GALE: Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
Where Are They Now? (1968)
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Quotations about:
growing up
Note not all quotations have been tagged, so Search may find additional quotes on this topic.
CALVIN’S DAD: It’s funny … when I was a kid, I thought grown-ups never worried about anything. I trusted my parents to take care of everything, and it never occurred to me that they might not know how. I figured that once you grew up, you automatically knew what to do in any given scenario. I don’t think I would have been in such a hurry to reach adulthood if I’d know the whole thing was going to be ad-libbed.
Bill Watterson (b. 1958) American cartoonist
Calvin and Hobbes (1989-05-10)
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After their house has been burgled.
Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.
P. D. James (1920-2014) British mystery writer [Phyllis Dorothy James White]
Time To Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography, “Diary 1997” (1999)
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Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.
Khaled Hosseini (b. 1965) Afghan-American novelist, physician [ خالد حسینی]
The Kite Runner, ch. 3 [Rahim Khan] (2003)
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Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
Where Are They Now? [Gale] (1970)
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The line in the play -- originally broadcast on BBC Radio 3 -- was based on an answer Stoppard himself gave in an interview by Peter Evans, reprinted in David Bailey and Peter Evans, Goodbye Baby and Amen: A Saraband for the Sixties (1969):
It is a very immature thing to worry about one’s stinking youth, but I don’t care: I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
Helpless lust and unreasoning anxiety were just part of growing up.
When I was a child, I used to talk like a child, and think like a child, and argue like a child, but now I am a man, all childish ways are put behind me.
The Bible (The New Testament) (AD 1st - 2nd C) Christian sacred scripture
1 Corinthians 13:11 [JB (1966)]
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Alternate translations:
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
[KJV (1611)]
When I was a child, my speech, feelings, and thinking were all those of a child; now that I am an adult, I have no more use for childish ways.
[GNT (1976)]
When I was a child, I used to talk like a child, and see things as a child does, and think like a child; but now that I have become an adult, I have finished with all childish ways.
[NJB (1985)]
When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, reason like a child, think like a child. But now that I have become a man, I’ve put an end to childish things.
[CEB (2011)]
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.
[NRSV (2021 ed.)]
Every human being has paid the earth to grow up. Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up. Not really. They grow older. But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth.
Maya Angelou (1928-2014) American poet, memoirist, activist [b. Marguerite Ann Johnson]
“Maya Angelou, The Art of Fiction No. 119,” Interview with George Plimpton, The Paris Review (Fall 1990)
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Angelou used the core section (credit cards, parking spaces) a number of times in different interviews.
She was a grown up now, and she discovered that being a grown up was not quite what she had suspected it would be when she was a child. She had thought then that she would make a conscious decision one day to simply put her toys and games and little make-believes away. Now she discovered that was not what happened at all. Instead, she discovered, interest simply faded. It became less and less and less, until a dust of years drew over the bright pleasures of childhood, and they were forgotten.
HAL: Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know — so shall the world perceive —
That I have turn’d away my former self.William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet
Henry IV, Part 2, Act 5, sc. 5, l. 60ff (5.5.60-62) (c. 1598)
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