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.
‘The Queen Is Dead’ is not merely the Smiths’ best album, but it is one of those timeless, perfect, inexhaustible artifacts that could only have been made by a gang of sullen, sun-deprived rock & roll boys fighting off adulthood tooth and nail.
I always find myself gravitating toward stories of transformation, and one of those periods is teenage life. When teenagers are figuring out who they are and have one foot in childhood and the other in adulthood – I think that’s a really mythic moment to tell stories about.
I think one of the defining moments of adulthood is the realization that nobody’s going to take care of you. That you have to do the heavy lifting while you’re here. And when you don’t, well, you suffer the consequences.
The ability and willingness to keep two opposing views in mind at the same time are hallmarks of adulthood.
When my dad left public life, I was 13 years old. I went through my teen years and into adulthood in relative anonymity. After my dad’s funeral, I was suddenly recognizable to people I passed on the street.
I never met anyone who didn’t have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?
Growing up in America, I experienced two puberties. The first opened me up to the possibilities of adulthood. The second reinforced that for someone like me – an immigrant, a minority, an Asian-American – there were limits.
Adapting to our Second Adulthood is not all about the money. It requires thinking about how to find a new locus of identity or how to adjust to a spouse who stops working and who may loll, enjoying coffee and reading the paper online while you’re still commuting.
A life-long blessing for children is to fill them with warm memories of times together. Happy memories become treasures in the heart to pull out on the tough days of adulthood.
Reading ‘IT’ again as an adult, you understand it from a different perspective. It is basically a love letter to childhood and talks about all of the treasures of that time, like imagination and belief, that are inevitably lost in adulthood.
There’s a tremendous sense of shame that people who are lonely feel. I say that as someone who felt ashamed of being lonely as a child and even at points during adulthood.
I grew up in a family of Republicans. And when I was 18 and registering to vote, my mom’s only instruction was ‘You just go in and pull the big Republican lever.’ That’s my welcome to adulthood. She’s like, ‘No, don’t even read it. Just pull the Republican lever.
Public schools were designed as the great equalizers of our society – the place where all children could have access to educational opportunities to make something of themselves in adulthood.
True adulthood occurs the moment we grasp that the people who raised us do not exist solely for our comfort and reassurance. From that point on, the steady stream of unconditional love and support we’ve expected from them all our lives has to flow both ways.
I was in high school, and when you get to be 14, 15, you start to feel a little more like your own person so that you can assert your adulthood a little bit.
Part of adulthood is searching for the people who understand you.
The male role models I had all seemed to have been in the military. My father served in the army. My uncle was in the Marine Corps. Both of my grandfathers served in WWII. There weren’t any career soldiers in my family, but when I was young it seemed like a way of arriving at adulthood.
The secret to adulthood is that 99% of the time, you actually know the right thing to do. Adults make it hard when they are deciding whether to do the right thing.
College and the responsibilities that came with it helped me transition from teenager to adulthood.
Dogs are a really amazing eye opener for us humans because their lives are compressed into such a short period, so we can see them go from puppyhood to adolescence to strong adulthood and then into their sunset years in 10 to 12 years. It really drives home the point of how finite all our lives are.
I was well into adulthood before I was prepared to acknowledge the simple fact that I am gay. It took years of struggle and growth for me to recognize that it’s just a fact of life, like having brown hair, and part of who I am.
I would go so far as to say I would not have the life that I have right now if it wasn’t for Gabe Liedman. He is the first person I met in my adulthood that I felt was truly delighted by me and understood me and also was curious about me.
I suppose a certain degree of adulthood has entered my life. Aiming for Broadway, I can’t think that way any more. Of course, Broadway will always be important. But it’s not the focus of everything that you do. You know, I’m very happy I was born when I was, so I got there in time. When it was time to get there.
My biggest financial fear is dying and not leaving enough to see my daughter through to adulthood and financial independence.
Once you’ve raised a child to adulthood, you can only be as demanding as your offspring allow.
A surprising number of scientific advances have been made and masterpieces of art created by individuals just on the threshold of adulthood.
Personality traits form at an early age and are fixed by early adulthood. Many important things about you change over the course of your lifetime, but your personality isn’t one of them.
I have been working with UNICEF Peru a lot. I am aiming to educate children, mostly because once adults reach adulthood, your views are shaped. With children, you can really teach them, you can open their eyes to what is really going on. The only way we can open their eyes and free them is by educating them.
In my teens, I eyed my adulthood with trepidation, as if stalked by a stranger – one who would seize control as if by demonic possession and regard my fledgling incarnation with contempt.
Probably the most important thing in terms of just trying to navigate and moving forward into adulthood is staying busy.
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.
I think anytime you’re writing to the middle grades, you’re writing to young readers who are trapped in a number of ways between two worlds: between childhood and adulthood, between their friends and their parents.
The powerlessness of the child is often forgotten. And after it comes the terrifying phase of moving into adulthood.
Adulthood is hell.
One of life’s fundamental truths states, ‘Ask and you shall receive.’ As kids we get used to asking for things, but somehow we lose this ability in adulthood. We come up with all sorts of excuses and reasons to avoid any possibility of criticism or rejection.
I was born in Mumbai, but I grew up in England, and then my adulthood has been in the States. I’m an American stuffed with an English person with an Indian person inside. I feel like those things kind of inform me in some way, which I think helps me as an actor.
Today, American women bear an average of 2.2 children that live to adulthood. Across most of Europe, women bear even fewer young.
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