These growing up quotes encapsulate the remarkable journey of growth we all go through, from the innocence of childhood to the wisdom of adulthood. Unlock the profound essence of life’s journey with our carefully curated collection of growing up quotes. Each quote mirrors life’s changing phases and imparts timeless wisdom, helping you to better understand and appreciate the journey of growing up.
Best Growing Up Quotes
Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up. Tom Stoppard
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. C.S. Lewis
As long as you’re green, you’re growing. As soon as you’re ripe, you start to rot. Ray Kroc
I don’t want to be a man, said Jace. I want to be an angst ridden teenager who can’t confront his own inner demons and takes it out verbally on other people instead. Well, said Luke, you’re doing a fantastic job. Cassandra Clare
The trick is growing up without growing old. Casey Stengel
We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and in spite of True Romance magazines we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely at least, not all the time but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness. Hunter S. Thompson
Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional. Walt Disney
Growing apart doesn’t change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I’m glad for that. Ally Condie
Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging. Maya Angelou
The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one. J.D. Salinger
It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are. E.E. Cummings
Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands. Anne Frank
When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. Tom Robbins
When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind. Patrick Rothfuss
Oh, she thought, How horrible it is that people have to grow up and marry and change! L.M. Montgomery
Dear God, she prayed, let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost. Betty Smith
Growing older is not upsetting; being perceived as old is. Kenny Rogers
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others. Virginia Woolf
You don’t stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing. George Bernard Shaw
Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging. Maya Angelou
When a child first catches adults out when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing. John Steinbeck
Growing up is losing some illusions in order to acquire others. Virginia Woolf
My mother she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her. Jodi Picoult
Growing up happens in a heartbeat. One day you’re in diapers; the next day you’re gone. But the memories of childhood stay with you for the long haul. The Wonder Years
I walked over to the hill where we used to go and sled. There were a lot of little kids there. I watched them flying. Doing jumps and having races. And I thought that all those little kids are going to grow up someday. And all of those little kids are going to do the things that we do. And they will all kiss someone someday. But for now, sledding is enough. I think it would be great if sledding were always enough, but it isn’t. Stephen Chbosky
Growing apart doesn’t change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I’m glad for that. Allie Condie
Growing up happens when you start having things you look back on and wish you could change. Cassandra Clare
You need not be sorry for her. She was one of the kind that likes to grow up. In the end, she grew up of her own free will a day quicker than the other girls. J.M. Barrie
It’s about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out. Jodi Picoult
Growing old is unavoidable, but never growing up is possible. I believe you can retain certain things from your childhood if you protect them certain traits, certain places where you don’t let the world go. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I think that the best thing we can do for our children is to allow them to do things for themselves, allow them to be strong, allow them to experience life on their own terms, allow them to take the subway let them be better people, let them believe more in themselves. C. JoyBell C.
Growing up, we are told many things; one being, you can do anything. But somewhere between child and adult, things change. Julie Hebert
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything. Kurt Vonnegut
As I learned from growing up, you don’t mess with your grandmother. Prince William
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
Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands. Anne Frank
Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you’re young. But I don’t think we make any fewer when we’re grown up. Jodi Picoult
When we are children, we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind. Patrick Rothfuss
You need not be sorry for her. She was one of the kind that likes to grow up. In the end she grew up of her own free will a day quicker than the other girls. J.M. Barrie
It takes years to learn the difference between who to let go and who to be patient with. The same way it takes years to know what you deserve and what you don’t. So hang in there growth and experience come with time. R.M. Drake
Don’t worry if people think you’re crazy. You are crazy. You have that kind of intoxicating insanity that lets other people dream outside of the lines and become who they’re destined to be. Jennifer Elisabeth
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
I am convinced that most people do not grow up. We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias. Maya Angelou
Don’t try to make me grow up before my time. Louisa May Alcott
Children are apt to live up to what you believe of them. Lady Bird Johnson
Never did the world make a queen of a girl who hides in houses and dreams without traveling. Roman Payne
We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today. Stacia Tauscher
For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him! Fyodor Dostoevsky
While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about. Angela Schwindt
You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable. Ta Nehisi Coates
You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they’re going. P. J. O’Rourke
Unfortunately, some family members are so psychotic that no matter how hard you try to forge a healthy relationship, nothing will help. Now that you’re an adult, take refuge in the fact that some things are beyond your control. You owe it to yourself to steer clear of people who are harmful to your health. Andrea Lavinthal
Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing up is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing. Phyllis Diller
I want to be the best version of myself for anyone who is going to someday walk into my life and need someone to love them beyond reason. Jennifer Elisabeth
A child’s life is like a piece of paper on which every person leaves a mark. Chinese Proverb
One of the oddest things about being grownup was looking back at something you thought you knew and finding out the truth of it was completely different from what you had always believed. Patricia Briggs
Motherhood is an early retirement position. Your children do grow up. Colleen Parro
Whenever I am in a difficult situation where there seems to be no way out, I think about all the times I have been in such situations and say to myself, I did it before, so I can do it again. Idowu Koyenikan
Kids They dance before they learn there is anything that isn’t music. William Stafford
He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all. Cormac McCarthy
You know children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers. John J. Plomp
I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now. John Green
You have a lifetime to work, but children are only young once. Polish Proverb
It doesn’t matter how many times you leave, it will always hurt to come back and remember what you once had and who you once were. Then it will hurt just as much to leave again, and so it goes over and over again. Once you’ve started to leave, you will run your whole life. Charlotte Eriksson
She’s a wild butterfly finding her way just a girl growing wings. Butterflies Rising
If you didn’t grow up like I did then you don’t know, and if you don’t know it’s probably better you don’t judge. Junot Díaz
Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different? C.S. Lewis
You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be. Charlotte Eriksson
Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them a mother’s approval, a father’s nod are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives. Mitch Albom
Maturity is when your world opens up and you realize that you are not the center of it. M.J. Croan
No matter how old she may be, sometimes a girl just needs her mom. Cardinal Mermillod
He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times. Neil Gaiman
I think she is growing up, and so begins to dream dreams, and have hopes and fears and fidgets, without knowing why or being able to explain them. Louisa May Alcott
To a father growing old, nothing is dearer than a daughter. Euripides
I met a boy whose eyes showed me that the past, present and future were all the same thing. Jennifer Elisabeth
A mother is not a person to lean on but a person to make leaning unnecessary. Dorothy C. Fisher
It’s much easier to not know things sometimes. Things change and friends leave. And life doesn’t stop for anybody. Stephen Chbosky
The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother. Sharon Olds
I don’t need anyone else to distract me from myself anymore, like I always thought I would. Charlotte Eriksson
As they get older, our daughters become more and more like us too. Amy Newmark
In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss. John Irving
I hope that my daughter grows up empowered and doesn’t define herself by the way she looks but by qualities that make her an intelligent, strong, and responsible woman. Isaiah Mustafa
I have lost and loved and won and cried myself to the person I am today. Charlotte Eriksson
It’s about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out. Jodi Picoult
I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them. Brian Fitzgerald, talking about his children. Jodi Picoult
The years will rush by, and one day you will be watching your son as a man and feeling incredibly proud that he is caring, safe, making a contribution, and hopefully going far beyond you in the scope of his life. Steve Biddulph
Where’d the days go, when all we did was play? And the stress that we were under wasn’t stress at all just a run and a jump into a harmless fall. Paolo Nutini
That strong mother doesn’t tell her cub, Son, stay weak so the wolves can get you. She says, ‘Toughen up; this is reality we are living in. Lauryn Hill
Growing up is hard, love. Otherwise everyone would do it. Kim Harrison
Yet, now in my arms, I was holding a helpless baby boy who would grow into a man. I cannot imagine that soft little face one day having whiskers. Rhonda Stoppe
He nods, as if to acknowledge that endings are almost always a little sad, even when there is something to look forward to on the other side. Emily Giffin
Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president, but they don’t want them to become politicians in the process. John F. Kennedy
Stop trying to be less of who you are. Let this time in your life cut you open and drain all of the things that are holding you back. Jennifer Elisabeth
I don’t want to be a man, said Jace. I want to be an angst ridden teenager who can’t confront his own inner demons and takes it out verbally on other people instead. Well, said Luke, you’re doing a fantastic job. Cassandra Clare
It’s hard at times, but it makes a kid strong in ways that most people can’t understand. Teaches them that even though people are left behind, new ones will inevitable take their place; that every place has something good and bad to offer. It makes a kid grow up fast. Nicholas Sparks
Even though you’re growing up, you should never stop having fun. Nina Dobrev
As a child there’s a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown ups lack the strength to take the right one each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment. Mark Lawrence
I make mistakes growing up. I’m not perfect; I’m not a robot. Justin Bieber
I still don’t know what it really means to grow up. However, if I happen to meet you, one day in the future, by then, I want to become someone you can be proud to know. Makoto Shinkai
The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt. Max Lerner
I don’t want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I’ll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it’s possible to be. I’m growing and I don’t know how to grow. I’m living but I haven’t started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it’s like I’m not here in the world at all and I simply don’t exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid. David Almond
When I was growing up, my parents told me, Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving. I tell my daughters, Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job. Thomas Friedman
People say you’re born innocent, but it’s not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can’t wash off. We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent. Hugo Hamilton
People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn’t want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, If this were the Middle Ages, you’d be married and you’d own a farm with about a million chickens on it. They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could. Heather O’Neill
No amount of me trying to explain myself was doing any good. I didn’t even know what was going on inside of me, so how could I have explained it to them? Sierra D. Waters
They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing. Margaret Atwood
When I was growing up, my parents were almost involved in various volunteer things. My dad was head of Planned Parenthood. And it was very controversial to be involved with that. Bill Gates
I’ve loved him my whole life, and somewhere along the way, that love didn’t change but grew. It grew to fill the parts of me that I did not have when I was a child. It grew with every new longing of my body and desire until there was not a piece of me that did not love him. And when I look at him, there is no other feeling in me. Laura Nowlin
Growing up in Rhode Island, my friends would have strung me up if I had been a Yankees fan. Charlie Day
You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they’re going. P. J. O’Rourke
Growing up, I was inspired by The Beatles and Bob Dylan. Damian Rice was a huge influence for me musically. Ed Sheeran
It was only high school after all, definitely one of the most bizarre periods in a person’s life. How anyone can come through that time well adjusted on any level is an absolute miracle. E.A. Bucchianeri
Mental toughness is a lifestyle. It’s something that you live every single day of your life. When I was growing up, I was a lazy kid. I was a lazy kid, and everybody goes, How did you get to where you’re at today? How did you get to where you’re running 200 miles at one time in 39 hours? Being so disciplined? David Goggins
As for the fact that Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle apeared to be going their different ways when they were usually inseparable, these things happened as people got older Ron and Hermione, Harry reflected sadly, were living proof. J.K. Rowling
My mother told me two things constantly. One was to be a lady and the other was to be independent, and the law was something most unusual for those times because for most girls growing up in the 40s, the most important degree was not your B.A. but your M.R.S. Ruth Bader Ginsburg
There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don’t lose yourself at happy hour, but don’t lose yourself on the corporate ladder, either. Shauna Niequist
Growing up, my dad was get a real job, don’t go pursuing your dreams, that’s how you become homeless. So, do I pick my family or do I pick my own happiness, and how much does my own happiness depend on my family? Jimmy O. Yang
You know, people ask me.They say Dan, three years later do you really want to be drawing cat whiskers on your face? but they don’t understand. The cat whiskers, they come from within. Dan Howell
I had a bad background just growing up as a child. Lil Durk
I am not collarbones or drunken letters never sent. I am not the way I leave or left or didn’t know how to handle anything, at any time, and I am not your fault. Charlotte Eriksson
I love to see a wood full of bluebells. Growing up in the Kent countryside, I have special memories of this brief annual spectacle. Gary Hume
Suddenly we’re not kids anymore, and it feels like it happened overnight, so fast I didn’t have time to notice, to let go of everything that used to matter so much, to see that the old wounds that once felt like gut level lacerations have faded to small white scars, mixed in among the stretch marks and sunspots and little divots where time has grazed against my body. I’ve put so much time and distance between myself and that lonely girl, and what does it matter? Here is a piece of my past, right in front of me, miles away from home. You can’t outrun yourself. Not your history, not your fears, not the parts of yourself you’re worried are wrong. Emily Henry
My father is a doctor and my mother ran the local pharmacy. Growing up, I saw firsthand the difference they made to our community. Rishi Sunak
