adulthood

Once we were young, now we are adult.

When You Live Life Too Early, You Learn Life Too Late.

In his grief over the loss of a dog, a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood. After this most inconsolable of sorrows there is nothing life can do to him that he will not be able somehow to bear.

How could any boy know that freedom is lost the moment you become a man. Things start to count. To press in. Constricting slowly, inevitably, creating a cage of inconveniences and duties and deadlines and failed plans and lost friends.

He was still so very young. Faeries__rue faeries, not their changeling throwaways__ive forever, and when you have an eternity of adulthood ahead of you, you linger over childhood. You tend it and keep it close to your heart, because once it ends, it__ over. Quentin was barely fifteen. He__ never seen the Great Hunt that came down every twenty-one years, or been present for the crowning of a King or Queen of Cats, or announced his maturity before the throne of High King Aethlin. He was a child, and he should have had decades left to play; a century of games and joy and edging cautiously toward adulthood.But he didn__. I could see his childhood dying in his eyes as he looked at me, silently begging me to answer for him.

I used to get so worked up about this or that boy, or who was passing notes in math class. All that stuff seems so far away now, ever since Real Life came along and punched me in the face.

To abandon the child __ithin_ means that the adult __ithout_ will be an adult in name only. And frankly, I can only name a handful of things that are that tragic.

Forgiveness is what makes adults different to children: children just forget, adults forgive.

Children are the closest we have to wisdom, and they become adults the moment that final drop of everything mysterious is strained from them.

To make a difference in the world, it only takes one optimistic person, who can gather millions of people to make the change.

Inside my house, nobody was home, except everybody, but it was easy to feel like those were one and the same.

Children__ 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__ why so many adults read YA: we__e never done coming of age.

The whole time I pretend I have mental telepathy. And with my mind only, I__l say _ or think? _ to the target, 'Don__ do it. Don__ go to that job you hate. Do something you love today. Ride a rollercoaster. Swim in the ocean naked. Go to the airport and get on the next flight to anywhere just for the fun of it. Maybe stop a spinning globe with your finger and then plan a trip to that very spot; even if it__ in the middle of the ocean you can go by boat. Eat some type of ethnic food you__e never evenheard of. Stop a stranger and ask her to explain her greatest fears and her secret hopes and aspirations in detail and then tell her you care because she is a human being. Sit down on the sidewalk and make pictures with colorful chalk. Close your eyes and try to see the world with your nose__llow smellsto be your vision. Catch up on your sleep. Call an old friend you haven__ seen in years. Roll up your pant legs and walk into the sea. See a foreign film. Feed squirrels. Do anything! Something! Because you start a revolution one decision at a time, with each breath you take. Just don__ go back to thatmiserable place you go every day. Show me it__ possible to be an adult and also be happy. Please. This is a free country. You don__ have to keep doing this if you don__ want to. You can do anything you want. Be anyone you want. That__ what they tell us at school, but if you keep getting on that train and going to the place you hate I__ going to start thinking the people at school are liars like the Nazis who told the Jews they were just being relocated to work factories. Don__ do that to us. Tell us the truth. If adulthood is working some death-camp job you hate for the rest of your life, divorcing your secretly criminal husband, being disappointed in your son, being stressed and miserable, and dating a poser and pretending he__ a hero when he__ really a lousy person and anyone can tell that just by shaking his slimy hand _ if it doesn__ get any better, I need to know right now. Just tell me. Spare me from some awful fucking fate. Please.

The future isn't written in the stars. There are no guarantees. So claim your adulthood. Be intentional. Get to work. Pick your family. Do the math. Make your own certainty. Don't be defined by what you didn't know or didn't do.You are deciding your life right now.

The monsters were never under our bed, but in the forest our future.

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.

As an adult I had mastered the art of looking without seeing and listening without hearing and eating without tasting and maybe even existing without living.

There was no starting point for the rebellion, but I could mark an arbitrary one: that a grown-up was someone who, first and foremost, could drink a Coke at whim.