Judith Viorst Quotes

When you're 22 or 23, you think the world revolves around you, and I felt that way for a long time. But I just turned 30, and I love it! You realize, 'Whoa, baby, you ain't all that.' And you're not! You're just a woman out there doing something she loves.

I was in a bar and I said to a friend, 'You know, we've become those 40-year-old guys we used to look at and say, 'Isn't it sad?'

I used to love getting older.

I know I felt like I was ready to be an adult long before the rest of the world agreed. I'd already realized that a lot of grown-ups didn't know any more than I did, and some of them were even dumber than I was, and even the ones who were smarter weren't using their smarts for things I necessarily considered worthwhile.

You either mellow at 30, or your head explodes - take your choice.

I'm not changing to the point where suddenly I wear floor-length skirts and start playing the violin; I'm just growing up a little bit, I guess.

I have this sense that I didn't really start growing up until my twenties.

I still have mixed feelings about what growing up is - this thing that happens to everyone, so I've heard.

I'm one of those people that makes a better adult than I did a kid.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

The college years are when you sow all your wild oats and become a vampire. By 40, you've lived it up. At least, you hope.

There is that time right around 30 when you think, your twenties have gone by, and now you really are a grown up, and you do have to figure out what you're going to do.

College was the first time I felt I really had to choose who my friends were.

Having a collection of regrets when you hit your 40s is part of the deal.

I'll never forget when I was 12 years old. I couldn't wait until the day I was 16 and could drive a car. I thought that'd be the end of life's problems. I mean, you can drive! What is there left? And then I turned 16 and realized there were still problems.

But I had a strong reaction to my first three albums and I struggle with them now, as an adult. It's very much the same as looking at your teenage photos in high school.

There's all these idealistic things that TV and movies tell you that you should want to be. And when you're growing up, you find out what you really care about and what really matters.

When you're in your twenties, your brain hasn't even finished baking, and your hormones are giving you all kinds of direction of which ways to go.

I know it's hard to believe that I'm no longer the young 'Zuri' everyone has grown to love, which I truly appreciate, but like every young lady, I'm growing, I'm maturing and finding myself at 16 years old discovering the joys and pains of the world we live in.

I left home at 18, I thought I knew everything. It was fun for a while and then it wasn't fun any more.

Growing up is mostly the process of having to acknowledge the differences between your world and the whole world.

It's just this feeling of when you're a kid, you have these ideas about the world and about people in your life that don't always hold up as you get older and start to realise that things are more complex than you might've realised. That's always a big part of a coming-of-age story.

He was twenty. I remembered twenty. I'd known everything at twenty. It took me another year to realize I knew nothing. I was still hoping to learn something before I hit thirty, but I wasn't holding my breath.

Womanhood is something you don't consider until it hits you.

Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.