Grownup Quotes

1. "Someday perhaps I'll have to get a grownup job... but for now I'm having too much fun being a reporter."
Author: Andrea Mitchell

2. "Dave couldn't remember the last time a grownup had apologized to him."
Author: Andrew Clements

3. "My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says 'PRIVATE--GROWNUPS KEEP OUT': a child sprawled on the bed, reading."
Author: Anne Fadiman

4. "I am. A child is helpless; I think it is the betrayal that destroys them. But a grownup is – usually – not helpless. Grownups expect betrayal. What they can't stand to be is powerless. That's what destroys them."
Author: B.G. Harlen

5. "Children want to do what grownups do."
Author: Beverly Cleary

6. "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

7. "I make the surprised O with my mouth, although I am not really that surprised. It was the kind of story that grownups tell children to complicate a thing when they could just tell you the thing itself, much faster."
Author: Claire King

8. "Time always seems long to the child who is waiting - for Christmas, for next summer, for becoming a grownup: long also when he surrenders his whole soul to each moment of a happy day."
Author: Dag Hammarskjold

9. "I want you to move in with me, man.""Nah. I appreciate it, but I need to get a place of my own. I'm a grownup."
Author: Damon Suede

10. "I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I'm starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life's sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it's my own choices that'll lock me in, it seems unavoidable--if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them."
Author: David Foster Wallace

11. "J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield is a literary descendant of Huck Finn: more educated and sophisticated, the son of affluent New Yorkers, but like Huck a youthful runaway from a world of adult hypocrisy, venality and, to use one of his own favourite words, phoniness. What particularly appals Holden is the eagerness of his peers to adopt that corrupt grownup behaviour."
Author: David Lodge

12. "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

13. "[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

14. "Grownups! Everyone remembers them. How strange and even sad it is that we never became what they were: beings noble, infallible, and free. We never became them. One of the things we discover as we live is that we never become anything different from what we are. We are no less ourselves at forty than we were at four, and because of this we know grownups as Grownups only once in life: during our own childhood. We never meet them in our lives again, and we will miss them always."
Author: Elizabeth Enright

15. "It's a very hard thing for all of us to accept ourselves at all the different stages - the horrible side, the wonderful side, the adorable side - and who you are as a grownup. And then to bring what you learned as a child to that grownup: that is the magic of creativity."
Author: Ellen Greene

16. "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

17. "Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them."
Author: John Irving

18. "As a kid, Vix had had some warped idea that grownup meant having a job and living on your own. It meant no one could tell you what to eat, or what to wear, or how to behave. It meant that it was okay to have sex with guys. What a joke!"
Author: Judy Blume

19. "A child's fear is a world whose dark corners are quite unknown to grownup people; it has its sky and its abysses, a sky without stars, abysses into which no light can ever penetrate."
Author: Julien Green

20. "The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia. Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites."
Author: Katherine Dunn

21. "Nathaniel kissed me and then Micah good-bye. Normally he would have kissed Micah more thoroughly, because he might not get another chance for hours, but we'd started doing less of the tonsil-cleaning kisses in front of Matthew—not just between the men, but between me and the men, or anyone and anyone. Why? Because Matthew liked to imitate, and he'd gotten sent home with a note from preschool. We'd been left having to explain that certain kinds of kissing was grownup kissing, and he had to be a grownup to do it. He'd accepted our reasoning and filed it away on the same list as driving a car, drinking liquor, or being able to lift weights. It made perfect sense to him that it was just one more thing he wasn't old enough to do, yet."
Author: Laurell K. Hamilton

22. "I make movies for grownups. When Hollywood starts making them again, I'll start acting in them again."
Author: Lee Remick

23. "Cute-and-furry was always an easier sell than carapaced-and-multilegged, for some obscure reason. Grownups, so unreasonable..."
Author: Lois McMaster Bujold

24. "Leonora is the grownups' version of Cinderella. She doesn't take crap from any ugly stepsisters. She doesn't sit indoors waiting to be rescued by prince charming. Oh, no, she rescues prince charming, Florestan, who's locked up in a dungeon by his archenemy, Pizarro. Cinderella was fun when we were little girls, played with dolls and believed in passive fairytales. Now that we're grown women who play with toys, it's only fit to believe in active fairytales."
Author: Luella Christie

25. "I would, quite often, like to be grownup, wise, and sophisticated. But these gifts are not mine."
Author: Madeleine L'Engle

26. "If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words."
Author: Madeleine L'Engle

27. "I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup."
Author: Madeleine L'Engle

28. "We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We've come to the point where it's irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up. The children themselves haven't yet isolated themselves by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily into the error of despair; they are considerably braver than most grownups. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don't look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it."
Author: Madeleine L'Engle

29. "We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups."
Author: Margaret Atwood

30. "Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!"
Author: May Sarton

31. "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

32. "Aren't you frightened?" Somehow I expected her to say no, to say something wise like a grownup would, or to explain that we can't presume to understand the Lord's plan. She looked away. "Yes," she finally said, "I'm frightened all the time." "Then why don't you act like it?""I do. I just do it in private.""Because you don't trust me?""No," she said, "because I know you're frightened, too."
Author: Nicholas Sparks

33. "I think your 20s are the hardest part of life. I mean, everyone goes on about how hard it is to be a teenager, but actually I think it's tougher to be in your 20s because you're expected to be a grownup and expected to earn your own living and be successful and I think you feel like a kid still."
Author: Nigel Cole

34. "Oh hours of childhood,when behind each shape more than the past appearedand what streamed out before us was not the future.We felt our bodies growing and were at times impatient to be grown up, half for the sakeof those with nothing left but their grownupness."
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

35. "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

36. "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

37. "Election night is the easiest time to act like a grownup."
Author: Ron Fournier

38. "When I was twenty-something, I asked my father, "When did you start feeling like a grownup?" His response: "Never."
Author: Shannon Celebi

39. "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

40. "I'm not too proud of the movies I made as a grownup except for 'That Hagen Girl', which nobody remembers but which gave me a chance to act."
Author: Shirley Temple

41. "Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought."
Author: Stephen King

42. "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

43. "Grownups have to say 'please,' too."
Author: Tommy Lasorda

44. "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

45. "To both the racist and the puritan, childhood is not a time of life that we grow out of, as the life of the child grows out of the life of the parent or as a plant grows out of the soil, but a time and state of consciousness to be left behind, to cut oneself off from ... The child may be joyous, the man must be sober and self-denying; the child may be free, the man is to be "responsible"; the child may be candid in his feelings, the man must be polite, restrained, mindful of the demands of convention; the child may be playful, the man must be industrious. I am not necessarily objecting to the manly virtues, but I am objecting that they should be so exclusively assigned to grownups, and that grownups should be so exclusively restricted to them. A man may have all the prescribed adult virtues and, if he lacks the childhood virtues, still be a dunce and a bore and a liar."
Author: Wendell Berry

46. "Being a grownup means assuming responsibility for yourself, for your children, and - here's the big curve - for your parents."
Author: Wendy Wasserstein

47. "Nurturing a child's sense of personal worth and therefore hope and dreams for a wonderful future is perhaps the most important responsibility of every grownup in a child's life."
Author: Wess Stafford

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

49. "I just took the idea that King Kong was too big for everything and reversed it and put George in a land of giants, which is basically what every kid goes through anyway - that, you know, the world is made for grownups, for tall people, for the giants."
Author: William Joyce

50. "A grownup is a child with layers on."
Author: Woody Harrelson

Grownup Quotes Pictures