Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

When I was thirty, and a long time after that, I felt like I had to leave home to do what I had to do. Now, it's just the opposite.

Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to.

Many of the things that I have written on have focused, at least a big part of the story, on adolescents. I think that in that period of life, so much happens, and it's the period of life where you're forming into an adult. In certain ways, you're already an adult and in certain ways you're still a kid.

After you've graduated, you're supposed to be an adult and go out into the world, and you're still not formed. It's an interesting... horrible, horrible time.

I see Igby as my first movie as an adult, and it's a big deal for me because I really, really like the film.

I'm a late developer. I only moved out of home when I was 30.

It changed me more than anything else. You don't want to get to that place where you're the adult and you're palpably in the next generation. And, this shoved me into that.

I really like coming-of-age dramas. It's probably the most intense period in anyone's life, those years before you become an adult. Dramatically, there's so much to explore there. And it's nice to be around young talent coming through.

When I write about my childhood I think, oh my God, how did I ever get from there to here? Not that any great thing has happened to me. But I felt so tiny, so lost.

I mean, 15 - that is such a pivotal time in a young man's life.

Adulthood is not a goal. It's not seen as a gift.

When you're young - I probably still am at 23, though I don't feel so young anymore - you have your ups and downs.

Growing up means leaving home and becoming a self supporting adult. I think this the hardest task any human being hast to face.

For the past couple of years I was doing the party thing - going out a lot. But now I've turned 25, I feel I'm an adult.

Once you move away from home, it's never quite the same again. You expect everything to be just as you left it, and it never is. It's almost the first step into adulthood, realising you've got to make your own way.

In my case, adulthood itself was not an advance, although it was a useful waymark.

I always think that I’m still this 13-year old boy that doesn’t really know how to be an adult, pretending to live my life, taking notes for when I’ll really have to do it.

I've grown up a lot. I've become more independent. I can talk to my parents more like friends. When I was going to college, I was still only an hour away from them.Now, after Idol and touring all over the place, I feel like I have become a lot more independent.

I've apparently been the victim of growing up, which apparently happens to all of us at one point or another. It's been going on for quite some time now, without me knowing it. I've found that growing up can mean a lot of things. For me, it doesn't mean I should become somebody completely new and stop loving the things I used to love. It means I've just added more things to my list.

Somewhere slightly before or after the close of our second decade, we reach a momentous milestone--childhood's end. We have left asafe place and can't go home again. We have moved into a world where life isn't fair, where life is rarely what it should be.

What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is like what happens to every individual when he passes from childhood to adolescence and from youth to manhood. He loses what had hitherto guided his life and lives without direction, not having found a new standard suitable to his age, and so he invents all sorts of occupations, cares, distractions, and stupefactions to divert his attention from the misery and senselessness of his life. Such a condition may last a long time.

Most of us won't see one another after graduation, and even if we do it will be different. We'll be different. We'll be adults--cured, tagged and labeled and paired and identified and placed neatly on our life path, perfectly round marbles set to roll down even, well-defined slopes.

When people say you're going to be so different at 22 or 23, when you're 16, you're like, I'm so not! And then you change drastically.

I felt for a really long time, "When I grow up I want to be an actor." And now I'm like, "Oh, this is it now. This is my life."

We live a protracted adolescence. At some point you must leave the party.