Grown Ups Quotes

1. "Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?"
Author: Alain De Botton

2. "Oh, grown-ups cannot understand,And grown-ups never will,How short the way to fairylandAcross the purple hill."
Author: Alfred Noyes

3. "Where are the stars on this dark, dark, night?Where is there tiny twinkling light?Where is the music?Where is the song?Where are the colors?Something is wrong.Sometimes stars hide in the clouds,and their light seems far away.Sometimes voices are hushed and still,and the rainbow fades to gray.Sometimes the world is topsy-turvy,and nobody really knows why;Sometimes sad things happen,and even grown-ups cry.But always, my child, always,you are safe here in my arms.The world may be topsy-turvy,but I will shelter you from harm.Always the stars are twinkling,even when clouds hide their light.I promise you voices will sing again,and colors will again shine bright.I promise there is always tomorrowfor starlight and rainbows and song;My love will always surround youunchanged, unbroken, and strong."
Author: Ann E. Burg

4. "I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal."
Author: Anne Lamott

5. "Hazel understood. Being grown up meant doing what grown-ups wanted you to do. it meant sacrificing your imagination for rules. It meant sitting quietly in you chair while your best friend is helicoptered off for emergency eye surgery. It meant letting people say whatever they wanted to you."
Author: Anne Ursu

6. "When grown-ups asked you to sit in a circle, they were usually about to tell you something you didn't want to hear. Ms. Aruba-Tate, Ivy and Bean's second-grade teacher, was forever gathering them in a circle for bad news. Like, the class fish died over the weekend. Or, everyone has to start using real punctuation. Or, the pencil sharpener is off-limits. Circles meant trouble."
Author: Annie Barrows

7. "Children should show great understanding towrds grown-ups"
Author: Antoine De Saint Exupéry

8. "Do you really admire me very much.?" he asked the little prince."What does "admire" mean.?""To admire means that you consider me the handsomest, the best dressed, the richest and the most intelligent man on this planet.""But you are all alone on your planet.!""Do me this kindness. Admire me all the same.!""I admire you," said the little prince with a slight shrug of his shoulders, "but why should that mean so much to you.?"And the little prince went away."Grown- ups are really very odd," he said to himself, as he continued on his journey."
Author: Antoine De Saint Exupéry

9. "That's the way they are. You must not hold it against them. Children should be very understanding of grown-ups."
Author: Antoine De Saint Exupéry

10. "I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn't much improved my opinion of them."
Author: Antoine De Saint Exupéry

11. "All grown-ups were once children, although few of them remember it."
Author: Antoine De Saint Exupéry

12. "If you were to say to the grown-ups: "I saw a beautiful house made of rosy brick, with geraniums in the windows and doves on the roof," they would not be able to get any idea of that house at all. You would have to say to them: "I saw a house that cost $20,000." Then they would exclaim: "Oh, what a pretty house that is!"
Author: Antoine De Saint Exupéry

13. "Kaoru: Grownups are so tiresome. They fake their smiles all day long and they try to force us to do the same. It's no fun at all."
Author: Bisco Hatori

14. "I expect someone lives there in secret, only coming in and out at night, with a dark lantern. We shall probably discover a gang of desperate criminals and get a reward. It's all rot to say a house would be empty all those years unless there was some mystery." "Daddy thought it must be the drains," said Polly. "Pooh! Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations," said Digory."
Author: C.S. Lewis

15. "If you`re wondering how you`ll find time, it means you don`t really want to read. Because nobody`s ever got time. Children certainly haven`t, nor have teenagers or grown-ups. Life always gets in the way. <...>Time to read is always time stolen. <...>Stolen from what? From the tyranny of living."- p.125"
Author: Daniel Pennac

16. "Grown-ups do a lot of complaining!"
Author: Dav Pilkey

17. "Most kids are smarter than most grown-ups. Kids see the world in black and white... They look through all the garbage and see a world run by fools and dullards and lazy people. And there's nothing they can do about it because they have no power."
Author: Dav Pilkey

18. "Let the children have their night of fun and laughter. Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world." Winston Churchill Christmas Eve Message, 1941 as printed in "In the Dark Streets Shineth."
Author: David McCullough

19. "I find this morning that what I most vividly and longingly recall is the sight of my grandson and his little sunburnt sister returning to their kitchen door from an excursion, with trophies of the meadow clutched in their hands—she with a couple of violets, and smiling, he serious and holding dandelions, strangling them in a responsible grip. Children hold spring so tightly in their brown fists—just as grownups, who are less sure of it, hold it in their hearts."
Author: E.B. White

20. "[W]hat upset grownups of both sexes about Elvis' performance was that he had broken the deepest taboo of all. He used his body as rhythmically and erotically and seductively as a woman--that was the forbidden territory he had entered. It was not only repulsive and offensive--it was nauseating--the word most used. It was an attack on male dignity.The kids, however, not yet grown into the stereotypes of gender, saw in him an exhilarating physical freedom."
Author: Elaine Dundy

21. "He died at the wrong time, when there was much to be clarified and established. They hadn't even started to be grown-ups together. There was this piece of heaven, this little girl he'd carried around the shop on his shoulders; and then one day she was gone, replaced by a foreigner, an uncooperative woman he didn't know how to speak to. Being so confused, so weak, so in love, he chose strength and drove her away from himself. The last years he spent wondering where she'd gone, and slowly came to realise that she would never return, and that the husband he'd chosen for her was an idiot."
Author: Hanif Kureishi

22. "Grown-ups are an untrustworthy, treacherous lot, they don't take their games in the serious wholehearted way children do, and yet they too have their own games, one more serious than the other, one game inside another, so that it's impossible to discover what the real one is."
Author: Italo Calvino

23. "The summer ended. Day by day, and taking its time, the summer ended. The noises in the street began to change, diminish, voices became fewer, the music sparse. Daily, blocks and blocks of children were spirited away. Grownups retreated from the streets, into the houses. Adolescents moved from the sidewalk to the stoop to the hallway to the stairs, and rooftops were abandoned. Such trees as there were allowed their leaves to fall - they fell unnoticed - seeming to promise, not without bitterness, to endure another year. At night, from a distance, the parks and playgrounds seemed inhabited by fireflies, and the night came sooner, inched in closer, fell with a greater weight. The sound of the alarm clock conquered the sound of the tambourine, the houses put on their winter faces. The houses stared down a bitter landscape, seeming, not without bitterness, to have resolved to endure another year."
Author: James Baldwin

24. "Everyone things children are sweet as Necco Wafers, but I've lived long enough to know the truth: kids are rotten. The only difference between grown-ups and kids is that grown-ups go to jail for murder. Kids get away with it."
Author: Jennifer L. Holm

25. "They'd have people out looking for her, and nothing makes grown-ups quite so mad as finding a child safe when they'd been scared silly that they might find that child dead."
Author: Jenny Wingfield

26. "We used to all come outside when the streetlights came on and prowl the neighborhood in a pack, a herd of kids on banana-seat bikes and minibikes. The grown-ups looked so silly framed in their living-room and kitchen windows. They complained about their days and sighed deep sighs of depression and loss. They talked about how spoiled and lucky children were these days. We will never be that way, we said, we will never say those things."
Author: Jill McCorkle

27. "...if a child waited to speak until all the grown-ups settled down and gave her some room to say her piece, the most important things would never get said."
Author: Katherine Hannigan

28. "Grown-ups didn't seem to realize that for me, as for most other schoolboys, it was easier to keep silent than to speak. I was a natural oyster."
Author: L.P. Hartley

29. "Literature is a source of pleasure, he said, it is one of the rare inexhaustible joys in life, but it's not only that. It must not be disassociated from reality. Everything is there. That is why I never use the word fiction. Every subtlety in life is material for a book. He insisted on the fact. Have you noticed, he'd say, that I'm talking about novels? Novels don't contain only exceptional situations, life or death choices, or major ordeals; there are also everyday difficulties, temptations, ordinary disappointments; and, in response, every human attitude, every type of behavior, from the finest to the most wretched. There are books where, as you read, you wonder: What would I have done? It's a question you have to ask yourself. Listen carefully: it is a way to learn to live. There are grown-ups who would say no, that literature is not life, that novels teach you nothing. They are wrong. Literature performs, instructs, it prepares you for life."
Author: Laurence Cossé

30. "We were grown-ups, yet still children, and yet neither, stuck in that space between infancy and adulthood, confusing and murky, where some tried to grow up too fast, others too slow, and the rest of us were wedged in the middle, not sure which way to go."
Author: Linda Kage

31. "Couples stray," said Edgar. "Part of the breaking-in process.""Not breaking in, breaking." Nicola differed sharply. "You can glue people together again. But then your relationship's like any other repaired object, with cracks, blobs of epoxy, a little askew. It's never the same. I can see you haven't a notion what I'm on about, so you'll have to take my word for it.""Christ, you're a babe in the woods." Edgar stopped slicing tomatoes. "You got it ass-backward. A marriage perched like porcelain on the mantelpiece is doomed. Sooner or later grown-ups treat each other like shit. You gotta be able to kick the thing around, less like china than an old shoe—bam, under the bed, or walk it through some puddles. No love's gonna last it if can't take abuse."
Author: Lionel Shriver

32. "THERE WAS A TIME""There was a time, everything was fine.You got drunk on the day like it was wine.And all the children,They put flowers in their hair.And all the grown-ups,They put daggers there instead."
Author: Marc Bolan

33. "Children, you are the future,' he said, and today I realize he did not mean it the way it sounded. The reason children are the future is not that they will one day be grownups. No, the reason is that mankind is moving more and more in the direction of infancy, and childhood is the image of the future."
Author: Milan Kundera

34. "Grown-ups always say that things are complicated."
Author: Nicholas Sparks

35. "It was hard to reassure grown-ups when you weren't certain yourself what you were feeling and thinking—when thoughts dissolved before you could name them."
Author: Paula Fox

36. "Grown ups don't believe in Santa Claus. They vote."
Author: Pierre Desproges

37. "What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours – that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because they looked so busy, and because one had no idea what they were up to.And when one day you realise that their preoccupations are meagre, their professions barren and no longer connected to life, why not continue to look on them like a child, as if on something alien, drawing on the depths of your own world, on the expanse of your own solitude, which itself is work and achievement and a vocation? Why wish to exchange a child's wise incomprehension for rejection and contempt, when incomprehension is solitude, whereas rejection and contempt are ways of participating in what, by precisely these means, you want to sever yourself from?"
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

38. "And children are still the way you were ...as a child, sad and happy in just the same way and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value."
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

39. "Angry at his parents and all grown-ups who thought that school life was a lark, a good time, the best years of your life with a few test and quizzes thrown in to keep you on your toes. Bullshit. There was nothing good about it. Tests were daily battles in the larger war of school. School meant rules and orders and commands. To say nothing of homework."
Author: Robert Cormier

40. "Archie became absolutely still, afraid that the rapid beating of his heart might betray his sudden knowledge, the proof of what he'd always suspected, not only of Brother Leon but most grownups, most adults: they were vulnerable, running scared, open to invasion."
Author: Robert Cormier

41. "The thing I would most like to see invented is a way of teaching children and grown-ups the difference between right and wrong."
Author: Robert Maxwell

42. "So, what's the plan for today?" If he asked for the whole day's plan he couldn't get in Slayde's way, right?"It's Wednesday. Wednesday is library day and I promised we could eat lunch at the park. Then someone told me they wanted macaroni and cheese for supper."He looked at the kids. "It wasn't me." He gave Christian a wink."No. Me," answered Christian. "With hot dogs in it."Oh, gag."Isn't that nice." Maybe Slayde would let him order them something for the grown-ups.Christian nodded, grinned. "Macamaronis and hot dogs! Yay!"The girls cheered. "Yay!"
Author: Sean Michael

43. "Next time I'll just send the three of you e-mails. What was I thinking when I decided to have this meeting? (Acheron)Oh, I know. That men who are a couple of thousand years old could actually behave like grownups? (Nick)(Zarek elbowed Nick in the stomach.)Oops. Involuntary arm spasm. (Zarek)"
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

44. "The sheer size too, the excessive abundance, scale, and exaggeration of dreams could be an infantile characteristic. The most ardent wish of children is to grow up and get as big a share of everything as the grown-ups; they are hard to satisfy; do not know the meaning of ‘enough."
Author: Sigmund Freud

45. "A month ago, Gavin had given his employer four weeks' notice. "I'll get a job around here," he'd told her. "Something low-stress, part-time, maybe. We're not paying rent, and Dad's left us plenty. You should quit, too." A year earlier this news would have filled her with delicious, full fat, chocolate-coated joy. But now, after a grueling routine of shitty work, shitty- weird home life in a house where the shadow of a dead boy walked more solidly than the grownups, shitty headaches, shitty worry about a husband who couldn't keep his dick out of other women, the golden offer just weirded Laine out. She didn't trust it."
Author: Stephen M. Irwin

46. "Relationships is not a game of amateurs is what people say..But they begin to foster between amateurs and become a reason to make them matured grown-ups!"
Author: Sujit Lalwani

47. "Merlin: "Grown-ups have developed an unpleasant habit lately, I notice, of comforting themselves for their degradation by pretending that children are childish. I trust we are free of this?"Arthur: "Everybody knows that children are more intelligent than their parents."Merlin: "You and I know it, but the people who are going to read this book do not.Our readers of that time (...) have exactly three ideas in their magnificent noodles. The first is that the human species is superior to others. The second, that the twentieth century is superior to other centuries. And the third, that human adults of the twentieth century are superior to their young. (...)"
Author: T.H. White

48. "It's a grown-ups' playground, isn't it?"
Author: Therese Anne Fowler

49. "You talked to us about what kind of fifth-graders we wanted to be this year. How it was all in our choices, every minute of our days. How even grownups like you had to think about it sometimes, to be the person they wanted to be."
Author: W.H. Beck

50. "This is our island. It's a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we'll have fun."
Author: William Golding

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