Maturity doesn’t advance linearly, like you steadily and readily becoming more profound in your thinking. No, it staggers and stumbles like a drunk.

Stop thinking like Alice in Wonderland, Celia told herself sternly. You're a grown-up, it's no use shutting your eyes, wishing things would happen

Most students have to do some work to resuscitate their childlike curiosity. The best way to do that is to start asking questions again—lots of them.

There comes a time in your life where youhave to live without the wo/man of yourdreams and have to live with the one in your reality.That is called maturity

The author likens crisis, and particularly war, to stop motion photography in its capacity to make changes plain that are ordinarily too gradual to be seen.

The only parts that really matter and take commitment in wedding vows are; worse, sickness and poorer. Better, richer and healthy is pretty easy to deal with.

Growing up is a ritual, more deadly than religion, more complicated than baseball, for there seem to be no rules. Everything is experienced for the first time.

We become increasingly aware that the human dream, the human drama, with all its questionable, damaging, and often malevolent intention is not real life at all.

For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress -- to the future.

Grass that is here today and gone tomorrow does not require much time to mature. A giant oak tree that lasts for generations requires much more time to grow strong.

I assume this kid is “normal” sixteen, like all the rest of them, whereas I’m “life can, and probably will, totally screw you” sixteen.

Mary, it must be remembered, was very nearly of the same age as Frank; but, as I and others have so often said before, 'Women grow on the sunny side of the wall.

Being a child sucked. Being a teenager was worse. And being an adult seemed so far away that I had a better chance at swimming the length of the ocean than growing up.

It is all too common for caterpillars to become butterflies and then to maintain that in their youth they had been little butterflies. Maturation makes liars of us all.

Maturity is so often considered to be synonymous with ‘adult.’ But I truly feel that maturity may be defined by the ability to be both an adult and a child.