Not to grow up properly is to retain our 'caterpillar' quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our caterpillar nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists and quacks. The genius of the human child, mental caterpillar extraordinary, is for soaking up information and ideas, not for criticizing them. If critical faculties later grow it will be in spite of, not because of, the inclinations of childhood. The blotting paper of the child's brain is the unpromising seedbed, the base upon which later the sceptical attitude, like a struggling mustard plant, may possibly grow. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive scepticism of adult science.
Richard DawkinsTags: growing-up reason childhood adulthood maturity
Why can't a girl just want to know stuff and not do stuff?
Ellen MulhollandTags: growing-up girls coming-of-age teenagers teen-fiction
It was such a strange tormenting feeling when your daemon was pulling at the link between you; part physical pain deep in the chest, part intense sadness and love. Everyone tested it when they were growing up: seeing how far they could pull apart, coming back with intense relief.
Philip PullmanTags: growing-up souls experimentation
His sixth year, it seemed to him, had lasted a remarkably long time and there were points at which he frankly wondered whether he would ever turn seven. But now it was the night before his birthday, and barring some cosmic disaster, the advent of some unexpected black hole into which the earth might be sucked, with the attendant reversal or suspension of time, in very few hours he would be waking up to a world in which he was numbered among the seven-year-olds.
Alexander McCall SmithTags: growing-up
Magda looks at me as if I've gone mad. Or I've grown up. It's kind of the same thing.
Victoria SchwabTags: growing-up madness adulthood mad adults
Such is life. We grow up. Planets like Tiny get new moons. Moons like me get new planets.
John GreenTags: life inspirational friendship growing-up metaphor
Sometimes, when you were thinking about something, trying to understand it, it opened up in your head without you expecting it to, like it was a soft spongy light unfolding, and you understood, it made sense forever…
Roddy DoyleTags: growing-up childhood coming-of-age paddy-clarke roddy-doyle
The groove is so mysterious. We're born with it and we lose it and the world seems to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the world unifies around us, and both stupid and cool fall away.
I am grateful to those who are keepers of the groove. The babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all.
Tags: growing-up dance dancing confidence babies stupid adolescence demons cool self-love grandma lynda-barry groove one-hundred-demons
Part of growing up was learning not to be quite that honest - learning when it was better to lie, rather than to hurt someone with the truth.
Jodi PicoultTags: growing-up
The idea of not being a kid anymore terrifies me. I am an adult and I have been hurled out of the world of boys and girls into the fray of men and women, and expected to function as a grown-up when I never functioned very well as a kid.
Kelley YorkTags: growing-up children you-matter
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