Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Adult Quotes from famous authors such as Alison Gopnik, Mayim Bialik, Peter De Vries, Margaret Cho, Anderson Cooper. Let’s look at these pieces of wisdom. We definitely have something to learn from them!
1
As adults, when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness.
2
I’m generally intimidated by adults.
3
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
4
Grow up and let anyone try to contend with the adult you.
5
When I was younger, I talked to the adults around me that I respected most about how they got where they were, and none of them plotted a course they could have predicted, so it seemed a waste of time to plan too long-term. Since then, I’ve always gone on my instincts.
6
My writing process hasn’t changed – it’s is the same whether I’m working on a Y.A. novel or, as now, a new novel for adults. A lot of reading, a lot of research if the subject warrants it, a lot of sticky notes and scraps of paper – and get to work.
7
In the case of my book, I don’t think it’s really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he’s enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.
8
I’m a huge Beatles fan, but I’ve only really gotten into them as an adult.
9
I get a lot of letters. Not only from children but from adults, too. Almost every week, every month, clippings come in from some part of the world where ducks are crossing the street.
10
Adolescents are not monsters. They are just people trying to learn how to make it among the adults in the world, who are probably not so sure themselves.
11
After all, I have spent the better part of my adult life insisting that government be open… that government be accessible… and that government be held accountable to people who voted us into office.
12
There are thousands of ways to take action. For example, plant trees, pick up litter, join an organisation or movement that makes a difference and especially try to influence adults and put pressure on people in power.
13
I love writing for young adults because they are such a wonderful audience, they are good readers, and they care about the books they read.
14
I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part and discuss it only with consenting adults.
15
A lot of people think they need to give up nature to become adults but that’s not true. However, you have to be careful how you describe and define ‘nature.’
16
I was a little shocked at how adult some of the humor was, because I was never that into animation before and when I watched ‘Shrek’ I really laughed out loud.
17
The traits the word ‘childish’ addresses are seen so often in adults that we should abolish this age-discriminatory word when it comes to criticizing behavior associated with irresponsibility and irrational thinking.
18
As a grown adult, if you can’t look a woman or look a man in the eye and say, ‘I have serious feelings for you’ and instead you have to say, ‘Do you like me? Check yes or no,’ like we’re in grade school, that to me is a red flag of maturity as far as a relationship goes.
19
Being a teenager is chaotic because you’re kind of coming into your own, but you’re not an adult; you’re fighting with your parents over responsibilities and freedom.
20
I’ve loved science fiction ever since I was a little kid, mainly from looking at the covers of science-fiction magazines and books, and I’ve read quite extensively as an adult.
21
I think people with open minds will observe the way we do things and realize that our goal is to have successful, happy, productive adults, and they will take our ideas and implement them elsewhere for their own children.
22
As a kid I read Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and a few others. As an adult have admired Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and notebooks.
23
As adults, we do know more, but we don’t know enough. People can be very unthinkingly callous.
24
‘The Piano Lesson’ is very sophisticated, easily the most adult or complex material I’ve attempted. It’s the first film I’ve written that has a proper story, and it was a big struggle for me to write. It meant I had to admit the power of narrative.
25
I have a natural affinity with children and adults who can’t accept adult responsibility.
26
I grew up in a family that was multifaceted, sexually oriented, and pretty much open to everything. And because I was working, my friends were all adults. I had a tough time going to different schools because people knew me from films and I was the fat child who got beaten up every day.
27
I remember my parents were always around, and that was glorious, but as an adult and as an actor I look back now and see, no, they were at home for long stints because they were unemployed.
28
Why are young adults so self-centered and always seeking instant gratification? Because older adults, often in positions of power, paint them that way.
29
My mom was a terrible parent of young children. And thank God – I thank God every time I think of it – I was sent to my paternal grandmother. Ah, but my mother was a great parent of a young adult.
30
Forty is the line of demarcation that says you’re an adult now. You’re an adult, so don’t pretend you’re a kid anymore.
31
I’ve spent so much of my adult life in relationships that it’s actually quite pleasant to be alone at last. I turned thirty-six the other day, which staggers me when I think about it.
32
My mother told me, ‘Son, nobody else but God knows.’ And that’s what I’m about – reaching out to the people, crying with them, giving them hope. Visiting the hospital, visiting the kids with cancer, visiting the adults, and stuff like that. That’s what I do.
33
I’m for absolute autonomy of the individual, and an adult, competent woman has absolute autonomy. It’s her choice.
34
What libertarians assert is simply that differences among normal adults do not imply different fundamental rights.
35
Are kids smarter than adults? All evidence points to that being true.
36
I like to protect children. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with having adult programming for mature adults that can selectively decide what they want to watch and what they don’t want to watch.
37
For most of my adult life, I always had this pain in my gut, but because I had to survive, and I had to pay the rent, I needed the roof over our head and food for us to eat and some clothes.
38
There’s always been some concern that adult subject matter should be quarantined from a page that attracts children. Unlike late at night, when ‘South Park’ and ‘Colbert’ are on, impressionable minds are wide awake when the newspaper arrives.
39
I don’t want the child in me to die. Fortunately, I’m lucky enough that my profession allows me to pursue my boyhood fantasies even as an adult.
40
I think this movie, ‘Moneyball,’ symbolizes becoming a man for me, and I think my character becomes a man. It’s important to me: I’m becoming a man. I’m taking my life seriously. I’m taking my acting really seriously, and it’s important for me to play adults. It’s important for me to change and develop as I get older.
41
The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn’t have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself.
42
‘Marnie’ was ahead of its time. People didn’t talk about childhood and its effects on adult life. It was taboo to discuss sexuality and psychology and to put all that into a film was shocking.
43
It gets very tiring when you are filming and then taken to a room to do school work. I never get any rest time. It is either work or school. Once you are an adult, you get to take a nap in between shots.
44
The competition is so fierce once you become an adult. I’ll probably move on to something else.
45
I was brought up in the shadow of the Holocaust. My mother lost most of her family, and I didn’t realize how much the guilt of survivorship weighed on her until I was an adult.
46
My mom was a terrible parent of young children. And thank God – I thank God every time I think of it – I was sent to my paternal grandmother. Ah, but my mother was a great parent of a young adult.
47
If liberals no longer pride themselves on being the adults in the room, the bulwark against the whims of the mob, our national descent into chaos will be complete.
48
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.
49
Love is staying up all night with a sick child – or a healthy adult.
50
Kids love watching adults act like children. It’s that spirit they can relate to.
51
I grew up in a house full of women: my mother, grandmother, three sisters, and two female cats. And I still have the buzz of their conversations in my head. As an adult, I have more female friends than male ones: I just love the way that women talk.
52
Young readers are the most challenging, demanding, and rewarding of audiences. Adults often ask why I write for the younger set. My reply: ‘I can’t think of anyone I’d rather write for.’
53
The adult way to run a business is to run it more like a country. They have disputes, yet they’ve actually been able to have huge trade with each other. They’re not sending bombs at each other.
54
I made stupid decisions as a kid, or as a young adult, but I’m trying to be now, I’m trying to take this lemon and make lemonade.
55
Good jobs look a lot like kids playing and adults working.
56
If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat – in other words, turn you into an adult.
57
There’s only one test of a great children’s book, or a great children’s film, and that is this: If it can be read or viewed with pleasure by adults, then it has the chance to be a great children’s film, or a great children’s book.
58
Some people manage to make that transition from child actor to adult actor seamlessly. But I felt that if I spent my whole life on a film set without taking a few years to do something else, all I would ever know about was film sets.
59
Being an adult comes with a whole new set of issues.
60
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.
61
I think that inside every adult is the heart of a child. We just gradually convince ourselves that we have to act more like adults.
62
Using adult stem cells drawn from bone marrow and umbilical cord blood system cells, scientists have discovered new treatments for scores of diseases and conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, juvenile diabetes, and spinal cord injuries.
63
A child speaks more sense than an adult half of the time.
64
Aly and I went through just a long period of time where we just didn’t feel creative musically. And, you know, we went through the whole writer’s block thing, and we went through having two pretty successful records and figuring out how we want to transition as adults.
65
The Term Paper Artist’ represents two models of writing, one of the little boy bouncing his ball, generating stories for the sheer pleasure of it, and the besieged adult, writing to make a living, having to contend with a very competitive, very unreliable world in which public image counts.
66
Almost everything else I have done during my adult years has been affected to some extent by my name – by my father’s position, if you will. But in the air, I had no name; to the Federal Aviation Agency I was simply Comanche Nine-Nine POP. The quality of my landings, navigation and judgment were mine alone.
67
Now I don’t really write for adults or kids – I don’t write for kids, I write about them. I think you need to do that, otherwise you end up preaching down.
68
I think I was 13 years old when my father put in my hands ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.’ It was the first real adult book I ever read, and it opened a new world.
69
In 2003 Scotland had 36 new business registrations per 10,000 adults. It’s still the same.
70
The best mistake I ever made was believing that I was stupid. It was a childhood thing, but it played out big-time as an adult. It scorned me the rest of my life – in a good way.
71
The greatest service that can be offered to children who show personality traits or inclinations that might not be understood by the adults around them is to allow them to express their own unique humanity.
72
Technically, ‘Kukla, Fran and Ollie’ was a kids’ show, but adults watched almost religiously – and we’re talking adult adults, celebrated adults – including James Thurber, Orson Welles, John Steinbeck, Adlai E. Stevenson and lyricist Stephen Sondheim.
73
The more Mommy blogs going nuclear over playground etiquette I read and birthday parties of glazed adults munching cupcakes like demoralized zombies I attend, I realize this is what my friends who conceived before me meant by, ‘You just won’t care.’
74
I’ve known from long ago that the universe was calling me. If you were one of those annoying adults that said, ‘Oh, what are you gonna be when you grow up?’ I would say, ‘Astrophysicist.’ And then they’d walk away real quickly.
75
My dad used to sing in a quartet. He loved everything: adult contemporary, anything smooth. He’d listen to the quartets.
76
Kids are brought into show business because they are cute and see truth and they’re very bright. But there’s a sense of doing it because you want the adults to be approving of you. You want to make them happy.
77
I’m a bit more of a suspense reader on the adult side, but my favorites were the ones I grew up reading.
78
Libertarians argue that no normal adult has the right to impose choices on other normal adults, except in abnormal circumstances, such as when one person finds another unconscious and administers medical assistance or calls an ambulance.
79
I realized that everything I do is fantasy, whether it is an adult movie or a kids movie.
80
Permissiveness is the principle of treating children as if they were adults; and the tactic of making sure they never reach that stage.
81
A lot of adults don’t think it’s their place to interfere with kids. I interfere all the time.
82
I used to be an editor and I was editing young adult series. I didn’t really like the books that I was reading, so I decided that I would write a book about something I’d want to read if I was 16. It turned into a Cinderella story… I developed a proposal and the characters of ‘Gossip Girl’ for my job.
83
I enjoy receiving and giving realistic fiction, for both children and adults, with strong characters, beautiful language, and humane visions.
84
A feeling for equal rights for other human beings cannot exist in adults if a feeling for authority is not implanted in them during childhood. Otherwise, adults will never become mature enough to recognize the rights of others.
85
Teenagers did not have, before rock ‘n’ roll and rhythm-and-blues – they did not have any type of music they could call their own once they got over 4 or 5 years old until they were well into their 20’s and considered adults.
86
We want everybody to act like adults, quit playing games, realize that it’s not just my way or the highway.
87
The Trevor Project provides crisis-intervention and suicide-prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning teens and young adults. It’s truly a lifeline to so many young people who just need someone to listen to them.
88
For only as we ourselves, as adults, actually move and have our being in the state of love, can we be appropriate models and guides for our children. What we are teaches the child far more than what we say, so we must be what we want our children to become.
89
To be adult is to be alone.
90
The infant runs toward it with its eyes closed, the adult is stationary, the old man approaches it with his back turned.
91
Through their play Barbara imagined their lives as adults. They used the dolls to reflect the adult world around them. They would sit and carry on conversations, making the dolls real people.
92
The most dangerous thing about student riots is that adults take them seriously.
93
Children often have a much stronger concept of morality than adults.
94
I’m not that girl from Freaky Friday any more! I’m a real adult. In fact, I hate children! I hate them all!
95
When I wrote ‘Marley & Me,’ I had a clear audience in mind. And it did not include children. I wrote my book for adults and assumed only adults, and possibly teenagers, would be drawn to it.
96
I look back at my adolescence, and I’m shocked at the things I did that were my idea of adult behavior.
97
I keep thinking, we teach children to use language to solve their disputes. We teach them not to hit and fight and bite. Then look what adults do!
98
We have been deformed by educational and religious institutions that treat us as members of an audience instead of actors in a drama, so we become adults who treat democracy as a spectator sport.
99
If you have parents with a healthy relationship, you don’t learn that you don’t have to be married. I thought being a healthy adult meant you had to have a spouse. I didn’t know any different.
100
If an adult uses violence on a child, the child will naturally assume that he too, has the right to use it on one smaller or weaker.
101
I’m 48 years old, not a kid anymore by any definition, but here is a universal truth that every adult at some point will realize: We are all always 17 years old, waiting for our lives to begin.
102
I actually was rebelling as all young adults tend to do at or around the age of 19, to experiment with their lives and have fun.
103
Of the primary emotions, fear is the one that bears most directly on survival. Children show fear. Adults try not to, maybe because it’s shameful, or, in some circumstances, dangerous. The fear response is automatic, though, and your body runs through its reflexes whether you want it to or not.
104
So many times, these kids know more about the technology than their parents. And so many times, we’re putting kids in very adult situations and expecting them to behave like they’re 40 years old. Well, that’s just not going to happen.
105
But these days, I get a lot more attention and airplay from the Adult Contemporary and country radio stations, and I feel comfortable saying I’m a part of that.
106
My adult life, I grew up in Chicago. When I go back there, I always have fond memories.
107
I lived the baseball life as a kid, with my dad in it. And I lived the baseball life as an adult, because I was in it. When I retired, I wanted the opportunity to be a little bit more flexible and home-based for my kids.
108
A child wants things to be a certain way. When you get to be an adult, you just understand that some people are good, some are not, and you can’t be naive.
109
Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.
110
Without intervention today, the cost of care for adults with autism will be significantly greater and the burden will no longer lie with the parents, but on our entire society.
111
Adult fantasy gets a bad name. You think of Xena – Warrior Princess. If you don’t do it expensively, it becomes tacky and you end up just appealing to 45-year-old single men.
112
I have spent most of my adult life proving that I existed. A blog is an accessible way of doing this – there is a date and place in cyberspace that I existed a year ago, to the day, and the proof is still there.
113
Buffy’s very similar to me to me when I was growing up. A child in an adult world, sort of trapped between the two. Does Buffy go to the prom or does she save the world from demons?
114
I was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADD/ADHD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) as an adult, but I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have them. Back in the 1960s, when I was growing up, my symptoms didn’t have a name, and you didn’t go to the doctor to find out.
115
Aside from a brief stint as a writing tutor during graduate school, I have managed to avoid respectable employment all my adult life.
116
Time goes by so slowly when you’re a child, and then, as an adult, it goes by in the blink of an eye.
117
You’re an actor, are you? Well, all that means is: you are irresponsible, irrational, romantic, and incapable of handling an adult emotion or a universal concept without first reducing it to something personal, material, sensational – and probably sexual!
118
In the past, when venture-funded startups told their investors they’d found a profitable business model, the first thing VCs would do is to start looking for an ‘operating exec’ – usually an MBA who would act as the designated ‘adult’ and take over the transition from Search to Build.
119
And my mother caught wind of this. She never had really tried to guide my career or really had any say in my life as an adult, but this was the one time she said she would never speak to me again if I quit acting.
120
It wasn’t until I was an adult reader that I began to fathom the influence of fairy tales on writers I was in love with over the years, from Louisa May Alcott to Bernard Malamud to John Cheever to Anne Frank to Joy Williams.
121
Normally, adults process their waking experiences during sleep. Children cannot yet carry their waking experiences into sleep. Thus, in sleep, they settle into the general cosmic order without taking their physical experience into the cosmic order.
122
My world was completely different to other boys my age. When I was six I was earning money, and by 10 I was paying more tax than the parents of other pupils. I feel a lot older than my years. Because I was working with adults, I had to mature a lot quicker.
123
You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.
124
It’s been interesting how kids have had hardly any problems watching it, but adults have more trouble. This happened way back even with Jabberwocky and Time Bandits.
125
There’s a bit of hazing when it comes to the youth performers and a disbelief that you’re capable of handling dramatic or comedic material on an adult level.
126
I remember once, we got an interview, and he said, ‘Dad, these people are writing about me like I’m an adult. Don’t they know I’m a kid?’ I have never tried to encourage him to get a music image like other musicians have.
127
When you’re doing something you’re not used to, you kind of realize that you’re still a kid: even though the whole world around you sees you as an adult and you’re expected to act like an adult, you still haven’t actually grown up.
128
‘The Omen,’ ‘The Exorcist,’ those movies for me are the quintessential horror movies that still scare me as an adult.
129
Most people who came here came for economic reasons or sometimes for religious or political reasons. I didn’t have any of this. I came here, I liked it, I stayed. So I’m a pure American – even more than people who are born here – because I did it by choice as an adult.
130
They asked me what I thought about euthanasia. I said I’m more concerned about the adults.
131
I also found child’s play – stuff that was not considered serious, but goofy – was the stuff I liked to do, so I still do it as an adult.
132
Inside every adult male is a denied little boy.
133
The bond between a parent and child is the primary bond, the foundation for the rest of the child’s life. The presence or absence of this bond determines much about the child’s resiliency and what kind of adult they will grow up to be.
134
Children, I always think, are just putting on a performance of being naive and not understanding anything. I have worked with children in films, and they’re treated as adults and they just drop the pretense of being children.
135
How often does one get to have a 20-year hiatus of a character and then come back as an adult?
136
For me, I really love ‘Tim and Eric’ and ‘Dr. Steve Brule’ and a lot of the Adult Swim shows, so I like strange, weird, sometimes slightly upsetting humor.
137
One of the many interesting and surprising experiences of the beginner in child analysis is to find in even very young children a capacity for insight which is often far greater than that of adults.
138
It wasn’t my intention in going after this part but I suppose now I do. The adult roles are a lot meatier – you’re not always just the daughter or the girlfriend or whatever.
139
Children up to the age of seven are like sponges. They look up to adults and copy what they do. So I thought if I could create a positive role model – a superhero, if you like – who moves around and has a balanced lifestyle – then they would be motivated to move more.
140
Juvenile justice is probably the area that’s most ripe for reform, in the nice liberal sense of the word, simply because there’s no getting around the fact that a teenage brain is not an adult brain.
141
Why not write a book which is as sophisticated as a book for an adult, but is about the concerns that teenagers actually have?
142
Teenagers are very dark, I think. That’s all the goth and emo stuff. They’re experiencing a lot of stuff that adults experience, but in a much more raw way. It’s that extremity that I’m interested in, to be able to go down so far and come up so quickly.
143
I think younger readers connect so readily to animal characters because they share a certain vulnerability, particularly when it comes to adult humans, who can be a rather unpredictable lot.
144
In the area we live, there’s a large show of children who run from one house to another house to another house. That’s lovely because it means all the children play together, and all the adults get to sit around and have coffees and read the papers or go to the park.
145
For the sake of our children, let’s behave like civilized, law-abiding adults.
146
We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second.
147
I’m not sure I can write about America for the same reason I’m not sure I can write about adults – I have no critical distance on either place.
148
I was hanging out with no one under 21. I thought that if I really wanted to fit in I had to… show them that I was in a way just as adult as they were, ’cause I could hold my own just as well as they could, if not better.
149
Most child actors go through that. Unless you can transition into an adult star, your career is over.
150
I designed ‘Buffy’ to be an icon, to be an emotional experience, to be loved in a way that other shows can’t be loved. Because it’s about adolescence, which is the most important thing people go through in their development, becoming an adult.
151
I was a wrestler. I played football, lacrosse. After high school, I got into jujitsu. I boxed my whole adult life.
152
Acting is a masochistic form of exhibitionism. It is not quite the occupation of an adult.
153
I don’t have any regrets about not having kids. I’ve just never had those maternal feelings. I am a nurturer by nature, but I nurture adults: my friends, the people I work with. I don’t want to nurture children.
154
There wasn’t much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult, but I was always very interested in what motivates people, and in telling stories and building things.
155
Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don’t have answers. So I let the mystery settle into my music. I don’t deny anything, I don’t advocate anything, I just live with it.
156
Because I’m in an adult world and I’m really working, my age is just a number. It’s not really who I am.
157
What is an adult? A child blown up by age.
158
As every successful parent learns, one way to encourage good behavior, from room-cleaning to tooth-brushing, is to make it fun. Not surprisingly, the same principle applies to adults. Adults like to have fun, too.
159
I’m not sure I’m adult yet.
160
In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
161
Every time an adult is going to write something for a teenager and you don’t have, physically, a person who is that, you are always going to be a little off.
162
As children, as we learn what things are, we are slowly learning to dismiss them visually. As adults, entirely submerged in words and concepts, we spend almost all of our time thinking and worrying about the past and the future, hardly ever looking at or engaging with the world visually.
163
The traditional role of the Senate has been to be the adult in the room.
164
They asked me what I thought about euthanasia. I said I’m more concerned about the adults.
165
The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.
166
I love how much love there is in the world of young adult and children’s literature.
167
Back then, as a teenager, I kept thinking, why don’t the adults around here just say something? Say it so they know we don’t accept segregation? I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there’s no easy way to get it. You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, ‘This is not right.’
168
I spent the majority of my adult life in a business where the object is to make people believe that you believe what you say. I was good at that, right?
169
I picture Generation X as young adults living in a state of perpetual adolescence.
170
When I’m on an adult set and I’m in a scene, I am myself. I’m not acting. I am playing to the camera, definitely, but I am myself.
171
Although an increasing proportion of the Hispanic population is foreign-born – about half of adults in this group – English proficiency is and should remain a requirement for citizenship.
172
I don’t think too much about the audience when I’m writing… I’m aware that ‘Holes’ was read by kids as young as 8, up to adults.
173
If you were a kid actor, if you had any plans of being an actor as an adult, you were really barking up the wrong tree.
174
It is every parent’s nightmare when a child is in trouble with the law. As a parent, you can do your best to guide young people, but as adults, they make their own choices and live with the consequences of those decisions.
175
Kids can still call me Shaq, but adults should call me Dr. O’Neal.
176
To tell you the truth, I hadn’t seen any Pixar until I went to see ‘Wall-E,’ and I watched it and I was shocked to see how adult it was, with the setting in our lives, both present and future, and how they dealt with it… And then quite relieved to find that the one I was working on, ‘Up,’ how adult it was.
177
Successful creative adults seem to combine the wide-ranging exploration and openness we see in children with the focus and discipline we see in adults.
178
I have so little patience with the whole Y.A. book thing. As far as I’m concerned, you either read books for children or you read books for adults.
179
Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.
180
For me, choice is the most important thing because I’m going to be an adult actor pretty soon. So I’ve got to be choosing the right roles now so that by the time I get to that age there will be wide options available.
181
The book I always say that influenced me, subconsciously, because at the time I didn’t know I wanted to be a writer, was William Goldman’s ‘Marathon Man.’ That was the first adult thriller that I loved. I read it when I was 15 or so, when my father gave it to me.
182
When I was growing up, if there was a Young Adult section of my town’s library, I missed it. I wandered right from ‘The Babysitter’s Club’ over to Stephen King. His books were big and fat and they seemed important. I eventually worked my way through most of the shelf, but ‘It’ is the one that stuck with me.
183
Love between two adults is always conditional. You can fall out of love because you are able to fall in love.
184
I like getting to be in the adult world a little bit and then getting to be in the mom world and cook dinners. And, for me, that balance is what makes it nice.
185
When I started out in the eighties, the idea of creating serious comics for adults was pretty laughable to most folks, and for the longest time it was hard to even explain what alternative comics or graphic novels were. Nobody seemed to understand or care. Not so, any longer.
186
Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.
187
Photographic memory is often confused with another bizarre – but real – perceptual phenomenon called eidetic memory, which occurs in between 2 and 15 percent of children and very rarely in adults. An eidetic image is essentially a vivid afterimage that lingers in the mind’s eye for up to a few minutes before fading away.
188
I think you basically have to abandon the dreams of having any other adult activities in your life. You have to go to sleep whenever your child goes to sleep.
189
Why would any parent want their kid on their health-care plan when they are 26? Parents want their kids to grow up and take care of themselves. A 26-year-old is an adult.
190
A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.
191
My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.
192
Sometimes our childhood experiences are emotionally intense, which can create strong mental models. These experiences and our assumptions about them are then reinforced in our memory and can continue to drive our behavior as adults.
193
Once I got my driver’s license everybody treated me like I was an adult.
194
I avoid the young adult section altogether if possible, although it’s sometimes fun to catch a girl lying on the floor, reading ‘Gossip Girl.’
195
Much of my adult life has been spent fighting for equal opportunity, and the idea that I would support limiting opportunity for any segment of society, particularly women, is antithetical to who I am and what I have done.
196
I wanted to tell a dream-come-true story about going from a closeted gay kid who loved pop culture to an out adult man making pop culture. I went from being told when I was 21 that I should never go on TV because of my crossed eyes to winding up being a ‘Housewives’ whisperer and talk-show host.
197
I think Hallmark is doing this really exciting thing right now, where they buy a series of books, they’re books for young adults, or adolescents, and they’re really fun Agatha Christie-style mysteries. I actually signed on for three of them.
198
Kids like classic rock, and so do adults.
199
My husband and I met when I was a teenager, and I’ve been with him for more than half of my adult life.
200
We have magnificent brains, but we use a great deal of our brilliance to keep ourselves stuck and ignorant, to keep ourselves from not shining. We are so afraid of our beauty and radiance and brilliance because it scared the adults around us when we were children.
201
I always tell the adults at my dance school, ‘Men, you are going to have to do something that you are absolutely not used to: you have got to take command and be the boss.’ Because – and this is just an observation – women get their way.
202
Everyone says how Calvin and Hobbes is about a real kid, to me there’s nothing real about it; it’s an adult using a kid’s body as a mouthpiece.
203
As kids, we had no clue about the racial stuff that seemed to preoccupy adults. We just enjoyed our life as kids.
204
There’s the typical books, Moby Dick and, I guess in my adult life I began to read biographies more than fiction. I started to want to relate to other people’s lives, things that had really happened.
205
The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle – secular, humanist, or religious – says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not?
206
I harbored a lot of resentment as a teenager and as a young adult. I still have a problem with authority, I’m trying to listen!
207
Is adult entertainment killing our children? or is killing our children entertaining our adults?
208
The problem is not scientifically illiterate kids; it is scientifically illiterate adults. Kids are born curious about the natural world. They are always turning over rocks, jumping with two feet into mud puddles and playing with the tablecloth and fine china.
209
Thirty was so strange for me. I’ve really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.
210
What’s great about games in particular is that it’s a socially acceptable way for adults to imagine.
211
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that comic books appeal so strongly to children. Not that it negates any of their power for adults, but there is something about comics that makes them a perfect storytelling system for children.
212
In fact, I want to be a Transformer as an adult. I would transform into a Gulf Stream 500.
213
I’m carded for R-rated movies. And I get talked down to a lot. When I try to go rent a car or buy an airplane ticket or other stuff adults do, I get ‘Okaaaaaay, honey.’ I remember when I was 18, getting crayons in a restaurant.
214
I think modelling was like the university of life, really. You get to travel but you get thrown into this adult world, which is kind of quite scary.
215
When I was a child, I did always feel that people were hiding things, and that they weren’t expressing their true feelings. When adults are too complicated, and cover their emotions with layers of well-intentioned subterfuge, the child isn’t seeing reality clearly enough and gets upset.
216
I don’t wish I started later, but I was never a child star. I was in school every year and had normal friends and I loved it and here I am, so I can’t say that I wish I hadn’t done it. I used to say, ‘No, I didn’t miss any of my childhood,’ but it is a very adult place to be, a movie set. Like, it’s a little weird.
217
Well, I never got into the young adult headspace. With ‘Twilight,’ they are pretty adult themes, aside from maybe the first one, but even that. They’re very adult themes, actually, particularly as the characters age. I never wrote for young adults. I wrote for myself, as an audience.
218
One of the scary things is that, when you’re a kid, you look at your dad as the man who has no fear. When you’re an adult, you realize your father had fear, and that you have it, too.
219
I know it’s a rare privilege, but if one can really tackle something in adult life that means that much to you, then it’s more rewarding than anything I can imagine.
220
I had this rare privilege of being able to pursue in my adult life, what had been my childhood dream.
221
I have spent my tenure in office – and, in fact, my adult lifetime – fighting for things that I care deeply about. And as anyone who knows me will tell you, I do not back down from tough fights.
222
The worst thing about being the laureate has been the attitude of a tiny minority of adults who haven’t liked some of the things I’m supposed to have said and who have used it as an opportunity to be verbally abusive and nasty, but I haven’t let it rule my world!
223
Many filmmakers portray teenagers as immoral and ignorant, with pursuits that are pretty base… But I haven’t found that to be the case. I listen to kids. I respect them… Some of them are as bright as any of the adults I’ve met.
224
I am occasionally enraptured by Western landscape. But I don’t identify that state of mind as having to do with my own origins, having grown up in the West, although I certainly crisscrossed Nevada countless times growing up, and then as a young adult, in cars and on motorcycles.
225
Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want – and their kids pay for it.
226
Reforming public education, cutting property taxes, fixing adult and child protective services and funding our budget can all occur when Democrats and Republicans engage in consensus and cooperation – not cynicism and combat.
227
You must remember that anyone under 30 – especially a ballplayer – is an adolescent. I never got close to being an adult until I was 32. Even though I was married and had a son at 20, I was a kid at 32, living at home with my parents. Sure, I was a manager then. That doesn’t mean you’re grown up.
228
We want everybody to act like adults, quit playing games, realize that it’s not just my way or the highway.
229
I don’t think my dad really knew what to do with me, as a daughter. He treated me like a boy; my brother and I were treated the same. He didn’t do kid stuff. There were no kid’s menus; you weren’t allowed to order off the kid’s menu at dinner – we had to try something from the adult menu.
230
Naturally, I have compensated in my adult years by owning very large numbers of books.
231
I’ve had the same breasts for my entire adult life.
232
My step-mom would tell me that she would get complaints from adults that I stared too much at them.
233
Despite this lamentable lack of balance in our education I do not believe that either children or adults in my country are permeated by a widespread hostility to Germany.
234
Everyone has their dates. For me, it’s 1991. I can place every memory of my life either before or after this date. It’s the year I became an adult. My mother died, and I created my company shortly thereafter.
235
I love sport, I grew up playing sports, that’s all I did, and it is so invigorating now that I’m supposedly adult to learn something completely new, from the bottom up.
236
For healthy adult people, the really big thing we can foresee are ways of intervening in the ageing process, either by slowing or reversing it.
237
There were some super-lean years, yeah. I’m six feet four. And I entered into this period all of a sudden when I was too big to play a kid and I was too young to play an adult. Like, I couldn’t play the lawyer, but I couldn’t play the high school kid anymore.
238
As a rule, I try to avoid the French Quarter because of the crowds, especially Bourbon Street. But hey, some people love it. A great, wild, adult thing to see is the costume competition in front of the bar Oz on Bourbon early morning on Fat Tuesday.
239
I think what makes good children’s books is putting the same care and effort into it as if I was writing for adults. I don’t write anything – put anything in my books – that I’d be embarrassed to put in an adult book.
240
War is society’s dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up failures perpetrated by adults.
241
I didn’t do a movie until I was almost 30. I’m grateful for that because it gave me a chance to be an adult in the world and do work in the regional theater that very few people cared about. I loved it and I wanted to do that stuff.
242
When there’s an adult person who’s scaring you, you grow up pretty quickly.
243
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.
244
Children who assume adult responsibilities feel old when they’re young.
245
Soon after joining the Ministry of Health in Ethiopia, I was called upon as part of team to respond to a malaria outbreak. My team was dispatched to a village in southwestern Ethiopia, where I not only observed the malaria epidemic’s shocking effects on adults and children but also experienced it first-hand.
246
I’m a liberal where children are concerned, a libertarian where adults are concerned – and thinking very seriously about running for the House of Representatives, for whatever that’s worth.
247
I couldn’t wait to be an adult woman, and I’m glad I felt that way as a kid because, when I grew up, I realised I live in a world where the female form is really disrespected, and society is often trying to wrestle the female form into a shape that looks more like a young boy.
248
I played teen roles until high definition came out, and I could never understand it. I would go in for adult roles and be older than many of the people auditioning, but they’d cast the girl without a line on her face.
249
I had this rare privilege of being able to pursue in my adult life, what had been my childhood dream.
250
I try to sign for as many kids as possible. Kids come first, and I’ll always sign for a kid before an adult. It’s funny, because I was never big into autographs as a kid. The only player who I ever wanted an autograph from was Dave Winfield.
251
I am actually a bit chubby, and I eat everything. I eat in a way – if my parents fed me the way I choose to eat as an adult, they would’ve lost custody.
252
Freud has shown one thing very clearly: that we only forget our infancy by burying it in the unconscious; and that the problems of this difficult period find their solution under a disguised form in adult life.
253
I don’t think coolness used to be such a commodity among adults. And now it is.
254
I work, and then whenever I have any other time, I’m with my daughter, and then I go to sleep. I think you basically have to abandon the dreams of having any other adult activities in your life. You have to go to sleep whenever your child goes to sleep. That’s basically how we’re doing it.
255
The private sector can go forward, if it must, with destruction of embryos for questionable and ethically challenged science. But spend the people’s money on proven blood cord, bone marrow, germ cell, and adult cell research.
256
As kids, our experiences shape our opinions of ourselves and the world around us, and that’s who we become as adults.
257
For 24 years of my adult life, by choice I weighed well over 200 pounds. I say ‘by choice’ because I have never ‘accidentally’ eaten anything, so when I choose to eat too much, I have chosen to weigh too much.
258
Adults need to live in a society that is economically social, governmentally democratic, and culturally free.
259
When you get to be 23, 24 or 25, you start to freeze up and become an adult.
260
Women are constantly taught to think about what other people are thinking, from those ‘Jackie’ magazine quizzes – ‘What’s he thinking?’ – to being a grown adult.
261
Sixty-six percent is the literacy rate in the Arab world. We have 58 million illiterate among adults in our part of the world.
262
It’s been very funny to try to act like an adult. Even getting dressed. Every day, I’m like, ‘Should I wear a blazer and walk around with an umbrella? Do I carry a briefcase?’ Because I’m trying to be some image of the adults I saw on TV growing up.
263
On the sets, Bharathirajaa would treat me like an adult even though I was just 16. One day, he slapped me. I was taken aback. I cried and went back to school. Then, he called me and said, ‘You are like my daughter. Come back.’
264
I’ve always loved acting with adults versus like the whole High School feel.
265
Designer clothes worn by children are like snowsuits worn by adults. Few can carry it off successfully.
266
I called all adults by their first names, and my mum was just another adult. I was the firstborn of my generation in the family, but because I was so close to my parents in age, they treated me with a kind of adult respect. They talked to me as an equal.
267
My parents were very, very good about not separating us as kids from their adult friends. So on any given night, we’d have, like, this kind of freak show – artists and art dealers coming over. And these are the people I feel like I learned from.
268
For an adult, eating alone at McDonald’s is admitting a kind of defeat.
269
Dad was the only adult male I ever trusted.
270
To talk about adults without talking about their sex drives is like talking about a window without glass.
271
Research has shown that a barren environment is much more damaging to baby animals than it is to adult animals. It does not hurt the adult animals the same way it damages babies.
272
Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.
273
I have a cartoon I’m developing with Adult Swim called ‘Monster Town U.S.A.,’ so I’m busy doing that. Trying to do a coffee-table book of my photography that’s been requested of me a couple of times. I’m constantly busy.
274
Like, shooting with adults is great, but being with kids my own age, it’s different.
275
Cord blood stem cell units have been shown to be a suitable alternative to adult bone marrow for the treatment of many diseases, including sickle cell anemia.
276
In both children and adults, there can be a hard-to-deny link between a robust sense of hope and either work productivity or academic achievement.
277
The hardest thing in acting is going from child actor to adult actor. It’s taken me a long time.
278
Adults are obsolete children.
279
I think I get some of my love of adult books that can be fun from Douglas Adams.
280
They were using the dolls to project their dreams of their own futures as adult women.
281
I had 500 kids at camp this past summer for example. We do nine weeks for kids and nine days for grown ups every summer. The adult camp is a lot of fun.
282
I am sure you will agree that all children deserve time, attention, and love from the adults in their lives. These basic qualities are so much more valuable than the always-changing material and social concerns that can seem so important to young people.
283
My mother and I always had full adult communication.
284
This is what happens when you are on the wrong side of 40. Young adults, who could be your children, are now working with you. I was playing their parents or mentor. I started to think: Oh, I am not part of that group any more.
285
Centuries ago it may have been difficult for pregnant women and their children to get proper nourishment, probably leading to smaller – and therefore shorter-lived – adults.
286
I am still bowled over by this great young adult novel by David Levithan called ‘Every Day,’ which is about a character with no gender or body who wakes up every day in the body of a different person. It’s a really impressive execution of a really great premise.
287
Inside every adult there’s still a child that lingers. We’re happiness merchants – giving people the opportunity to dream like children.
288
The adult is the enemy of the child because of the awful process of civilizing this thing that, when it is born, is an animal with no manners, no moral sense at all.
289
I see my upbringing as a great success story. By disciplining me, my parents inculcated self-discipline. And by restricting my choices as a child, they gave me so many choices in my life as an adult. Because of what they did then, I get to do the work I love now.
290
When you’re an adult, things mellow out. I think when you’re a teenager and you are sad and the world is ending, everything is about that one sadness.
291
I became an adult in an extreme way. I was recently sorting some old photographs and I found another.
292
My desire to curtail undue freedom of speech extends only to such public areas as restaurants, airports, streets, hotel lobbies, parks, and department stores. Verbal exchanges between consenting adults in private are as of little interest to me as they probably are to them.
293
Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
294
But as an adult working in the fashion industry, I struggle with materialism. And I’m one of the least materialistic people that exist, because material possessions don’t mean much to me. They’re beautiful, I enjoy them, they can enhance your life to a certain degree, but they’re ultimately not important.
295
Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.
296
At this stage I am not involved with young adults as closely as many other writers. My children are grown up and my grandchildren are still quite young.
297
An early editor characterized my books as ‘romantic comedy for intelligent adults.’ I think people see them as funny but kind. I don’t set out to write either funny or kind, but it’s a voice they like, quirky like me… And you know, people like happy endings.
298
I hear many people talking as if the terms liberal, progressive and leftist refer to different factions, and that one might partner with one and reject another. I have been on the left my entire adult life. I never have seen clean distinctions drawn between these things.
299
Children who are healthy – and have adequate nutrition – are much more likely to attend school. People who finish school and do well have higher earning potential in their adult lives.
300
If adults are not enjoying something they’re doing in their leisure time, they should stop doing it.
301
I’m more experienced, I’ve won titles at Juventus. I’ve been playing with big players like when I started at Man United, of course. I came back. I’ve not come back from the Academy now; I went to play somewhere else, and I came back, I would say, as a person, as an adult.
302
I thought of myself as kind of an anarchist all my whole adult life, from the days when I was 15 or 16.
303
Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers.
304
Just because you liked something as a youngster doesn’t mean you have to like it as an adult. You can change your taste a little bit on the sweets and things like that.
305
Look, just go sit at the card table with the rest of the kids and let the adults run the country.
306
Maybe it was the home tutoring, or the late start to formal schooling, or an overly cautious and protective upbringing, but in any case, I never became a talkative person. As an adult, I am not always comfortable in social gatherings with small talk. I must have inherited my father’s gentle nature.
307
As a free-speech advocate, I believe that adults should have access to any material they want. As a parent, and a community member, I think people should be able to protect their homes from imagery – much of it violent – that is, I feel, a form of child abuse when adult society inflicts it upon children.
308
It would be better, in a way, if any adults present were completely uneducated. There is nothing children like more than passing on information they have just discovered to people who may not already have it – an elderly grandmother, for instance.
309
Adults have pretty much made up their minds – they like you to the extent that you confirm what they already believe.
310
Acting is playing pretend, playing a children’s game at an adult level, but with children’s rules. It’s fun to play bad guys. I’ve never been in a fight in my life, so it’s fun to play something that’s different.
311
You like to think with young adults that with your books, a little part of it has reached them and will stay with them. It is great to be part of an eight-year-old’s world.
312
I have serious adult acne, am almost legally blind and have to work at controlling my weight.
313
One of the things that I really like about young adult fiction is that you can explore the relationships between teens and their parents. I definitely think that teens are a product of their parents. You either end up just like them or you consciously make the decision to be unlike them.
314
Growing up, I was a kid pretending to be an adult.
315
Every adult, whether he is a follower or a leader, a member of a mass or of an elite, was once a child. He was once small. A sense of smallness forms a substratum in his mind, ineradicably. His triumphs will be measured against this smallness; his defeats will substantiate it.
316
I started running away when I was five years old. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized what I really wanted was somebody to come after me when I was running away.
317
And we lost a lot because of that, and I think this is future gymnastics to separate ages. Because kids can do it more than adult. A woman and adult woman can show more than the small kids.
318
As adults, we’ve seen so much before that we often turn the pages of a picture book without really looking. Young children tend to look more carefully.
319
When I first saw a picture of the crucifixion, I lost respect for my parents. I suddenly realised that this is what the adult world is like – full of cruelty and hypocrisy.
320
You know, children philosophize more than adults – and they are critical of adults.
321
I’d never been religious, but I’d always obeyed my elders. My decision to become an omnivore was fraught, not because it was a religious transgression but because it was my first act of self-assertion as a young adult.
322
What we believe at Quantic Dream is that there is a space for adult games: meaningful experiences for a mature audience.
323
Adult Swim’s philosophy is, ‘Put it on the air and if it works, great. If it doesn’t, take it down and try again.’ It’s a refreshing way to do TV, I think.
324
I never was really into comics as a child, and I think if you miss the boat when you’re a kid, you don’t necessarily pick up on it when you’re an adult.
325
Although I sometimes enjoy writing from an adult’s perspective, I feel dedicated to the coming of age story – that part of a young person’s life where he must make a decision that will change his life forever. I still remember what it’s like to be twelve years old.
326
It’s been very funny to try to act like an adult. Even getting dressed. Every day, I’m like, ‘Should I wear a blazer and walk around with an umbrella? Do I carry a briefcase?’ Because I’m trying to be some image of the adults I saw on TV growing up.
327
To be honest, I owned one suit before I filmed ‘Mad Men’ – the one suit that you have to have as an adult. Outside of that, I never really felt comfortable in a suit.
328
If you want your kids to listen to you, don’t yell at them. Whisper. Make them lean in. My kids taught me that. And I do it with adults now.
329
One of the things that defines YA is a really strong narrative. Adults love YA because, at the end of the day, they’re good stories and page-turners. The other element is emotion. The teen years are a very emotional and intense time, and I think it’s a time we that we can all relate to and remember.
330
Before people break the law, they need strong families – adult authority figures and the love of the family. When they step over the line, I’m a Tory. I believe in tough responses, in the law coming down on people like a ton of bricks.
331
Every kid goes through puberty, wondering what to do about girls and struggling with homework, and every adult has been through that.
332
I drive a car, like an adult. Not brilliantly. I’m not great.
333
As a kid, I liked the ‘Halloween’ movies and ‘Nightmare On Elm Street’ and all that kind of stuff. But as an adult, I really don’t watch much horror, to be honest.
334
So much of young adult literature has turned dark, almost pathological. It’s almost as if there is a race to see who can be the most dysfunctional.
335
Universities used to prepare young adults for the real world. I dare say the graduates today go in without a clue and graduate without a clue. It’s time to acknowledge the college degree is not worth what it was in the past. Times are changing, and so is the way we prepare our youth to survive in a competitive world.
336
You have to love your country like an adult loves somebody, not like a child loves its mommy. And right-wing Republicans tend to love America like a child loves its mommy, where everything Mommy does is okay. But adult love means you’re not in denial, and you want the loved one to be the best they can be.
337
If the government decides to put your life under a microscope, do you think it won’t find something? I suspect there’s not an adult in the country who would walk away totally unscathed if every aspect of his or her life were investigated the way Stewart’s ImClone trading was.
338
Divorce is hard enough when you’re an adult – never mind when you’re a child. That was probably when my shyness started, when I was at my shyest.
339
Black America knows better than anyone else the high price children pay for the sexual agendas of adults.
340
We’re adults. We’re the ones who should teach the kids what’s good to eat. I don’t think the government should ever regulate what we eat at home, but we’re feeding them in school with tax dollars. Quite frankly, if my tax dollars are being spent to feed kids, I’d rather feed them better food.
341
As a children’s author, reviewers are generally very nice to you. I only ever wrote one adult book and received such a kicking for it that I was in trauma for the next six months.
342
I had lived all of my youthful dreams, but I couldn’t think of many adult ones. I finally realized that we don’t have many dreams for adults because, historically, people have always died much younger than they do today.
343
The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.
344
It changed me more than anything else. You don’t want to get to that place where you’re the adult and you’re palpably in the next generation. And, this shoved me into that.
345
One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.
346
A boy becomes an adult three years before his parents think he does, and about two years after he thinks he does.
347
Divorce is hard enough when you’re an adult – never mind when you’re a child. That was probably when my shyness started, when I was at my shyest.
348
Fettucini alfredo is macaroni and cheese for adults.
349
‘Harry Potter’ achieved a very special act of actual magic: it made it completely acceptable for an adult to carry around, read and enjoy a children’s book.
350
I’m having the same problems today that I had when I first started, saying that outrageous adult animation works.
351
The great advantage of having a bear as a central character is that he can combine the innocence of a child with the sophistication of an adult.
352
To be adult is to be alone.
353
It’s such a thrill when an adult comes up to me and says, ‘I read your book as a child and really loved it.’ That’s a tremendous compliment.
354
I feel like in America, we don’t have a kid problem. You think about all these issues that these kids are dealing with, we have an adult problem. We have adults that do not place the priority on our kids to get a valuable education.
355
We’ve all seen the mom who devotes all her time and attention to her child and is so hungry for adult interaction that as soon as she’s around another adult, she’s not paying attention anymore.
356
I have stepped off the relationship scene to come to terms with myself. I have spent most of my adult life being ‘someone’s girlfriend’, and now I am happy being single.
357
I was incredibly lucky that my first book found a large and loyal readership. It changed my life – from being a very withdrawn adult to living in Paris as a full-time writer. It has also given me enormous confidence.
358
I do like a lot of things that a lot of adults would scoff at. ‘SpongeBob SquarePants,’ ‘Looney Tunes.’
359
The weird thing is, if I’d made ‘The Incredibles,’ shot-for-shot – exactly the same script, same timing, same shots – in live action, it would be perceived very differently, and somehow more adult than me doing it in animation. I find that fascinating and frustrating.
360
Often, I think bullying – especially in its adult, verbal forms – is the sort of thing you don’t realize till the end of the day, and it’s a horrible feeling to realize something wasn’t just a bland statement but was actually cruel. But then, we’re all capable of things that are breathtakingly cruel.
361
I was a ravenous child. I’m a ravenous adult. I love to eat.
362
When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults.
363
The average adult laughs 15 times a day; the average child, more than 400 times.
364
I think there has been this increasing misperception that kids will not respond to something because it’s also for adults. I think that often that tends to get underestimated.
365
Most adults I know start their Internet session at Google, and most kids I know start their Internet session at either Facebook or MySpace.
366
I’m rather pleased with the new manuals. I see Inform now as a gauche young adult, having got past the stage of growing out of his shoes every few months.
367
For a long time I felt like I was fighting my age, like I was constantly trying to prove to people that I was a savvy peer, and I felt them viewing me as a kid. I was a cocky kid, and I felt like I was an adult at, like, 9, you know? I think that’s because my parents always treated me as an adult.
368
Down the road a bit, I would like to write a couple of stand-alone adult novels, especially in the horror genre. I’ve got lots of things up my sleeve.
369
I think I am an adult.
370
I was, like, forty at birth. When I wasn’t even a year old, I spoke, I was potty trained, I walked and talked. That was it. Then I started school and drove everybody crazy because they realized I had popped out as an adult. I had adult questions and wanted adult answers.
371
Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don’t have answers. So I let the mystery settle into my music. I don’t deny anything, I don’t advocate anything, I just live with it.
372
To try and raise a budget for a film that is strictly for adults and both strong and graphic in content is not easy, especially when there is pressure to spend serious money on good special effects.
373
My six handbooks to Jewish life and lifecycle events mostly followed the trajectory of my adult Jewish life.
374
‘Harry Potter’ opened so many doors for young adult literature. It really did convince the publishing industry that writing for children was a viable enterprise. And it also convinced a lot of people that kids will read if we give them books that they care about and love.
375
I love the pictures of Old Hollywood, seeing the directors dressed in suits and ties. Even the grips would be wearing ties. But the biggest thing is when I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to be an adult, and I think what happens with most guys is that no one wants to be an adult anymore. So they’re dressing like kids.
376
To date, embryonic stem cell research has not produced a single medical treatment, where ethical, adult stem cell research has produced some 67 medical miracles.
377
I don’t read young adult or children’s books, now that my grandchildren are beyond the age of my reading to them. I read reviews, and so I’m aware of what’s out there. But I tend not to read the books.
378
My dad has sometimes felt that I grew up a little lacking in sufficient eccentricity – in the sense that I’m willing to live as an adult in a house with walls that are parallel to each other, that sort of thing.
379
I think that children that are acting are always pretty savvy anyway because you’re conducting yourself around adults a lot of the time, aren’t you? But there is this worry now that children just want to be famous.
380
Kids enjoy laughing and are seldom bored when they find something funny. They also ask questions, often to adults, because they understand that the more words they can comprehend about a funny story or a joke, the more they’ll enjoy it.
381
As far I’m concerned, being an adult is way more fun than being a kid. But then I was a kid who wanted to be an adult. I’d watch shows like ‘Bewitched’ and see Darren come home and mix a martini and I’d go, ‘That looks awesome! I want to do that!’
382
Writing for adults often means just increasing the swearing – but find an alternative to swearing and you’ve probably got a better line.
383
Kids and adults have sex for many, many reasons… Put out a question box.
384
I think some of my best theatre training has been in the Marine Corps. Not only meeting a bunch of characters, but growing up. You’re in really adult situations at a young age, as far as being in charge of people.
385
My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents… They treated us like adults.
386
There’s a sort of sibling moratorium when you’re establishing yourself as an adult. So much of your energy has to be focused on other things like work and kids. But when people become more settled, siblings tend to regroup because now you’re building a new extended family.
387
It was my first straight dramatic role, and the most adult, intelligent one I have ever played.
388
You have to be an adult; there is no sitting around and feeling sorry for yourself.
389
Guardians are necessary for children and abnormal adults, because they cannot make responsible choices for themselves.
390
I think I knew acting was what I wanted to do. But I was from this small town and there was no place for an adult to recognise it.
391
Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.
392
Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts, and they should therefore be accorded the same respect.
393
If you set as your goal to roll back the size of government, you have an obligation to answer the tough questions and show real courage, not just appeal to ideology. Treat the voters like adults.
394
I think my primary audience is in some sense an adult audience, because I think that will then have a knock-on effect for children.
395
I wrote eight full-length adult novels in my twenties. None of them were published.
396
I grew up in an apolitical household. I never left the country. When I became an adult, I started traveling and became interested in politics, and I probably talked about things in a silly, ignorant way.
397
‘Good Times’ is a story about the loss of innocence, how adults are responsible for their actions but children aren’t.
398
‘The Voice’ has lots of singers who fit the ‘Idol’ mold of young, innocent ingenues with psycho stage moms. But it also has long-suffering adult pros, with a whiff of thirtysomething despair in their voices. That adds an edge of realness.
399
There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.
400
Kids are absolutely starved for positive adult contact.
401
One of my favorite things about ‘Spring Awakening’ is that it is enjoyable and important for both kids and adults to see.
402
No one tells you that when you get older sometimes you never escape the bullying. I had no idea people could be as mean as they are when you’re an adult.
403
At the age of 16 I was already dreaming of having a baby because I felt myself to be an adult, but my mum forbid it. Right now, I feel like a teenager and I want to have fun for one or two more years before starting a family.
404
Crimes against children are the most heinous crime. That, for me, would be a reason for capital punishment because children are innocent and need the guidance of an adult society.
405
The most important thing for me is the thing I strive for. But I also hope when I play my songs for people – adult, children, mostly children – that they feel mighty, they feel noble, they feel like warriors. And they feel like they can do anything in the world because that’s how I feel.
406
You’ve got to be vulnerable when you’re talking to kids. There’s nothing worse than some adult standing up there just talking down to some kid. You can’t work that way.
407
Success is to bring into existence, in adult terms, your childhood dreams.
408
I never had teenage years. I guess because I was seen to be more adult than anybody around me.
409
Growing up I played in garage bands and cover bands with my older brother, and he got us a gig opening up for some hippie jam band. I was 15. I felt like such an adult!
410
Whenever I hear someone describe something as a ‘kids movie’ or a ‘family movie,’ it immediately has a negative connotation in my mind because I think, ‘Well, as an adult, I wouldn’t go see it by myself, because it’s purely for children and it holds nothing for me and it’s simplistic and it’s kind of easy.’
411
A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world.
412
To be more childlike, you don’t have to give up being an adult. The fully integrated person is capable of being both an adult and a child simultaneously. Recapture the childlike feelings of wide-eyed excitement, spontaneous appreciation, cutting loose, and being full of awe and wonder at this magnificent universe.
413
Children have a right to some stability and constancy from the adults in their lives.
414
Mainly as sort of blueprints for dealing with most of the adults in their lives, to some extent with their fellows. It is this notion of aiming high and there’s always hope, aim low and you might as well stop now.
415
You can control and censor a child’s reading, but you can’t control her interpretations; no one can guess how a message that to adults seems banal or ridiculous or outmoded will alter itself and evolve inside the darkness of a child’s heart.
416
Back then, as a teenager, I kept thinking, why don’t the adults around here just say something? Say it so they know we don’t accept segregation? I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there’s no easy way to get it. You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, ‘This is not right.’
417
If ever there was a holiday that deserves to be commercialized, it’s Halloween. We haven’t taken it away from kids. We’ve just expanded it so that the kid in adults can enjoy it, too.
418
My parents called me their wise little baby. I was mature when I was 4 or 5. My brother and sister were older, so I was raised by four adults.
419
I got so much out of ‘The To-Do List.’ This is a joke that I say about myself sometimes, in terms of my film career: I feel like I’m always playing the kid in serious adult movies. So, for me, it was so wonderful to suddenly be working with other people my age who were doing this on film.
420
If you’re under 26, you can stay on your parents’ plan. You can go back to school or get extra training without fear of a health catastrophe bankrupting your family. Over three million previously uninsured young adults are now on their parents’ plans.
421
I don’t want to make movies for kids, and I don’t want to make movies for adults either.
422
You can rebel against everything adults say. When I want to find out what the new music is, I find out what parents hate.
423
Kids are smart: don’t underestimate their bull detector. Contemporary kids have access to a lot of information, so don’t even try to fool them. I have never been more nervous about my research than when writing for young adults because they pick up every single error.
424
Children are not only innocent and curious but also optimistic and joyful and essentially happy. They are, in short, everything adults wish they could be.
425
I come from a part of Nigeria where a lot of value is placed on implicit communication. The ‘well brought up’ child is the one who can pick up nonverbal cues from adults and interpret them correctly.
426
On the whole, I prefer Christmas as an adult than I did as a child.
427
As a child. I grew up on a small farm, so I did a lot of drawings of animals, chickens and people. At the bottom of every page, I’d put a strange scribble. I was emulating adult handwriting, though I didn’t actually know how to write.
428
I said I wanted to strap guns on an El Camino. When I brought it up at a meeting, they said great. I realized there’s no adult in the room.
429
We’re all family at the end of the day – connected to other members of our family as adults or children.
430
My hope was that organizations would start including this range of skills in their training programs – in other words, offer an adult education in social and emotional intelligence.
431
Do you realize that if we could increase just by 50 percent the number of adults who have a college degree, it would add $5 billion to the economy and it would result in a net income to the state of Arkansas of $340 million a year?
432
I’m thought of as a celebrity. Everything I’ve ever done… has been for children. As long as I was working constantly, that was fine, because, although I don’t have any children, I do relate better to them than adults.
433
I think the value in books like mine, and a great number by other talented writers, is in the ability to bring dark subjects into the open where they are not so dark, where they can be talked about and considered by teens and adults alike.
434
The truth is that we were born to have it all. And part of our handicap as adults is that we no longer understand our potential.
435
Kids should feel afraid of ‘Doctor Who.’ All the adults I’ve talked to remember fondly being afraid when they were kids. That’s part of the reason they remember it and love it. And if you’re afraid in a controlled way, you sort of appreciate fear in some respect.
436
I love children. I’d prefer to be around children much more than adults, actually. And I like animals, too. I’m just really into beings who are at ease with themselves.
437
I was a very, very old child. Sometimes you meet a child who seems more like an adult. I think I was that type of child because I had a nearly fatal kidney disease when I was 9 years old.
438
People always tell me, ‘Don’t work so much’, but I can’t help it. I feel like all the things I’ve done are important to get to this adult stage and now I’m getting all these adult offers, so it’s working.
439
Whether people choose to have same sex relationships or relationships outside the marriage – whatever happens between two consenting adults should be purely their business, not the state’s or the society’s.
440
I’m not concerned with people seeing me in a certain way. Some people see me as a kid, some people see me as an adult. But I’m seriously not going to complain how anybody sees me, as long as they see me.
441
Everybody struggles with being an oddball. It’s tough trying to fit in when you’re a kid; then you become an adult and you think, ‘I’m just going to be myself and either they accept it or they don’t.’ But you know what? I like me, and that’s the most important thing.
442
My philosophy is I’m raising future adults, not children.
443
In a culture defined by shades of gray, I think the absolute black and white choices in dark young adult novels are incredibly satisfying for readers.
444
You cannot hold a child accountable to the same standards that you hold an adult accountable to.
445
Can we really believe that we are living a good life, an ethically decent life if we don’t do anything serious to help reduce poverty around the world and help save the lives of children or adults who are likely to die if we don’t increase the amount of aid we are giving.
446
I’m a guy who likes to watch something cool, creepy and suspenseful and there is no show to watch as an adult that would scare me at for even four seconds.
447
Kids are born into the situation they’re born into, and obviously, they have no control over that. And we, as adults, it’s up to us to take care of kids – that’s part of your moral responsibility. I always tell people, ‘There’s two groups we should take care of – old people and young people.’
448
It’s kind of like family. I can’t say that we go out to lunch and to the movies every day with each other. Everyone’s fully grown adult women with lives.
449
Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation.
450
I actually started an adult book, worked on it for about two years, and then decided it just wasn’t coming together for me, and thought I’ll go back to children’s books, and almost immediately I started ‘Holes,’ and it just seemed to take off on me.
451
I’d never been religious, but I’d always obeyed my elders. My decision to become an omnivore was fraught, not because it was a religious transgression but because it was my first act of self-assertion as a young adult.
452
I used to think that what scared me was the idea of being abandoned until someone said to me, ‘Only children can be abandoned. Adults can’t be abandoned because we have a choice. Children don’t have a choice.’
453
Putting lessons in young adult books is very dangerous.
454
Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.
455
I know plenty of adults who act like teenagers.
456
I have spent much of my adult life flinching with pain as I tried to pull out the threads that bound the shadows of my past to me.
457
When looking at the evidence of feeding on large prey, you can see every size tooth from hatchling to adult in one spot. The babies may have been fed in the nest until they were full grown, like in eagles and hawks.
458
For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction.
459
I need to find a church on Sunday. I need to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ ‘yes sir’ and ‘no ma’am.’ Do the little things because that’s part of being an adult.
460
In California, of all places, entertainment is the key to a vibrant economy. If we do not develop young adults capable of entering that world, the financial base of this state is sure to suffer and impact all of us.
461
I think part of being an adult is leaving the fairytale behind.
462
I had one fight in my adult life. I had the famous ’89 fight with Nicole, which she admits that she initiated the physical part.
463
You see failed vocabulary in the adult world so often, and it’s often because once you reach a certain age you’re kind of embarrassed to go look up a word if you don’t know what it means.
464
To be able to make up stories has been a great gift to me from my ancestors and from the storytellers who were so numerous at Laguna Pueblo when I was growing up. I learned to read as soon as I could because I wanted stories without having to depend on adults to tell or read stories to me.
465
Twitter is one of those dangerous toys that if it gets in the hands of the wrong person you’ll have the mind of a 12-year-old masquerading as an adult.
466
All my adult life people have been helping me.
467
Kids are not going to sit and read a slow-paced book. Neither are adults.
468
A fairly bright boy is far more intelligent and far better company than the average adult.
469
Even though I’m not with their mother, it’s important for my kids to see adults in a committed and happy relationship. They need to see a strong relationship. You don’t have to settle.
470
Sometimes adults seem as though they have cut a chord from being a child.
471
Teen movies often have an unspoken underlying premise in which high school is seen as less serious than the adult world. But when your head is encased in that microcosm it’s the most serious time of your life.
472
I think kids want the same thing from a book that adults want – a fast-paced story, characters worth caring about, humor, surprises, and mystery. A good book always keeps you asking questions, and makes you keep turning pages so you can find out the answers.
473
I’m pretty much in love with ‘Adult Swim.’
474
Children refuse to compromise. Adults learn how.
475
What Washington needs is adult supervision.
476
Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom. Young adults, he thought, should be allowed to develop their capabilities in their distinctive way.
477
I think any good literature, whether it’s for children or for adults, will appeal to everybody. As far as children’s literature goes, adults should be able to read it and enjoy it as much as a child would.
478
When I was a child I devoured every book I could get my hands on. I loved losing myself in colourful and dramatic stories – and my absolute favourite was ‘Charlie And The Chocolate Factory.’ Everything about it electrified me, and when I re-read Roald Dahl’s books as an adult it surprised me.
479
Kerri and I met at theatre camp when were 16 years old, which is pretty lame. The rest of us met when we founded the State at New York University in 1988. Most of our adult lives have been spent bickering with these people.
480
Libertarians recognize the difference between adults and children, as well as differences between normal adults and adults who are insane or mentally hindered or retarded.
481
Adults are obsolete children.
482
Every adult in the world has some sense that he or she might be obliterated at any time by these weapons that we have created.
483
For the vast majority of my adult life, I was a freelance writer, forever scrambling for work that paid an insulting non-amount.
484
There is no age, height, or weight requirement to skate. It is good exercise no matter what your age is. If you want to be competitive, most start young. But, I practice with many adult competitors.
485
When I’m on stage, I get real happy there. Maybe that’s the only time in my adult life I feel like myself.
486
I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that’s not really there.
487
I am going into the adult market because they don’t care what label you are signed to or who you know.
488
As an adult, it’s a huge shock to be orphaned; as a child it’s just hideous, ghastly.
489
I am not really much interested in talking to adults, although I suppose practically every mother in the kingdom knows my name and my books. It’s their children I love.
490
Children’s books are often seen as the poor relation of literature. But children are just as demanding as adult readers, if not more so. I should know. I’m a children’s writer myself.
491
Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
492
I was married to someone who wanted me to change. Become more adult, more responsible. I began not to like myself, not like what I do. I lost my identity. Everything began collapsing around me.
493
I find the subject of childhood fascinating. I explored this subject in Speak to me of love and I am curious about portraying the often painful transition into the adult world.
494
I subscribe to the online Urban Dictionary’s definition of nerd: ‘one whose IQ exceeds his weight’. I’m also keen on the same Urban Dictionary’s definition of geek: ‘the person you pick on in high school and wind up working for as an adult’. I happily proclaim myself a book nerd/reading geek and proud of it.
495
I suffer from vertigo. It’s paralyzing in extreme situations. The most scared I’ve been as an adult was trying to conquer that fear by going climbing in Wales.
496
Most of my adult life I had this towering contempt for America.
497
Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?
498
To be more childlike, you don’t have to give up being an adult. The fully integrated person is capable of being both an adult and a child simultaneously. Recapture the childlike feelings of wide-eyed excitement, spontaneous appreciation, cutting loose, and being full of awe and wonder at this magnificent universe.
499
The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise.
500
The most confounding thing of all is that we still haven’t identified the cause of 20% to 30% of adult common colds.
501
Festivals are fun for kids, fun for parents and offer a welcome break from the stresses of the nuclear family. The sheer quantities of people make life easier: loads of adults for the adults to talk to and loads of kids for the kids to play with.
502
I thought I’d been condescended to as an Indian – that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing young adult literature.
503
Believe me, you can get into a lot of trouble being sixteen years old in a foreign country with no adult telling you when to come home.
504
Turning 16 is kind of scary because when you’re 16, you go from being a kid and then you can drive and are more of a young adult in a way.
505
I still can’t get over the idea that respectable adults now go to see superhero movies and that such films get reviewed in the ‘New Yorker.’ Clearly, I am seriously out of step with the times.
506
I have an adult emotional life and an editing system inside me which prevents me from being preposterously stupid.
507
If your parents gave you fire to play with when you were two, you’d be standing in fire by the time you were an adult.
508
Nine out of ten adult Americans have a checking account. It’s the most widely used financial services product in the United States.
509
There’s a generation now that didn’t grow up in nature. Some of these adults are parents and they know that nature is good for their kids but they don’t know where to start.
510
I’ve always been a big guy, whether it’s been a fat kid, a fat young adult, or a fat adult. I was always sort of… I guess the term would be ‘popular.’ I never dealt with a lot of name-calling or any of the bullying you’d think a fat kid might have to deal with.
511
It’s not a character flaw to become an adult.
512
I do intelligent roles. I don’t want to be labeled as doing silly movies. I’m more mature than kids my age because I’m constantly surrounded by adults.
513
You should be able to do anything you can afford as an adult.
514
I don’t have to worry about any pop sensibility. I can write adult songs, and I don’t have to worry about choruses and hook lines.
515
Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas.
516
Children had a special status – protected from the outside world – and they dressed for the part in a way that made that special status immediately visible to themselves and the adults.
517
Every child should have a caring adult in their lives. And that’s not always a biological parent or family member. It may be a friend or neighbor. Often times it is a teacher.
518
I always hated being a child. I always felt like an adult trapped in a child’s body.
519
Bullying has been around forever, and so it became one of these issues that as an adult we look back on and say, ‘Yeah, it’s just one of those unfortunate parts of growing up.’ You know you’re not going to stop it, so it just became easier to call it one of those things that ‘just happens.’
520
I’ve never read a young adult novel, though. I’m sure I would love it, but I’ve never read one.
521
In the early Sixties, having begun to describe the physiology of cells in the adult cat visual cortex, David Hubel and I decided to investigate how the highly specific response properties of cortical cells emerged during postnatal development.
522
Living on the Gulf Coast, we often have to go through dangerous situations, whether you’re a child, an adult or a senior citizen.
523
When I was growing up in the Forties and Fifties, you could hide your children from the difficulties of life, but today you can’t separate children’s contact with the adult world today.
524
If I’m going to do something a little bit more adult, I’ll do it if it’s going to be on at a different time slot or if it’s going to be something that kids won’t be able to get their hands on.
525
There’s this idea that when you turn 40, you automatically go to adult contemporary heaven, but I want to try and challenge that.
526
It has taken me most of my adult life to come to terms with who I am. To do that, I had to break free of attitudes that brought me down.
527
I myself identify as British-Nigerian, and I’m also gay, and I’m also a young adult in London making music. All of things can co-exist as one.
528
Studies indicate that most of young adults struggle to grasp even the most basic financial principles that will allow them to manage money and prepare for their future.
529
We got babies raising babies, and its important for us as responsible adults to go out and do what we can to make sure that our kids are steered in the right direction.
530
It’s always exciting to explore adult roles when the vast majority of viewers that have seen me on TV know me from ‘Glee,’ from something of a different tone.
531
In my adult life, I had spent a lot of time angry at God, mostly over the sudden deaths in my family – my brother at 30, my daughter at 5.
532
I feel very lucky to have grown up having interaction with adults who were making change but who were far from perfect beings. That feeling of not being paralyzed by your incredible inadequacy as a human being, which I feel every day, is a part of the legacy that I’ve gotten from so many of the adult elders.
533
The Seventies were an interesting time to be a reader or writer of fantasy. Tolkien was the great master. Lin Carter was resurrecting wonders of British and American fantasy from the early twentieth century in his Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series.
534
And, as an adult, I tried skiing, and I ended up in tears.
535
No matter how little we think anatomy should matter to one’s social and political rights, surely we can’t pretend biology doesn’t matter in sports. Surely there’s a reason we don’t let adults play in the t-ball leagues, and a reason most women athletes want their own leagues.
536
Every December, I host a tree-trimming party. I serve chili with cornbread and lots of good wine. It’s a wonderful party, and it shows how much adults like to play.
537
Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where they feel safe.
538
Regression to the stage of early infancy is not a suitable method in and of itself. Such a regression can only be effective if it happens in the natural course of therapy and if the client is able to maintain adult consciousness at the same time.
539
I did not even go to kindergarten; I just started first grade when I was five and started reading right away. I don’t know how it all worked, but I had a lot of adults and older siblings around me. So, I guess I was probably introduced to what one would be introduced to at that time in kindergarten.
540
The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.
541
I have an only child. She’s so independent and good with adults.
542
Adult characters are all the things they’ve encountered over time. But kids haven’t accumulated all the life experience, all the regrets. They tend to be more in the moment, more willing to play, to be joyful.
543
It’s weird: The leader of the Conservative Party in England is two years younger than me, and I still don’t really feel like a responsible adult.
544
We should face reality and our past mistakes in an honest, adult way. Boasting of glory does not make glory, and singing in the dark does not dispel fear.
545
I think it just helps to be very aware that fundamentally, there are no adults. Everyone is making it up as they go along. You have to find your own path, picking, choosing, taking and discarding as you see fit.
546
For many decades now – and certainly during my adult life in academe – the Western intellectual world has not been convinced that theology is a pursuit that can be engaged in with intellectual honesty and integrity.
547
I’m not terribly conversant with children’s literature in general. I tend to read books for adults, being an adult.
548
We should read music in the same way that an educated adult will read a book: in silence, but imagining the sound.
549
I’m definitely not eager to grow up, but I do like some adult stuff.
550
Tarantino’s ‘Django’ amused me very much. It is as made by an adult that was still a child.
551
I have known lots of adults who enjoyed similar enthusiasms as a kid and weren’t encouraged and then didn’t go anywhere with it and so they’re unhappy in their jobs as adults.
552
I spent my adult life as a scientist, and science is, essentially, the most successful approach we have to try and understand the vast mysteries around.
553
I’m all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
554
I was always a little adult. Even as a little kid, I just couldn’t understand why I was surrounded by all these kids. I took things very seriously.
555
My family was very unorthodox. My mother was very eccentric and amazing. She always treated us like adults.
