Diane Ackerman Quotes

The most sophisticated people I've ever known had just one thing in common: they were all in touch with their inner children.

Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.

I was way behind in my maturity. I was a 30-year-old acting like a 23-year-old. So when I was 21, I was probably acting like a 15-year-old.

We may outgrow the things of children, without acquiring sense and relish for those which become a man.

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.

I am convinced that most people do not grow up...We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.

For children love is a feeling; for adults, it is a decision. Children wait to learn if their love is true by seeing how long it lasts; adults make their love true by never wavering from their commitment.

You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.

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.

There is no child left within me, none whatsoever.

Some people seem as if they can never have been children, and others seem as if they could never be anything else.

When you start acting as a child, you grow up ahead of your movies.

Because when does anybody really grow up? I mean, I feel more grown up now, more in a place of solidity and peace. But I think a lot of people take on these roles as parents, or husband or wife, and immediately think 'That's it. I'm grown up now. Done.'

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.

I think I was probably, at one point, a very needy friend, and as you grow up and you have your own life and get married or not and have kids or not, and life goes, and it grows, and you grow with it, and - I think I'm a better friend now.

I feel that adolescence has served its purpose when a person arrives at adulthood with a strong sense of self-esteem, the ability to relate intimately, to communicate congruently, to take responsibility, and to take risks. The end of adolescence is the beginning of adulthood. What hasn't been finished then will have to be finished later.

The mature person meets the demands of life, while the immature person demands that life meet her demands.

I’ve aged, but I don’t think I’ve grown up.

I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.

A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish.

I was tired of playing the child and acting the way many of my friends did - the ones who are afraid that love is impossible without even knowing what love is. If I stayed like that, I would miss out on everything good that these few days with him might offer.

You're learning things. As you get older, you're experiencing them. You learn about what it means to be sacrificial. Then, you get married or something like that and you think, "Oh, wow! This is the real deal."

Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.

I think you can be mature without being grown-up. You can also be grown-up without being mentally mature. One of them is forced, while the other one is your choice.

I get a little scared of words like maturity.