David Foster Wallace Quotes

There is a trade off - as you grow older you gain wisdom but you lose spontaneity.

When you have a kid, you have to be more mature.

Young alienation, disappointment and heartache is all a part of the first real growing up that we do.

However light-hearted you try to be about it, the loss of youth, and everything that goes with it, is quite a trauma.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

At a young age, I had to give up a lot of things, like being able to hang out with my friends.

Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.

I can sing very comfortably from my vantage point because a lot of the music was about a loss of innocence, there's innocence contained in you but there's also innocence in the process of being lost.

For most of us, when our 'dreams' - I use the word with reservations - came true, and marriage and motherhood became a reality, the romcoms, like horoscopes, swiftly lost their allure.

No generation has escaped it - one morning, your skill with the eight-track or the record player or the cotton gin suddenly ceases to impress. It's just one of those inevitable disappointments that come with growing up, like the realization that Santa doesn't exist or the way that music always takes a turn for the worse after you turn 30.

A lot of people don't want to grow up because it sucks.

I suppose you always look back at how easier things were being young. There's always a shame that you're not as naive as you were.

I regret losing my innocence so early.

I never wanted to grow up. It really is a trap.

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

I think that's the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your potential.

Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing.

But for me, to get the tattoo was part of moving into adulthood. Making a choice that is permanent and that I'll have to stick with.

I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.

Choice was dangerous: you had to forgo all other possibilities when you chose.

She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here--the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.

When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you.

Even in a fantasy realm, growing up is accomplished not without cost.

Ambition, the soldier's virtue, rather makes choice of loss, than gain which darkens him.