I left home when I was just 17, finished up high school, and went to work.

Growing up in Denver, I'm sure it started with loving the Colorado mountains.

It's so funny, because when I was growing up in a small town in New Hampshire, I was obsessed with Leonardo DiCaprio - from the 'Growing Pains'/'What's Eating Gilbert Grape' era, because he was...

I cried on my 18th birthday. I thought 17 was such a nice age. You're young enough to get away with things, but you're old enough, too.

What's so beautiful about girls? I would implore. And the secret society of adults would reply with a smirk and wink as if I was merely a boy who couldn't possibly have the mental maturity to...

Because…sometimes I think you meet people and they make you better, even if you're not with them forever.

Sometimes you have to grow up before you appreciate how you grew up.

I would never be popular. I didn't want to be; I liked being shy. I'd never be the smartest or the hottest or the happiest. By eighth grade you start to figure out your limits.

I am convinced that most people do not grow up... We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and...

Each of Nora's children had arrived on this earth as him or herself, the more she knew them, the more she felt it to be true. They were so different from one another, and from her.

It wasn't right that you could only understand your parents' pain once you'd experienced the things they had, and by then they were gone.

I guess that's what growing up is. Saying good-by to a lot of things. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it isn't. But it is all right.

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure, death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality even where we will not....

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd...

Where is the happiness, the sunshine, where are those thick skittles of wood which crashed and bounced so nicely, where is my bicycle with the low handlebars and the big gear? It seems there's a law...

They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.

It was too late. Maybe yesterday, while I was still a child, but not now. I knew too much, had seen too much, I was a child no longer now; innocence and childhood were forever lost, forever gone from...

We realized that the version of the world {our parents} rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a...

Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

The way surviving hard winters makes a tree grows stronger, the growth rings inside it tighter

you know what her punishment is for tormenting you way back when?" he said.I looked at him.He said, "her punishment is being her

Laughing at "Rapper's Delight"'s no revenge, and anyway it wasn't your idea, and anyway it's . Dean Street's another story, a realm of knowledge unapplicable here.You've just about finished leaving...

I know who I want to be and I want you by my side as I become that person.

It's a shame for a woman's history to be all about men-first boys, then other boys, then men, men, men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and elections, one war...

That's the worst of growing up, and I'm beginning to realize it. The things you wanted so much when you were a child don't seem half so wonderful to you when you get them

I used to joke that we had prepared ourselves for a time like this by living with Mother. The problem with such a state of affairs was not that you did not get to do what you wanted---sometimes you...