Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

I don't yearn to be a child again.

My brother and I have a profound nostalgia for our youth, and I think people need to come to terms with things leaving and being gone.

It’s part of growing up, I suppose…you always have to leave something behind you.

Friends come and go, clothing is packed and unpacked, households are continually purged of unnecessary items, and as a result, not much sticks. it's hard at times but it makes a kid strongs in ways that most people can't understand. Teaches them that even though people are left behind, new ones will inevitably take their place; that every place has something good and bad to offer. It makes a kid grow up fast.

The end of anything is not fun because there's a nostalgia to it and everything else. Even the end of a bad relationship can feel so, so, so sad.

I long for the time of no more departures. It has something to do with age, probably.

I spend a lot of time thinking about this business of letting go - letting go of the children God gives to us for such a brief time before they go off on their own; letting go of old homes, old friends, old places and old dreams.

Good-byes are hard, but life is about changes.

If youth is a defect, it is one we outgrow too soon.

God gives us love. Something to love He leads us; but, when love is grown To ripeness that on which it throve Falls off, and love is left alone.

It was hard saying goodbye to that oblivion they call childhood.

It's definitely tough to get up and walk away from something you have been a part of for so long. But it's part of life.

Outgrowing things we love is never a pleasant process.

I'd love to go back to when we played as kids, but things change. And that's the way it is.

The jovial party broke up next morning. Breakings-up are capital things in our school-days, but in after life they are painful enough. Death, self-interest, and fortune's changes, are every day breaking up many a happy group, and scattering them far and wide; and the boys and girls never come back again.

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.

Your children will smash your understanding, knowledge and reality. You will be better off. Then they will leave. You'll miss them forever.

I wonder if, as you get older, you stop missing people so fiercely. Maybe growing up is just focusing on what you've got, instead of what you don't.

Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here--

A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants.

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

Something that required the best of you has ended. You will miss it.

I became an adult in an extreme way. I was recently sorting some old photographs and I found another.

I miss Denny Crane.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.