Judith Viorst Quotes

It was inconceivable to me as a child that I would be an adult. I mean, one assumed that it would happen, but obviously it didn't happen, or if it did, it happened when your back was turned, and then suddenly you were there. So I couldn't have thought about it much.

For many of us, the curtain had just come down on childhood.

Welcome to adulthood." Cob said. "Every child finds a day when the realize that adults can be weak and wrong just like everyone else. After that day, you are an adult. Like it or not.

Growing up is scary because it happens without you knowing it.

Even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up.

I think growing up is difficult and it's a process that I'm always interested in, with kids and adults, they are often on two different universes.

You think that adulthood will hit and you'll suddenly be more capable. But that doesn't happen, ever, does it?

I had a real strong fantasy life as a kid. But then you grow up and think about real jobs.

I'm not sure I'm adult yet.

Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.

As a child, I thought, 'Once I am a grown-up, there will be no more fear, no more worries,' and it turns out that's not true.

Almost all great writers have as their motif, more or less disguised, the passage from childhood to maturity, the clash between the thrill of expectation and the disillusioning knowledge of truth. 'Lost Illusion' is the undisclosed title of every novel.

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

I used to be a child. It came naturally to me. I was an adult for a time, too. That came less naturally.

Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.

There are children born to be children, and others who must mark time till they can take their natural places as adults.

When I was younger, I'd wanted someone to promise me that things would work out and nothing bad would ever happen again. But I understood now that that was a child's wish. No one could promise that. No one. The grown-ups could try, but they couldn't promise, not and mean it.

Sometimes I feel like the Tom Hanks character in Big. But my life is not a movie. I never have to go back to Coney Island to find the fortune-teller machine so I have to grow up again.

A boy has two jobs. One is just being a boy. The other is growing up to be a man.

We all, one day, realize that we’re not going to be kids forever and we’re going to grow up.

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

For me, the end of childhood came when the number of candles on my birthday cake no longer reflected my age, around 19 or 20. From then on, each candle came to represent an entire decade.

I became a man. Before that I was a little boy.

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

There's this assumption that all children have the luxury of a childhood where their innocence is always respected and their main occupation is pleasant play - at the age of 18 or 21, they are then thrust into the real world and shown its uglier side, but not before.