Grownups Quotes

Children are more than we think they are; they can do more than we think they can do. All they need is a vote of confidence from grownups, whom they will ultimately replace anyway. Their dream today will become the realities of tomorrow.

We’ve educated children to think that spontaneity is inappropriate. Children are willing to expose themselves to experiences. We aren’t. Grownups always say they protect their children, but they’re really protecting themselves. Besides, you can’t protect children. They know everything.

There are poets and there are grownups.

Come September, children return to school, grownups to work, and the brain to the head.

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

Next time I’ll just send the three of you e-mails. What was I thinking when I decided to have this meeting? (Acheron) Oh, I know. That men who are a couple of thousand years old could actually behave like grownups? (Nick) (Zarek elbowed Nick in the stomach.) Oops. Involuntary arm spasm. (Zarek)

The day you realize you're a grownup is the day you realize that you have to do something. When we're kids, we don't have to do anything. Then all of a sudden you realize, if I want this to be better, I've got to do something.

I think Laurie's Keller story 'We are growing', resonates because when you have that amount of independence, you're starting to ask yourself questions that the grownups in your life have been answering for you. Before that, you are a good kid, or you are a funny kid, because you're told that's who you are. But when it's just you and the book, you have to figure out who you are.

It's to come up with a deal that both sides feel they can live with. And I think that that's probably where we're going to end up. I think that Donald Trump has people working for him who are ultimately deal-makers. And the Canadians are the same way. They're grownups about this. That's why you saw the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau not respond to Trump with the same rhetoric, but to talk about the strength of the relationship and the desire for a deal.

People think that children don't know anything. It's enough to make you wonder if grownups were ever children once upon a time.

I feel bad for the kids that are in school right now and the young people all across America who don't realize that the grownups who are supposed to be running this country are the verge of leaving them as the first generation of Americans worse off than the generation before.

Is not Jesus pointing to children even as models for grownups?

Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.

One foot in front of the other, wasn't that the grownup way of solving problems? Surely he ought to be a grownup at his age.

What is difficult about learning - any kind of learning - is that you have to give up what you know already to make room for the new ideas. Children are much better at it than grownups.

I am curious about grownups, not children.

We just got to go on, that's all. That's what grownups would do.

Kids are in ongoing need of support, and they get various versions of it from grownups which aren't legitimate - a grownup's version of what we think you should have. We tell you what creativity is, and we even tell you what you're thinking.

I'll do anything for kids but I don't sign anything for grownups anymore.

Grownups have to say 'please,' too.

Children want to do what grownups do.

I make movies for grownups. When Hollywood starts making them again, I'll start acting in them again.

When people go to a new country, whether as refugees or immigrants, kids usually assimilate easily, but it's much harder for the grownups. Especially, oftentimes, for the mothers, because they are usually confined to the house. They're not going to school, and they're not necessarily holding down a job. It's tough. It's not easy to assimilate to a new culture when you're an adult.

Growing up I never had a perfume. I was like oh, one day when I'm grownup and have money I'm going to wear perfume. I had one perfume and I would save it for really, really, really special occasions. Which meant I never actually wore it. So now it's one of those things like, I can wear perfume everyday. I can afford to buy another one, I'm really lucky that I can. Now when I have nice stuff I don't save it anymore, I try to use it.

We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

Nurturing a child’s sense of personal worth and therefore hope and dreams for a wonderful future is perhaps the most important responsibility of every grownup in a child’s life.

God wants a child's heart and a grownup's head.

That's what my books are, now that I'm a grownup - mosaics of jokes.

When people are grownups they're grown ups. They make their own decisions you know.

Everybody thinks you reach a certain age and you're a grownup, but it's not true. Nobody grows up until the day they croak.

A grownup is a child with layers on.

This is our island. It's a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we'll have fun.

A lot of times it's the child that sees something and not the grownup. I love that because, when readers get older, they start looking for the most important ideas in the story. They don't look at things in the same way anymore. Children haven't really learned to do that yet. They take all their great, intellectual skills, look at the full page, and appreciate all of the different things.

Embracing the fear of freedom, deciding to determine your own path, this is the work of a grownup.

We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We've come to the point where it's irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up. The children themselves haven't yet isolated themselves by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily into the error of despair; they are considerably braver than most grownups. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don't look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it.

Time always seems long to the child who is waiting - for Christmas, for next summer, for becoming a grownup: long also when he surrenders his whole soul to each moment of a happy day.

if a book is not good enough for a grownup, it is not good enough for a child.

I'm not too proud of the movies I made as a grownup except for 'That Hagen Girl', which nobody remembers but which gave me a chance to act.

And that the best things that grownups do, we do for the children, and that they inspire great good in us. I also want them to remember that the world is intertwined and that we therefore have to be gentle in the way that we treat one another and the Earth, so that our impact on others is benevolent and good.

Naturally, grown-up citizens are concerned about the beatniks and delinquents. ... The question is why the grownups do not, more soberly, draw the same conclusions as the youth. Or, since no doubt many people are quite clear about the connection that the structure of society that has becoming increasingly dominant in our country is disastrous to the growth of excellence and manliness, why don't more people speak up and say so?

It's easier to be a grownup than to be a kid. When you're a kid, you lie constantly and people are always calling you on it. And when you're a grownup, you lie constantly and people rarely do. Children are constantly being caught. Adults rarely so. Being an adult, you also get a free pass, which means you have to actively be a good person because nobody's around to tell you to do that. Even evil kids will be good when adults are watching. But once you're an adult, no one is. As a grownup, you've got an agency over your own life, which hopefully you use for the greater good and not evil.

What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just playground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn't be, could it? It was too horrible to think about.

I began feeling the way I imagine an actor or athlete must feel when, after years of commitment to a particular dream...he realizes that he's gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him. The dream will not happen, and he now faces the choice of accepting this fact like a grownup and moving on to more sensible pursuits, or refusing the truth and ending up bitter, quarrelsome, and slightly pathetic.

It's actually not very hard to re-set between the adult novels and the ones for younger readers. The narrative voices are very similar, the smartass attitude, the environmental battles. Kids love books that are irreverent and challenge authority, when authority is arbitrary, greedy or foolish. They also love it when you make fun of grownups, and I've spent my whole life as a writer doing that.

My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says 'PRIVATE--GROWNUPS KEEP OUT': a child sprawled on the bed, reading.

The Lord of the Rings' is fundamentally an infantile work. Tolkien is not interested in the way grownup, adult human beings interact with each other. He's interested in maps and plans and languages and codes.

When you're young, you're always wondering when you're actually going to feel like a grownup. And I think you probably fear it, in a sense, too. There's a danger to feeling like an adult... like this whimsical kid in you is going to die or something. And then all of a sudden, one day you kind of feel like an adult and it's really nice.

The moment you decide that you're a grownup now, and therefore must put away foolish things like staying out all night or cruising down strange highways is the moment you will lose that ineffable glow of youth. If you don't believe me, look around. Study those people who would rather go to shopping malls than dance halls, who think the height of depravity is bidding two no trump with only fifteen points. Every single one of these people has a stringy neck.

Let's face it: part of being a grownup is that every day you have to choose between going out at night or staying home, and it is one of life's unhappy truths that there is not enough time to do both.

All any grownup expects of an adolescent is that he act like an adult and be satisfied to be treated like a child.