Top 100 Sayings About Not Growing Up
#1. Thinking you knew something was a sure way to blind yourself. It was not growing up that slowly applied brakes to learning (Mentats were taught) but an accumulation of "things I know." New
Frank Herbert
#2. Everybody either wanted to take care of me or push me around, you know? I was teased a lot, sure I was, of course. Fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade, everybody was taking their spurts except me. I was not growing up.
Linda Hunt
#3. It's hard to have done all one's growing up since 33 - but that's a damn sight better than not growing up at all.
H.P. Lovecraft
#5. We all have this moment, when your folks first see you as someone not growing up to be them.
Chuck Palahniuk
#6. Just understanding that if you're not growing up, you're just moving backwards, and I'm a person that I always want to grow and learn and not be the smartest person in the room, because when you're not the smartest person in the room, you're always learning things.
Ndamukong Suh
#7. ...[their] children were not growing up or being brought up, but were tumbling up.
Charles Dickens
#10. I think there's nothing wrong with being fixated on superheroes when you are 7 years old, but I think there's a disease in not growing up.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#11. I've always felt that spiritual experience is dropping the illusion that we're not. Growing up at Londolozi nourished that sense in me from my earliest years. Mom and Dad often had to visit with the guests in
Boyd Varty
#12. I think many people love their problems. Gives them all sorts of excuses for not growing up and getting on with life.
Louise Penny
#13. Most young people seem to be behaving very intelligently: They look at things once in a while, but then they find it so idiotic and uncool that they just look away again. That is, provided they're not growing up in a family in which a drunk father is already watching pornos in the morning.
Volkmar Sigusch
#14. If you're not losing some friends then you're not growing up.
Timothy Goodman
#15. The process of growing up is to be valued for what we gain, not for what we lose.
C.S. Lewis
#16. Growing up, I was a very shy, wallflower type. I was not a nerd, but not popular. I was just invisible, like that person you probably didn't know you were in school with.
Jenna Fischer
#17. I'm still not totally sure I know what's true about me.
Kenneth Logan
#18. I've known a lot of religious people. My mother is very religious, but she also is very private about it. When I was growing up, she never went to church. She just prayed and read her Bible and kept it to herself. I'm not from a background of flamboyant believers. It's much more a personal issue.
Michael Shannon
#19. Becoming a man means doing the right thing even though it may be hard or difficult. Boys do what is easiest. A man does what is right, whether easy or not.
Carew Papritz
#20. I just feel like growing up in Los Angeles, you learn, 'Well you're never gonna be the prettiest girl in the room, so just don't even try.' I mean, I care about being pretty, but it's not my most valued thing.
Zooey Deschanel
#21. When people talk about how in America, anybody can grow up to be President, I'm not sure George Bush is exactly what they had in mind.
Will Durst
#22. It was a time before Facebook and Instagram and texting. I imagine it must be easier now, for college students. Home must not feel so far away anymore. But how do you cut the apron strings if the strings are virtual?
Kirstie Collins Brote
#23. You know, I was a huge fan of comedy and movies and TV growing up, and I was able to memorize and mimic a lot of things, not realizing that that meant I probably wanted to be an actor.
Hank Azaria
#24. I'm not in this just to change the law. It's about changing society. I want gay kids to grow up believing that they can get married, that they can join the Scouts, that they can choose the life they want to live.
Evan Wolfson
#25. I want my son to grow up in a place where the people are more powerful than the government and not the other way around.
Tony Blair
#26. I'm not terribly athletic. And ... there's a lot of things I'm not good at. And if it makes anybody feel better, I was really a pretty bad math student growing up.
Lester Holt
#27. I thought highly of myself growing up. I still do. There's not really much somebody can say to me to bring down my confidence or anything.
ASAP Rocky
#28. I worry very much about kids growing up in a society where they think: "I'm not going to talk about this issue, read this book or explore this idea because someone may think I'm a terrorist." That's not the kind of free society I want for our children.
Bernie Sanders
#29. I was taught coming up in the Phillies organization to be seen and not heard by people like Pete Rose, my hero growing up, and players like Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton and Manny Trillo.
Ryne Sandberg
#30. If it weren't for Jesus, I would not be where I am today and my life would be without purpose. I've heard kids say they want to be just like me when they grow up. They should know I want to be just like Jesus.
Albert Pujols
#31. It's not always easy being her daughter.'
I think,' she said, 'sometimes it's hard no matter whose daughter you are.
Sarah Dessen
#32. If our society were truly to appreciate the significance of children's emotional ties throughout the first years of life, it would no longer tolerate children growing up or parents having to struggle in situations which could not possibly nourish healthy growth.
Stanley Greenspan
#33. Find someone to push him ever sunward.
There's always something you're not supposed to see but it is a condition of growing up that you will see it.
Don DeLillo
#34. When I was growing up, I dreamed about becoming a cowgirl, a detective, a spy, a great actress, or a ballerina. Not a dentist, like my father, or a homemaker, like my mother - and certainly not a writer, although I always loved to read.
Judy Blume
#35. Growing up in South London, we went to a school where there were not that many Jewish kids. I love being Jewish in L.A.; it feels really normal. The culture seems to be integrated into Hollywood. Everyone uses Yiddish words like 'schlep' and 'schmooze.' That's what I love about New York, too.
Hannah Ware
#36. You're starting to look like you did before, and that's not good because what you looked like was complete shit, so get up and go to bed so I can stop acting like your mother. I can already feel my balls starting to recede. And hey, does it look like I'm growing breasts? - Kye
Krista Alasti
#37. Growing up, I'll always remember knowing from movies and TV that there was a possibility that you wouldn't fall in love. I always thought, 'Oh my God, I hope I'm not that person.'
Isabel Gillies
#38. Stasis is something that has marked my life since I was a boy growing up in Pittsburgh with my mother. It was the natural state that we existed in. For one thing, she suffered from a debilitating depression throughout my childhood, and depression is nothing if not static.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#39. Logic doesn't always lead us down the right path. Logic tells us not to take chances. Not to chase after that risk. To ignore the what ifs. I guess part of growing up is deciding when to listen to your head...and when to listen to your heart.
Jenny B. Jones
#40. Believe it or not, I was a pretty shy youngster growing up.
John McEnroe
#41. I did not grow up in the church. I'm not a church-goer now. I'm a very spiritual person.
Malcolm D. Lee
#42. The third thing that men do to get over a break-up. Drinking, not talking about your feelings, and then what?" I said, growing suspicious. "It's fighting, isn't it? You set this up.
Molly Harper
#43. Revolution does not insure progress. You may overturn thrones, but what proof that anything better will grow upon the soil?
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
#44. We split a bottle of Norman cider. Not everybody sells Norman cider by the bottle.
"Has a European feel" Susan said.
"That sounds terrific" I said. "Can I have one?"
Susan grinned at me. "How did you ever get to be so big without growing up?" she said.
"Iron self-control" I said.
Robert B. Parker
#45. Oh hours of childhood,
when behind each shape more than the past appeared
and 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 sake
of those with nothing left but their grownupness.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#46. I did not know the woman I would be
nor that blood would bloom in me
each month like an exotic flower,
nor that children,
two monuments,
would break from between my legs ...
Anne Sexton
#48. I began to feel alternately too big and too small. First, I grew so big that I took up the whole street; then I grew so small that nobody could see me - not even if I cried out.
Jamaica Kincaid
#49. My whole life growing up, both my parents told me not to swear like a sailor. After college, I recall there was finally a time where I swore, and neither one of them was correcting me, and I felt so relieved. I thought, finally; I can finally be myself and not get yelled at.
Rory Freedman
#50. The earth's crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#51. A grandparent will help you with your buttons, your zippers, and your shoelaces and not be in any hurry for you to grow up.
Erma Bombeck
#52. It's not going to be easy; Enterprise IT has spent decades growing a defensive culture based on the premise that you only get noticed when you screw up, so that must be avoided at all costs.
Tim Bray
#53. Growing up under Saddam's rule, I witnessed many injustices occurring everyday in my country and yet I could not do anything to prevent them.
Zainab Salbi
#54. Artists are a very important part of our society because they make a great contribution to our values. The artist creates a value system that we all grow up on, whether we know it or not.
Roy DeCarava
#55. We are like an only child who in growing up realizes that the world does not revolve only around himself, as he thought when little," Rovelli writes. "Mirrored by others, and by other things, we learn who we are.
Rovelli Carlo
#56. Personally speaking, growing up as a gay man before it was as socially acceptable as it is now, I knew what it was to feel different, to feel alienated and to feel not like everyone else. But the very same thing that made me monstrous to some people also empowered me and made me who I was.
John Logan
#57. One of the reasons I'm an actor is because I was no physical specimen as a child. I wasn't athletic and didn't have any prowess in that regard. Growing up in Kentucky, most little boys were trying to get into sports, and it was very competitive, so that was not to be. But I did want to do something.
Michael Shannon
#58. A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.
Dylan Moran
#59. We are all born with an open heart, but at some point as we are growing up, things happen in our lives where we start to shut down, like rejection, not fitting in, wanting approval, judgments, comparisons, and criticism of others.
Agapi Stassinopoulos
#60. Growing up like rewriting is simply admitting how clueless you were not so long ago.
Scott Westerfeld
#61. Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.
Horace Greeley
#62. The goal of the pastor is not to get people to show up but to get people to grow up.
John C. Maxwell
#63. I brought in a yogurt master from Turkey. I went to Greece. I was always going back and forth, from New York to Turkey and Greece. The recipe we use has been around hundreds and hundreds of years. Growing up in Turkey, not a day would go by that we wouldn't eat yogurt like this.
Hamdi Ulukaya
#64. Growing up, I realized that fame is not what you think it is. It's a little bizarre. You have to learn how to cope with that and figure out who you are.
Tyler Posey
#65. To be able to explore the genre of the musical is nice. It was great to be able to sing professionally, for the first time, and dance, which was something that I did growing up, but I had not done for many, many years.
Penelope Cruz
#66. [My boys] bloody well will work. Same as myself, same as David. They're not going to be the kinds of kids that just hang about. I want them to be able to fulfill their passions, but I think it's important that the children grow up and have respect for themselves.
Victoria Beckham
#67. I wanted only a familiar voice, someone who knew me. Not some earlier, larval version of myself ...
Jennifer Haigh
#68. When you come from a big family, you see that, growing up, you're learning how to share. Your sisters have got your back; you're not alone in this - 'We all support you!' Your family provides that; it gives you a sense of safety, and it's a very grounding feeling.
Gisele Bundchen
#69. I'm not really big on video games at all, I played a lot at the arcade as a kid. I didn't have a system growing up at my house.
Kyp Malone
#70. I didn't grow up in a naked household, but nudity was not a taboo thing. My mother was an artist and there were naked sculptures and paintings all over the place.
Ingrid Michaelson
#71. The wish fulfillment of growing younger is not necessarily all it's cracked up to be. You have new problems that arise which you are not anticipating and you deal with the same problems you would deal with if you were ageing normally: what is the end of life about? What have I accomplished?
Eric Roth
#72. The economy is growing, productivity is high, trade is up, people are working. It's not as good as we'd like, but
and to the extent that we find weakness, we'll move.
George W. Bush
#73. I think you grow up wanting to be a racing driver. Then it dawns on you that it's not going to happen.
Dominic Cooper
#74. The reason I'm in San Diego is not because I want distance from South Africa but because I want proximity to the people I love. But I don't envy growing up in America. As ugly as aspects of it were, my biggest blessing was to be born a South African.
Athol Fugard
#75. If growing up means not seeing one's family and friends on the regular - all in the name of paying the bills, then growing up is overrated.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#76. You mostly know that you want to be funny, know that you have the desire. It's not like people who grow up beautiful and can look in the mirror and be like, I'm beautiful! Funny is more of a journey. And a desperate attempt.
Tina Fey
#77. Do you ever plan to grow up, Veltan?" he asked.
"Not if I can avoid it, no.
David Eddings
#78. New Life Realization #1:
Being an adult is hard work. I know people tell you this growing up, but it doesn't really sink in until you're living it, waist deep in the swamps of no-free-time and not-enough-money.
New Life Realization #2:
It's worth it.
Cora Carmack
#79. I wouldn't trade growing up on the farm in Yolo (you only live once) County for anything in the world. I prefer the world I grew up in, and not the world I am growing old in.
Lorraine Rominger
#80. The term "teenager" had not long been invented, and it never occured to him that the separateness he felt, which was both painful and delicious, could be shared by anyone else.
Ian McEwan
#81. Being self-aware is not the absence of mistakes, but the ability to learn and correct them.
Auliq Ice
#82. When I was growing up, my parents asked me what I wanted to do, and I said that I wanted to live in Springfield. They were like, "Well, that's not how it works. There is an actor who play Homer, and someone who writes what Homer says." So, I was like, "Well, I want to write what Homer says."
Jonah Hill
#83. It was too late. Maybe yesterday, while I was still a child, but not now. I knew too much, had seen too much, I was a child no longer now; innocence and childhood were forever lost, forever gone from me.
William Faulkner
#84. I don't have a hands-on fondness for animals. I did not grow up bonded to any particular nonhuman animal. I like them and I pet them and I'm kind to them, but there's no special bond between me and other animals
Wayne Pacelle
#85. When I was growing up, I don't remember being told that America was created so that everyone could get rich. I remember being told it was about opportunity and the pursuit of happiness. Not happiness itself, but the pursuit.
Martin Scorsese
#86. I think it is important to grow. Your fans are growing up with you whether you like it or not. You have to keep it fresh and exciting for them. You have to bring something new to the table each time.
Jesse McCartney
#87. When I'm not in the booth, I'm one of the most laid-back guys. But growing up, I liked DMX, Jay-Z, 50 Cent, and T.I. - dudes that went all out on the track. My first songs were energetic because I liked their energy.
Meek Mill
#88. To be completely honest, it's shocking to me that I keep getting the villain roles! I do not see myself as the villain and I know, growing up, I was the opposite of a villain. I would never try to be a villain to anyone - but maybe other people I grew up with feel differently about that.
Cam Gigandet
#89. When we look at that jingoism and the sexism and the racism and the homophobia, that's not who we are, and that's not the country that I want my daughter to grow up in.
Chelsea Clinton
#90. When I was growing up in Nigeria - and I shouldn't say Nigeria, because that's too general, but in Afikpo, the Igbo part of the country where I'm from - there were always rites of passage for young men. Men were taught to be men in the ways in which we are not women; that's essentially what it is.
Chris Abani
#91. It was just you had to be strong, and if you weren't strong you're a victim and you're not going to make it. That was the reality when I was growing up.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#92. Is there someone who passively watches his children growing up? We constantly and maximally invest ourselves into our children to realize our vision of happiness. But not for us - for those children. It's not enough that we molest ourselves, so we have to molest the children as well ...
Ruben Papian
#93. Everyone grows old but not everyone grows up.
Maya Angelou
#94. I've always felt this, from when I was growing up to now with my son Riley. We don't let them be little. I was not a normal kid, but I had a sense of innocence far longer than we let kids.
Melissa Peterman
#95. I've struggled so much, growing up, with just feeling that my life is valid because it's not filled with these hyper-dramatic moments, and I think a lot of people of my generation feel that way. We're so inundated with hyper-drama that people crave everyday life.
Ellar Coltrane
#96. Jocelyn did not want to always remain the same. Where was the adventure in that?
Heidi Schulz
#97. The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.
Rollo May
#98. It's not nice to think of children growing up like mushrooms, in the dark.
Shirley Jackson
#99. On the way home I remembered a bit of old folklore about how to boil a frog. You put it in cold water, then start turning up the heat. If you do it gradually, the frog is too stupid to jump out. I don't know if it's true or not, but I decided it was an excellent metaphor for growing old.
Stephen King
#100. Isn't it weird how people grow up when you're not looking?
Ann Benjamin
