Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Catalog
Quotes tagged ‘Growing Up’
What's the use you learning to do right, when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?
I'm not the same kid I was when I was younger. I just thought you should know.
I suppose it was just old, I suppose it was just its time, or maybe it was only some stray image, twisted minute of a dream, broken bit of a story I've taken for memory. I could do it, I think. It's like religion that way. You simply begin to believe.
they loved us, those stars. They must have, anyway, for they did what no one did, what even we could not: they saw us and spared us.
I know about the stars. That night they made shadows of us, made us bigger, wilder than we were--
As adults we lose memory of the gravity and terrors of childhood.
I am, I guess, depressed. I guess I've been depressed for about twenty-four years. I can feel a better version of me somewhere in there - hidden behind a liver or attached to a bit of spleen within my stunted, childish body - a Libby that's telling me to get up, do something, grow up, move on.
And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your…
The most creative act you will ever undertake is the act of creating yourself.
When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.
I was twelve. What did I know? How could I have imagined then how alone I would become.
Someone plays a chord. The choirmaster says, ‘Yes. But remember, old men lie awake at night. Have pity, for whether or not the aches and pains they feel are true, we must be patient with them. Because someday that old man will be you.'
Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.
There would be no heroics, I understood. Just the dull terror, the physical pain that would have to be suffered through
The intensity of his attention seemed exposing, and I laughed a little. I was just starting to learn how to be looked at. I took a deep drink. The glass was full of vodka, cloudy with the barest slip of orange juice.
I looked up because of the laughter, and kept looking because of the girls. I noticed their hair first, long and uncombed. Then their jewelry catching the sun.
These long-haired girls seemed to glide above all that was happening around them, tragic and separate. Like royalty in exile.
These long-haired girls seemed to glide above all that was happening around them, tragic and separate. Like royalty in exile.
the gaudy, prickling tease that was almost the same thing as beauty.