Quotes about Growing up

It's funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools - friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty - and said 'do the best you can with these, they will have to do'. And mostly, against all odds, they do.

All of my friends from school grew up and settled downAnd they mortgaged off their livesOne thing's not said too much, but I think it's trueThey just get married 'cause there's nothing else to do

Mother Nature is wonderful. Children get too old for piggy-back rides just about the same time they get too heavy for them.

You know you're a grownup when your houseplants are alive and you can't smoke any of them.

Son, you outgrew my lap, but never my heart.

I'm a big boy now, and I have to deliver.

But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?