Adult Reality Quotes

These days it takes a child nearly 20 years to find out that Superman, Batman will not come to his or her rescue.

When I was little, I watched a lot of Disney movies - so I always imagined a big fairytale wedding as a kid. But when marriage became real, I felt an intimate wedding with close family and friends would be better.

Catcher in the Rye had a profound impact on me-the idea that we all have lots of dreams that are slowly being chipped away as we grow up.

We grew up during the 'peace and love' of the 1960s, only to discover that there are wars everywhere, and love and romance is a con.

According to a British poll, you've only got a one in five chance of achieving your childhood career ambition. Which probably explains why you don't run into that many cowboys, princesses, or space rangers.

I used to want to gamble, too, until I was 20 and could actually go to a casino. Then I wasn't so crazy about the attitude.

How little is the promise of the child fulfilled in the man.

It's like you said the other day," said Adam. "You grow up readin' about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus' when you think the world's full of amazin' things, they tell you it's really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nucular waste hangin' about for millions of years. 'Snot worth growin' up for, if you ask my opinion.

Basically, the last 30 minutes of 'Goodfellas,' that was my neighborhood... literally. There were people on my street who did nothing but just wash their car all day and wait for a package, and that's what I thought being an adult was.

Sometimes when you're young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you're living on someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been. Then we grow up and our hearts break into two.

Childhood is a promise that is never kept.

I went around in my teens and early 20s thinking that life was a con trick. I had managed to grow up believing in all sorts of romantic ideas about hard work and justice and truth, and it seemed the real world was much more complicated and shaded than I wanted to believe.

Here's what I think I'm having trouble with: this is what happiness is. When I was a kid, I thought I'd just get happier and happier as I got older, and have more things to be happy about. I based this theory on observation of select adults. The problem with my results is that I couldn't tell the difference then between happy and fake-happy. Now I know you pretend to be just frigging ecstatic over everything, maybe because you're so glad it's not worse.

When I was a little boy in short pants, I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I'm successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible.

When you're a kid, you imagine acting to be singing and fighting and like the movies. Then you become an actor and get the reality, which is often a lot more mundane. But sometimes it's really nice to run around with guns saving the world.

The disappointment of manhood succeeds the delusion of youth.

Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not.

When I was a kid, I would be watching TV shows like, you know, like 'Get Smart' and be like, 'That's what being an adult is.'

Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?

The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes - all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults.

You spend your childhood wanting to get out from your house and wanting to get away and out into the real world, and then as adults, we start to learn that things are not what we thought they were.

But adulthood," continued the barely twentysomething, "doesn't give you power over what matters most. It doesn't protect you from pain, loss, fate. That's part of being human.

I never set out to become 'famous.' I mean, when you're 14 you think 'I'm gonna become a writer and people will want my autograph and that'll be cool,' but you grow up and you learn that's just not how the world works. I resigned myself to the fact that I would probably never be published and if I did it probably wouldn't be a big deal.

When I was very young every grownup was a hero. It's been all downhill since then, and I have only two left.

I found I was having continually to please the sort of people I'd always hated when I was a child. This began to bring me back to reality.