Quotes about Maturity

I'm thirty,' I said. 'I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.

She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can.

Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

Stated to a running back after an overly exuberant display of celebration: Next time you make a touchdown act like you've been there before.

Oh, let us lose our milk teeth and cut instead the strong teeth of hate and love.

The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements, as well as one's deepest failures is a definite symptom of maturity.

You cannot become a power in your community nor achieve enduring success in any worthy undertaking until you become big enough to blame yourself for your own mistakes and reverses.

When you were young you were afraid of ghosts, and when you were aged you called them to you.

I was not pleased to be sent from my mother, but I occupied myself, a skill learned by children who must sometimes act older than their age.

He wasn't the first man she'd been with, and that hadn't been Bill back home either. It had been a boy she met on holiday when she was fifteen. She had decided it was time for her to have sex, the way someone else might decide it was time to get a driver's license, and she'd gone ahead with it. Pragmatic, that's the way she'd always been.

We recall that to the Cherokee, as to other people who have noticed how long it sometimes takes for humans to develop fully, adulthood comes--if it is coming at all--at the age of fifty-two.