818 Quotes About Coming-of-age

Your mother would have more luck winning her election than teaching you how to be charming. Izzy Malone, going to charm school! Are you going to walk across the room with a book stuck on your head?""No, it's not like that at all," I said as he doubled over with laughter. "And I really don't see what's so funny.""It's just that"--he gasped--"it would be like teaching a hippo to wear high heels!

P.S. Please don't call me Isabella. That name belongs to a really pretty girl who never wrecks her clothes and who never gets dirt under her fingernails. That's definitely not me. My name is Izzy.

Sometimes I think teachers like Ms. Harmer view creativity as something dirty and slightly embarrassing, and would prefer to turn kids into people who color inside the lines.Generally speaking, I don't care much for lines.

It is the genius of life that demands of those who partake in it that they are not only the guardians of what was and is, but what will be.—Thomas Nō Kannon, The Lady and the Samurai +

It is as if I had to take Sam back into the uterus to protect him, to reestablish the placental connection in order to nourish him through his crisis. Perhaps because of this primitive reaction, his recovery is marked by an increasing independence for both of us, a feeling of health and ease as if, in some mysterious way, he had accomplished his second birth, into adulthood, by means of this violent accident.

Don't claim to know what is good for me while you dangle from a noose with only a brick to balance on.

Playing the piano felt like coming home, in the sense that it represented everything that was familiar to Jack.

During the day they goofed and joked around, whatever worked to keep them going. Only in moments like these, in the glistening light of the fire underneath the night sky, were their deepest thoughts and insecurities revealed. Everyone had their own story, their own version of the truth. And everyone was hurting and trying to hide it some way or other. Sometimes it was OK not to be OK.

Saying the words out loud for the first time made it more real. Not something that existed only in his imagination.