorothy Draper

As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep,so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily , to appreciate more lovingly , our own. ~ Margaret Mead

I am both the singular and the plural. I am what was, what is, and what will be. I am everything that is and isn't. ~ Natasha D. Lane

He shook his head and thought about it for a second. "Maybe I'm not straight? Can I still be straight when I'm sitting here looking into your eyes?" he asked. Maybe it was the alcohol talking or maybe he wasn't as straight as he thought he was.
"Yes. Absolutely." Cormag nodded and watched him closely.
"Even when I think they're so pretty? They are, you know. So many different shades of brown ... and a little green. Just a touch; not a lot. So pretty." He sighed happily, watching those dark eyes staring back at him in surprise. He lay his head on his arms, smiling at the way Cormag flushed in embarrassment and turned his full attention onto his bottle of beer.
"Wow, you are super drunk. ~ Elaine White

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

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

I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board. ~ Emma Cline

Is the ash in trees, babies, flowers, and visions of God
better than the visions themselves? Then you think,
none of this is tangible or concrete. So you have another cigarette
and think about the (not one) but many ghosts you keep tucked away,
under sheets, under beds, in notes, within other ghosts. ~ Derek Keck

They will bloom when they're ready. ~ Brie Spangler

The coming nanometer age can, therefore, also be called the age of interdisciplinarity. ~ Heinrich Rohrer

Science confirms that when an individual is asked to make a choice between two insignificant objects, the person's brain knows which he will choose up to six seconds before he ever vocally says a word. ~ Linda Armstrong

I stopped telling you
all of my secrets
when you became
my biggest one. ~ Heather Angelika Dooley

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

This is a city of absolute enchantment in the literal sense of the word. It loosens all the bonds binding the traveller to his own age and sets him free to live in a past that is vital and crude but never ugly. Herat is as old as history and as moving as a great epic poem - if Afghanistan had nothing else it would have been worth coming to experience this. ~ Dervla Murphy

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

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

It is hard to know how to save the world if one has never lived in it. ~ Alex Flinn

Before, the woods had always done so much for me. Once I could actually go out into the woods and communicate with God, or Nature or something. Now that something didn't come through. It was just not there anymore. More than ever I began to wonder whether God actually existed. Maybe God changed as the individual changed, or perhaps grew as one grew. ~ Anne Moody

Oh and I thought, as i was dressing, how interesting it would be to describe the approach of age, and the gradual coming of death. As people describe love. To note every symptom of failure: but why failure? To treat age as an experience that is different from the others; and to detect every one of the gradual stages towards death which is a tremendous experience, an not as unconscious, at least in its approaches, as death is. ~ Virginia Woolf

I want you to travel roads that aren't there,
build bridges where none exist,
sing songs that haven't been written.

I want you to love yourself fiercely,
love others courageously,
love life unapologetically.

I want you to shatter expectations,
break out of cages,
and dance in crowded streets while it rains. ~ Marcus Granderson

It's okay to be happy. ~ Megan Duke

Whose little boy are you? ~ James Baldwin

The worst of anything she could do to me would be to make me like her. That's why I ran away. ~ Jo Walton

And it shall come to pass that what man made shall be shattered, and the Shadow shall lie across the Pattern of Age, and the Dark One shall once more lay his hand upon the world of man. Women shall weep and men quail as the nations of the earth are rent like rotting cloth. Neither shall anything stand nor abide...
Yet one shall be born to face the Shadow, born once more as he was born before and shall be born again, time without end. The Dragon shall be Reborn, and there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth at his rebirth. In sackcloth and ashes shall he clothe the people, and he shall break the world again by his coming, tearing apart all ties that bind. Like the unfettered dawn shall he blind us, and burns us, yet shall the Dragon Reborn confront the Shadow at the Last battle, and his blood shall give us the Light. Let tears flow, O ye people of the world. Weep for your salvation.

-from The Karaethon Cycle: The Prophecies of the Dragon, as translated by Ellaine Marise'idin Alshinn, Chief Librarian at the Court of Arafel, in the Year of Grace 231 of the New Era, the Third Age ~ Robert Jordan

The rain landed on my skin with a barely audible patter and changed the tempo of its repetitive dance, letting the wind change its course and angle. The cold soon seeped through my dress and into my bones. An iris from my garland fell in my lap. ~ Erica Sehyun Song

It's [old age] not a surprise, we knew it was coming – make the most of it. So you may not be as fast on your feet, and the image in your mirror may be a little disappointing, but if you are still functioning and not in pain, gratitude should be the name of the game. ~ Betty White

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

...have you ever thought you knew someone--I mean really knew someone--then realized that the person you thought you knew only existed in your overextended mind... ~ Stephanie Verni

We were on a family holiday to Cyprus to visit my aunt and uncle. My uncle Andrew was then the brigadier to all the British forces on the island, and as such a senior military figure I am sure he must have dreaded us coming to town.
After a few days holed up in the garrison my uncle innocently suggested that maybe we would enjoy a trip to the mountains. He already knew the answer that my father and I would give. We were in.
The Troodos Mountains are a small range of snowy peaks in the center of the island, and the soldiers posted to Cyprus use them to ski and train in. There are a couple of ski runs, but the majority of the peaks in winter are wild and unspoiled.
In other words, they are ripe for an adventure.
Dad and I borrowed two sets of army skis and boots from the garrison up in the hills and spent a great afternoon together skiing down the couple of designated runs. But designated runs can also be quite boring. We both looked at each other and suggested a quick off-piste detour.
It was all game…age eleven.
It wasn't very far into this between-the-trees deep-powder detour that the weather, dramatically, and very suddenly, took a turn for the worse.
A mountain mist rolled in, reducing visibility to almost zero. We stopped to try and get, or guess, our directions back to the piste, but our guess was wrong, and very soon we both realized we were lost. (Or temporarily geographically challenged, as I have learned to call it.)
Dad and I ~ Bear Grylls

I lost my innocence very young and it had nothing to do with sex. ~ Jennifer Elisabeth

Creativity is the catalyst to the future. ~ Ann Marie Frohoff

Millennials: We lost the genetic lottery. We graduated high school into terrorist attacks and wars. We graduated college into a recession and mounds of debt. We will never acquire the financial cushion, employment stability, and material possessions of our parents. We are often more educated, experienced, informed, and digitally fluent than prior generations, yet are constantly haunted by the trauma of coming of age during the detonation of the societal structure we were born into. But perhaps we are overlooking the silver lining. We will have less money to buy the material possessions that entrap us. We will have more compassion and empathy because our struggles have taught us that even the most privileged can fall from grace. We will have the courage to pursue our dreams because we have absolutely nothing to lose. We will experience the world through backpacking, couch surfing, and carrying on interesting conversations with adventurers in hostels because our bank accounts can't supply the Americanized resorts. Our hardships will obligate us to develop spiritual and intellectual substance. Maybe having roommates and buying our clothes at thrift stores isn't so horrible as long as we are making a point to pursue genuine happiness. ~ Maggie Georgiana Young

What happened was that sometimes I was, from a young age, put in the theater to watch movies because they kept me quiet and they kept me entertained, and they got me out from under the feet of my parents. So from a very early age, I went to the movies and I soon grew to prefer the life of the movies to my own life. The reality that the movies offered was preferable to the reality that I was experiencing. I became a child movie addict. I would go in with great pleasure and I'd never look at what was playing
what was playing was unimportant. The fact was that I was entering a new world, an environment where not only was it much more attractive than my life was ordinarily, but also I could manipulate it to an extent by coming and going, and by looking at scenes or not, which I could not in my own life. I was subjected to my own domestic life. But I discovered a kind of power at the movies. ~ Donald Richie

We love each other. You love me, you do." His eyes beseech me to believe it, to remember it, to feel it. ~ Siobhan Davis

You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else
an adult, an animal. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I fell in love with her suddenly, deeply, in the most all-consuming way. ~ Siobhan Davis

These examinations and certificates and so on--what did they matter? And all this efficiency and up-to-dateness--what did that matter, either? Ralston was trying to run Brookfield like a factory--a factory for turning out a snob culture based on money and machines. The old gentlemanly traditions of family and broad acres were changing, as doubtless they were bound to; but instead of widening them to form a genuine inclusive democracy of duke and dustman, Ralston was narrowing them upon the single issue of a fat banking account. There never had been so many rich men's sons at Brookfield. The Speech Day Garden Party was like Ascot. Ralston met these wealthy fellows in London clubs and persuaded them that Brookfield was the coming school, and, since they couldn't buy their way into Eton or Harrow, they greedily swallowed the bait. Awful fellows, some of them--though others were decent enough. Financiers, company promoters, pill manufacturers. One of them gave his son five pounds a week pocket money. Vulgar . . . ostentatious . . . all the hectic rotten-ripeness of the age. . . . And once Chips had got into trouble because of some joke he had made about the name and ancestry of a boy named Isaacstein. The boy wrote home about it, and Isaacstein père sent an angry letter to Ralston. Touchy, no sense of humor, no sense of proportion--that was the matter with them, these new fellows. . . . No sense of proportion. And it was a sense of proportion, above all things, that Brookfield ou ~ James Hilton