Top 100 Childhood Adulthood Quotes
#1. Just give her one, Ifemelu thought. To overwhelm a child of four with choices, to lay on her the burden of making a decision, was to deprive her of the bliss of childhood. Adulthood, after all, already loomed, where she would have to make grimmer and grimmer decisions.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#2. And at twelve, heading for adulthood, a child fears that the way she is at that moment is all she's ever going to be.
Jane Yolen
#3. We all can think of at least one kid who had great parents, a great family, and an all-around great childhood ... who suddenly went crazy as soon as he left the house for college or adulthood. And nobody can figure out how or why it happened!
Andy Andrews
#4. I had been riding horses before my memory kicked in, so my life with horses had no beginning. It simply appeared from the fog of infancy. I survived a difficult childhood by traveling on the backs of horses, and in adulthood the pattern didn't change.
Monty Roberts
#5. There was a time when that kind of thing looked like the kingdom of heaven, but somewhere along the line it had lost its glow. Maybe that was just the cost of growing up. And maybe the cost of growing up was too high.
James P. Blaylock
#6. We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice - that is, until we have stopped saying "It got lost," and say, "I lost it.
Sydney J. Harris
#7. People never grow up, they just learn how to act in public.
Bryan White
#8. They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.
George Eliot
#9. To carry feelings of childhood into the powers of adulthood, to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for years has rendered familiar, this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish it from talent.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#10. It is widely known that the effects of childhood poverty follow children through adolescence and into adulthood.
Chris Van Hollen
#11. The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way.
Joe Hill
#12. There's childhood and early onset bipolar, but it transitions in your early adulthood into something a little bit different, and extremely severe. It was at that time that my impulse control just went out the window. Impulse control when you're manic just disappears.
Marya Hornbacher
#13. 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
#14. They sealed this promise by hooking pinkies, the way they used to, long ago, when promises didn't hurt as much.
Alice Hoffman
#15. Be absolutely assured that we will die long before our own deaths if we ever allow the fear of adulthood to kill the wonder of childhood.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#16. Our lives are scattered throughout with periods of unbelonging; in childhood, of course, and adolescence; but in adulthood too, when sudden loss (or gain) forces us to reassess things we believe immutable.
Clive Barker
#17. Adulthood was invented to repair the wounds of childhood.
Joy Browne
#18. I had a beautiful childhood, so my adulthood has been really frustrating because it's - half the time it hasn't been as good as my childhood.
John Lautner
#19. In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.
Socrates
#20. Childhood is what you spend your entire adulthood trying to get over.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#21. When we graduate from childhood into adulthood, we're thrown into this confusing, Cthulhu-like miasma of life, filled with social and career problems, all with branching choices and no correct answers.
Felicia Day
#22. When I was younger, I use to laugh at my mom when she was silly. Now that I'm older, I find myself just as silly as her. Thanks mom, for teaching us that even as adults, it's OK to be fun and enjoy life laughing. I now get to teach my nephews and stepdaughter the same thing.
April Mae Monterrosa
#23. Belief is like that, a circle, and often I find that the seemingly simplistic explanations from childhood for the unexplainable have merit, maybe more so than all the educated and contrived answers of adulthood.
Frances A. Washburn
#24. Comedy was the key to everything. I grew up fast and controlled my future by bringing it on faster than it naturally unfolded. I cheated myself out of a childhood but then got a running headstart into adulthood that no one else could keep up with.
Margaret Cho
#25. Adolescence is a border between childhood and adulthood. Like all borders, it's teeming with energy and fraught with danger.
Mary Pipher
#26. I'd had a less tumultuous transition from childhood to adulthood, but somewhere in my twenties I feel like I got stalled in the process and now I'm drifting, marking time without any great passion to move forward.
Janet Evanovich
#27. Study is the bane of childhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of adulthood, and a restorative in old age.
Walter Savage Landor
#28. Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself.
Jonathan Kozol
#29. Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.
Adam Phillips
#30. someone like him, is the island of exile where most teenagers go to wait until childhood becomes adulthood. What you need to see - what Rothstein finally saw, although it took him three books to do it - is that most of us become everyone.
Stephen King
#31. Jesus Christ - He means the world to me. So many different situations I've been through, through my childhood and now my adulthood; I lost my brother at a young age. He got hit by a car right in front of me. I had to be strong for my mom.
Adrian Peterson
#32. It's a universal truth that no parent wishes to acknowledge that the fear and phobias we are in thrall to in adulthood almost invariably connect back to childhood experiences.
Mariella Frostrup
#33. I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.
Anne Tyler
#34. I spent my whole childhood wishing I were older and now I'm spending my adulthood wishing I were younger.
Ricky Schroder
#35. The beige linoleum floor turned into the ocean, crashed and crashed against Lotto's shins. He sat down. How swiftly things spun. Two minutes ago he'd been a kid, thinking about his nintendo system, worried about asymptotes and signs. Now he was, heavy, adult.
Lauren Groff
#37. In earlier periods of history, adolescence was virtually unknown ... Today, the span between childhood and adulthood may extend over ten years. Deferred adulthood is synonymous with deferred responsibility.
Billy Graham
#38. Reading is the scourge of childhood because, in a sense, it creates adulthood.
Neil Postman
#39. We know that childhood and adolescence are the most crucial times for environmental stimuli to affect breast cancer risk, but changes made during adulthood and even after diagnosis still have the potential to create positive changes in the body.
Joel Fuhrman
#40. Eventually he understood that he was crying for himself. He was ashamed of the man whom he had become, mourning the man whom he had expected to be when he'd been a boy.
Dean Koontz
#41. Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.
Robert Charles Wilson
#42. This is why Max loved Mr. Beckmann: he was an equal. He seemed to have navigated his way through seven or so decades of adulthood without forgetting one moment of his childhood- what he loved and hated, feared and coveted.
Dave Eggers
#43. The most difficult journey any of us ever take in our adulthood is the return to our parents' house. A home visit makes us recall all of the childhood events that formed us. Returning home reacquaints us with family members and our former self.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#44. Childhood and adulthood were not factors of age but states of mind.
Alex Shakar
#45. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.
Neil Gaiman
#47. I didn't have a dysfunctional childhood or young adulthood, but I was somebody who was very much raised to do what other people told me to do as a person.
Shelley Fabares
#48. Everyone's childhood is strange. It prepares you for the strangeness of adulthood." Riley
Janet Evanovich
#50. I spent five years of my childhood in Port Elgin and came back to spend another five years of my young adulthood there as well, including the years in which I was first published.
Susanna Kearsley
#51. In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you.
Rebecca Solnit
#52. The monsters were never under our bed, but in the forest our future.
Crystal Woods
#53. Families start out, most of the time, with unconditional acceptance of one another. That acceptance starts in childhood and continues into adulthood. Somewhere in there, between childhood and adulthood, the ability to distinguish right versus wrong is born.
Bart Hopkins
#54. When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you
Gail Carson Levine
#55. I had a wonderful childhood, which is tough because it's hard to adjust to a miserable adulthood.
Larry David
#56. My father had been my Moses, bringing me to life. Then my grandfather became my Joshua, carrying me through my childhood and teen years into adulthood.
Wes Moore
#57. There've always been people in the borderland between childhood and adulthood. That state is not a matter of chronological age. It's a matter of understanding that you can accept a future that has been defined by the previous generation, or you can reject it and make something new.
Will Shetterly
#58. Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#59. Life after 50 or 60 is itself another country, as different as adolescence is from childhood, or as adulthood is from adolescence - and just as adventurous.
Gloria Steinem
#60. All people cross the line from childhood to adulthood with a secondhand opinion of who they are. Without any questioning, we take as truth whatever our parents and other influentials have said about us during our childhood, whether these messages are communicated verbally, physically, or silently.
Heyward Bruce Ewart III
#61. Children are the closest we have to wisdom, and they become adults the moment that final drop of everything mysterious is strained from them.
Simon Van Booy
#62. I've always thought that one of the signs of true adulthood is when you realize that you spend each Christmas trying to relive childhood memories that never really happened in the first place.
Josh Kilmer-Purcell
#63. Sum of life; Birth, childhood, youth, adulthood, parenthood, old age and death.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#64. Just as the blurring between childhood and adulthood has produced the kidult, so the stretching of middle into old age has fostered another peculiar chimera: septuagenarians with apoptosis sporting the depeche mode.
Will Self
#65. Someday I'd have to tell her about Ed Gein, whose mother dressed him as a girl for most of his childhood. He spent most of his adulthood killing women and making clothes out of their skin.
Dan Wells
#66. She was at that period of her life that almost everyone must pass through, when childhood is done with and a faux maturity, untrammeled by experience, gives one a sense that anything is possible until the arrival of real adulthood proves conclusively that it is not.
Julian Fellowes
#67. All over America, the membrane between adulthood and childhood had been eroding, the fantastic and and the personal melding into one, adult worries receding into a pink childhood haze.
Gary Shteyngart
#68. For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.
John Connolly
#69. The day you graduate from childhood to adulthood is the day you take full responsibility for your life.
Darren Hardy
#70. both of them having moved through space and across the parenting continuum to voice their concern for their middle daughter, the one in no-man's-land between the trenches of childhood and adulthood.
Laura Buzo
#72. children spend their time for they think they have more time; adults cry over their time for they see they have less time
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#73. After all, isn't that what really draws the line between childhood and adulthood, knowing that you are solely responsible for yourself? If so, then my childhood ended at fifteen.
Liz Murray
#74. -'Would it help if I said I was very drunk?'
Brachio shook his head. - 'We all were'
-'Shitty childhood?'
-'Mummy used to leave me in a cupboard.'
-'Shitty adulthood?'
-'Whose isn't?
Joe Abercrombie
#75. A central theme of all about love is that from childhood into adulthood we are often taught misguided and false assumptions about the nature of love. Perhaps the most common false assumption about love is that love means we will not be challenged or changed.
Bell Hooks
#76. It's strange how in childhood it feels like tomorrow won't come until the end of forever, but in adulthood it feels like the end of forever could come tomorrow.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#77. Already, though, she understood the difference between being a child and being an adult. The difference is when someone says he can keep the bad things away, a child believes him.
Joe Hill
#78. Kimberly Reed explains why this love has transferred to adulthood, saying, "When you love something as a kid, you never stop loving it; you just tuck that love away in a different spot in your heart.
Nikki Van Noy
#79. Childhood is like that, so full of treasures. I've tried to bring as many of those treasures with me, into adulthood, as possible. Otherwise, what is it to be grown? Is learning to die, one day at a time.
Sonya Chung
#80. A return to Childhood will rid the Evils of Adulthood
Jason Duncan
#81. I'm pretty squeaky clean. No big tragedies in my childhood or adolescence or adulthood. I've had a very easygoing, simple life.
Vera Farmiga
#82. You see, I don't think age matters so much as people think. Parts of me are still 12 and I think other parts were already 50 when I was 12 ... .
C.S. Lewis
#83. All fathers are liars ... If you want to be a father, you have to be prepared to become a liar.
Alison Espach
#84. A pony is a childhood dream. A horse is an adulthood treasure.
Rebecca Carroll
#85. A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.
Thomas Szasz
#87. How do you explain to a child who likes everyone in the world that adult life consists to a great extent of cutting people away?
Miranda Emmerson
#88. I wanted the Andy of Toy Story 3 to be right on the cusp, straddling childhood and adulthood ... I wanted to find this sweet spot where he had gotten tall and had clearly grown up but still retained many boyish qualities, including a boyish charm.
Lee Unkrich
#89. I had spent my childhood and the better part of my early adulthood trying to understand my mother. She had been an extraordinarily difficult person, spiteful and full of rage, with a temper that could flare, seemingly out of nowhere, scorching everything and everyone who got in its way. [pp. 40-41]
Dani Shapiro
#90. Soon, he would become an adult. And when he did, there would be not going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about being a war hero: one you became one, you died one.
Khaled Hosseini
#91. Don't you find it odd," she continued, "that when you're a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you're older, somehow they act offended if you even try.
Ethan Hawke
#93. When we strive to remove all risk from childhood we also remove the foundations of a rational adulthood, and we eliminate the very experiences that will help kids grow up to be the empowered, creative, brave problem-solvers that they can and must be.
Gever Tulley
#94. Childhood boredom is a special kind of boredom. It is a boredom full of dreams, a sort of projection into another place, into another reality. In adulthood boredom is made of repetition, it is the continuation of something from which we are no longer expecting any surprise.
Italo Calvino
#95. Nobody truly becomes an adult. The child we have been is always there, deep inside of us. As time passes, we think we're growing, but maturity is only an illusion; a hindrance to our free child soul.
Jiro Taniguchi
#96. They didn't really have a childhood. Just them and Mom and then her liver went and she died and it was just them. Except they never learned to be grown-ups. And they never learned to be just kids, either. Stuck in never-never land. Kinda sad.
Gerry Boyle
#97. What surprised me about the Oscars was how familiar it was - because you're in the room with all these people that have inspired you from your childhood to adulthood in the film industry. It feels like you've known them all of your life.
Octavia Spencer
#98. Social environment in childhood affects achieved adult height, life chances, and ultimately mortality rates in adult life. ( ... ) ... social circumstances acting in childhood do have a persisting effect on adult disease rates, in addition to influences acting in adulthood.
Michael Marmot
#99. Past a certain point it is not interesting to think about childhood as the central drama and adulthood as its reprise.
Martha Cooley
#100. Adel could almost feel himself leapfrogging over childhood. Soon, he would land as an adult. And when he did, there would be no going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about being a war hero: once you became one, you died one. Lying
Khaled Hosseini
