We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.

My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.

Did you know I always thought you were braver than me? Did you ever guess that that was why I was so afraid? It wasn't that I only loved some of you. But I wondered if you could ever love more than some of me. I knew I'd miss you. But the surprising thing is, you never leave me. I never forget a thing. Every kind of love, it seems, is the only one. It doesn't happen twice. And I never expected that you could have a broken heart and love with it too, so much that it doesn't seem broken at all. I know young people look at me and think my youth seems so far away, but it's all around me, and you're all around me. Tiger Lily, do you think magic exists if it can be explained? I can explain why I loved you, I can explain the theory of evolution that tells me why mermaids live in Neverland and nowhere else. But it still feels magic. The lost boys all stood at our wedding. Does it seem odd to you that they could have stood at a wedding that wasn't yours and mine? It does to me. and I'm sorry for it, and for a lot, and I also wouldn't change it. It is so quiet here. Even with all the trains and the streets and the people. It's nothing like the jungle. The boys have grown. Everything has grown. Do you think you will ever grow? I hope not. I like to think that even if I change and fade away, some other people won't. I like to think that one day after I die, at least one small particle of me - of all the particles that will spread everywhere - will float all the way to Neverland, and be part of a flower or something like that, like that poet said, the one that your Tik Tok loved. I like to think that nothing's final, and that everyone gets to be together even when it looks like they don't, that it all works out even when all the evidence seems to say something else, that you and I are always young in the woods, and that I'll see you sometime again, even if it's not with any kind of eyes I know of or understand. I wouldn't be surprised if that is the way things go after all - that all things end happy. Even for you and Tik Tok. and for you and me.Always, Your PeterP.S. Please give my love to Tink. She was always such a funny little bug.

I haven’t been very impressed lately.By people,or places,or the way someone said he loved me and then slowly changed his mind.

I am not a broken heart. I am not collarbones or drunken letters never sent. I am not the way I leave or left or didn’t know how to handle anything,at any time,and I am not your fault.

Dear God," she prayed, "let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere - be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.

I walked over to the hill where we used to go and sled. There were a lot of little kids there. I watched them flying. Doing jumps and having races. And I thought that all those little kids are going to grow up someday. And all of those little kids are going to do the things that we do. And they will all kiss someone someday. But for now, sledding is enough. I think it would be great if sledding were always enough, but it isn't.

Growing up happens when you start having things you look back on and wish you could change -Clary Fray

Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.

I think that the best thing we can do for our children is to allow them to do things for themselves, allow them to be strong, allow them to experience life on their own terms, allow them to take the subway... let them be better people, let them believe more in themselves.

I've apparently been the victim of growing up, which apparently happens to all of us at one point or another. It's been going on for quite some time now, without me knowing it. I've found that growing up can mean a lot of things. For me, it doesn't mean I should become somebody completely new and stop loving the things I used to love. It means I've just added more things to my list. Like for example, I'm still beyond obsessed with the winter season and I still start putting up strings of lights in September. I still love sparkles and grocery shopping and really old cats that are only nice to you half the time. I still love writing in my journal and wearing dresses all the time and staring at chandeliers. But some new things I've fallen in love with -- mismatched everything. Mismatched chairs, mismatched colors, mismatched personalities. I love spraying perfumes I used to wear when I was in high school. It brings me back to the days of trying to get a close parking spot at school, trying to get noticed by soccer players, and trying to figure out how to avoid doing or saying anything uncool, and wishing every minute of every day that one day maybe I'd get a chance to win a Grammy. Or something crazy and out of reach like that. ;) I love old buildings with the paint chipping off the walls and my dad's stories about college. I love the freedom of living alone, but I also love things that make me feel seven again. Back then naivety was the norm and skepticism was a foreign language, and I just think every once in a while you need fries and a chocolate milkshake and your mom. I love picking up a cookbook and closing my eyes and opening it to a random page, then attempting to make that recipe. I've loved my fans from the very first day, but they've said things and done things recently that make me feel like they're my friends -- more now than ever before. I'll never go a day without thinking about our memories together.

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 on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.

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 have no heart to start at all.

It's much easier to not know things sometimes. Things change and friends leave. And life doesn't stop for anybody.

It's not always easy being her daughter.' I think,' she said, 'sometimes it's hard no matter whose daughter you are.

I've screwed everything up royally. I remember you saying that growing up happens when you start having things you look back on and wish you could change.

You said you want to became Hokage. I have become the Kazekage. If you are willing to bear the name Kage, you have to do what you must do.

Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.

I don’t want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I’ll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it’s possible to be. I’m growing and I don’t know how to grow. I’m living but I haven’t started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it’s like I’m not here in the world at all and I simply don’t exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid.

You know, people ask me. They say 'Dan, three years later do you really want to be drawing cat whiskers on your face?' but they don't understand. The cat whiskers, they come from within.

Stop trying to be less of who you are. Let this time in your life cut you open and drain all of the things that are holding you back.

I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.

It's alright, just wait and see, your string of lights is still bright to me. Who you are is not where you've been. You're still an innocent. It's okay life is a tough crowd, 32 is still growing up now.

I can do this… I can start over. I can save my own life and I’m never going to be alone as long as I have stars to wish on and people to still love.

I don't want to be a man," said Jace. "I want to be an angst-ridden teenager who can't confront his own inner demons and takes it out verbally on other people instead.""Well," said Luke, "you're doing a fantastic job.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge.

He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times.

By the time we began to understand enough about what the world to ask the right questions, our visit is over, and someone else is visiting, asking the same questions.

I could watch him do this until morning — never asking questions and never interrupting his work. I worship quietly — his intense focus and attention to detail and then, out of no where, I realize the inconvenient, inappropriate truth: ‘I love this man… and it has swallowed me.

Your personal truth is your gift to the world.

Today I wore a pair of faded old jeans and a plain grey baggy shirt. I hadn't even taken a shower, and I did not put on an ounce of makeup. I grabbed a worn out black oversized jacket to cover myself with even though it is warm outside. I have made conscious decisions lately to look like less of what I felt a male would want to see. I want to disappear.

It is not until you change your identity to match your life blueprint that you will understand why everything in the past never worked.

I know there are days when even one single positive thought feels like too much effort, but you must develop an unconditional love for life. You must never lose your childish curiosity for the possibilities in every single day. Who you can be, what you can see, what you can feel and where it can lead you. Be in love with your life, everything about it. The sadness and the joys, the struggles and the lessons, your flaws and strengths, what you lose and what you gain.

My friend Madea has "attitude" that comes with wisdom. Back in our teens and twenties, we thought we knew everything and made all those foolish mistakes. Then, when we got a little older, at thirty, we started getting these flashes of light, revelations of what a great and lucky thing it is that we didn't get caught doing those stupid things back then. Around forty, if we are lucky, we stop lying to ourselves. Fifty and above, we've run out of patience for foolishness. Take me to the bottom line.

It's not very easy to grow up into a woman. We are always taught, almost bombarded, with ideals of what we should be at every age in our lives: "This is what you should wear at age twenty", "That is what you must act like at age twenty-five", "This is what you should be doing when you are seventeen." But amidst all the many voices that bark all these orders and set all of these ideals for girls today, there lacks the voice of assurance. There is no comfort and assurance. I want to be able to say, that there are four things admirable for a woman to be, at any age! Whether you are four or forty-four or nineteen! It's always wonderful to be elegant, it's always fashionable to have grace, it's always glamorous to be brave, and it's always important to own a delectable perfume! Yes, wearing a beautiful fragrance is in style at any age!

When You Live Life Too Early, You Learn Life Too Late.

Our Peter Pan generation is unhappy. All our lives, we want to grow up—to be treated like adults, to have freedom to choose. Then we get here and it turns out being an adult sucks. We pay the bills and taxes, watching others succeed while we are forever waiting for our turn. We believe we are special, but nothing special has come our way.

I was happy, but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.

When I say maturity, I mean an inner integrity. And this inner integrity comes only when you stop making others responsible, when you stop saying that the other is creating your suffering, when you start realizing that you are the creator of your suffering. This is the first step towards maturity: I am responsible. Whatsoever is happening, it is my doing.You feel sad. Is this your doing? You will feel very much disturbed, but if you can remain with this feeling, sooner or later you will be able to stop doing many things. This is what the theory of karma is all about. You are responsible. Don’t say society is responsible, don’t say that parents are responsible, don’t say the economic conditions are responsible, don’t throw the responsibility onto anybody. YOU are responsible.

I don't think that I am happy, but then again, I don't know. Sometimes I get so caught up in the process of living-- of eating, dressing, taking the train to work, that I don't give it enough thought. Maybe happiness is being content.But is it really?

I cared about Ben, but I was never in love with him. I was in love with what it said about me that I had a boyfriend like Ben, and that's just different.

Take a shower, wash off the day. Drink a glass of water. Make the room dark. Lie down and close your eyes.Notice the silence. Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting. You made it, after all. You made it, another day. And you can make it one more. You’re doing just fine.

Don’t worry if people think you’re crazy. You are crazy. You have that kind of intoxicating insanity that lets other people dream outside of the lines and become who they’re destined to be.

I met a boy whose eyes showed me that the past, present and future were all the same thing.

For so many years, I couldn’t understand why every time I thought that someone finally loved me, like… for real, they would eventually turn to vapor. Every person whom I’ve ever loved is trapped inside of my chest. I’ve breathed all of them in so deeply that I’ve nearly choked and died on every soul that I’ve ever given myself to.

I want to be the best version of myself for anyone who is going to someday walk into my life and need someone to love them beyond reason.

Let this time in your life cut you open and drain all of the things that are holding you back. I’m going to help you forgive the things that you won’t let yourself forget.

Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn't happen. It was all dream stuff. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer?

I look out into the water and up deep into the stars. I beg the sparkling lanterns of light to cure me of myself — my past and the kaleidoscope of mistakes, failures and wrong turns that have stacked unbearable regret upon my shoulders.

Does our purpose on Earth directly link to the people whom we end up meeting? Are our relationships and experiences actually the required dots that connect and then lead us to our ultimate destinies?

I fantasize the night sky to be like a cosmic blue print of my life as I close my eyes and unbutton my heart…. just in case anyone up there is listening.

I’ve grown up defined by this desperate, undeniable, ‘can’t breathe’ kind of space inside of myself and I’m afraid that the diagnosis is fatal.

Something, somewhere, knows what’s best for me and promises to keep sending me people and experiences to light my way as long as I live in gratitude and keep paying attention to the signs.

I’ve always seen this in you, ever since you were a little girl — this hunger to love other people into their highest selves and it’s what has made me irreversibly and just so forever in love with you.

Please… Whoever you are, whatever you are… I believe in you even though I don’t completely understand you. I feel you around me even though I can’t exactly describe what I’m feeling. Sometimes things happen to me and I know that you’re there and I’m humbled by the lack of coincidence that exists in the world. Whatever you want from me, it’s yours — just please help me. You know how I get when I lose control, and I find myself constantly being pulled back there these days.

I feel a resurgence of my 6-year-old self… that little warrior, goddess of a girl reminding me of who I was when I was little, before the world got its hands on me.

I know that this process of ‘me changing my life’ doesn’t just end once I set fire to this list of things I hate about myself. Tonight isn’t as much of a new beginning as it is a violent end and I know the real work hasn’t even started yet.

I’m going to follow this invisible red thread until I find myself again… until I finally figure out… who I’m meant to be.

If ever I was running, it was towards you.

I love him in ways that I can’t explain to other people. They don’t understand… it’s not their fault.

I really believe that there is an invisible red thread tied between him and me, and that it has stretched and tangled for years — across oceans and lifetimes. I know that it won’t break because our souls are tied.

Everything hurts right now and nothing is helping because as the pain is getting worse — so is the love.

I just want your voice aimed at me again. I want to absorb the direction of your eyes…

I want you to trust yourself, baby. Love is all that matters and you’ve always known that. You’ve known, since you were a very little girl, what your life is meant to be about…

I know that your soul is on life support and that you feel lost and like you’re completely spinning out of control, but you’re finding yourself — here, tonight… even in this darkness.

Why wait? So precious is this life—this gift—this temporary blindness. Burn and drown and embrace the false dark, then grasp the unthinkable height of resulting joy. For in the end, in the light of truth when the flesh is cast off, there is nothing but this.

Every change, those subtle-slow, and those drastically sudden, has brought me into myself.

When we’re young, we think that Love and Hate live on opposite sides of the street from one another; But as we get older we realise they’re actually next door neighbours with paper thin walls.

Parents expect only two things from their children, obedience in their childhood and respect in their adulthood.

Father has a strengthening character like the sun and mother has a soothing temper like the moon.

The stars are brilliant at this time of night and I wander these streets like a ritual I don’t dare to break for darling, the times are quite glorious.I left him by the water’s edge,still waving long after the ship was goneand if someone would have screamed my name I wouldn’t have heard for I’ve said goodbye so many times in my short life that farewells are a muscular task and I’ve taught them well. There’s a place by the side of the railway near the lake where I grew up and I used to go there to burry things and start anew. I used to go there to say goodbye. I was young and did not know many people but I had hidden things inside that I never dared to show and in silence I tried to kill them, one way or the other,leaving sin on my body scrubbing tears off with saltand I built my rituals in farewells. Endings I still cling to. So I go to the ocean to say goodbye.He left that morning, the last words still echoing in my headand though he said he’d come back one day I know a broken promise from a right onefor I have used them myself and there is no coming back.Minds like ours are can’t be tamed and the price for freedom is the price we pay.I turned away from the oceanas not to fall for its pleafor it used to seduce and consume meand there was this one nighta few years back and I was not yet accustomed to farewellsand just like now I stood waving long after the ship was gone.But I was younger then and easily fooledand the ocean was deep and dark and blueand I took my shoes off to let the water freeze my bones.I waded until I could no longer walk and it was too cold to swim but still I kept on walking at the bottom of the sea for I could not tell the difference between the ocean and the lack of someone I loved and I had not yet learned how the task of moving on is as necessary as survival.Then days passed by and I spent them with my work and now I’m writing letters I will never dare to send.But there is this one day every year or sowhen the burden gets too heavyand I collect my belongings I no longer needand make my way to the ocean to burn and drown and start anewand it is quite wonderful, setting fire to my chains and flames on written wordsand I stand there, starring deep into the heat until they’re all gone. Nothing left to hold me back.You kissed me that morning as if you’d never done it before and never would again and now I write another letter that I will never dare to send, collecting memories of loss like chains wrapped around my veins,and if you see a fire from the shore tonightit’s my chains going up in flames. The time of moon i quite glorious. We could have been so glorious.

... so this is for us.This is for us who sing, write, dance, act, study, run and loveand this is for doing it even if no one will ever knowbecause the beauty is in the act of doing it.Not what it can lead to.This is for the times I lose myself while writing, singing, playingand no one is around and they will never knowbut I will forever rememberand that shines brighter than any praise or fame or glory I will ever have,and this is for you who write or play or read or singby yourself with the light off and door closedwhen the world is asleep and the stars are alignedand maybe no one will ever hear itor read your wordsor know your thoughtsbut it doesn’t make it less glorious.It makes it ethereal. Mysterious.Infinite.For it belongs to you and whatever God or spirit you believe inand only you can decide how much it meantand meansand will forever meanand other people will experience it toothrough you.Through your spirit. Through the way you talk.Through the way you walk and love and laugh and careand I never meant to write this longbut what I want to say is:Don’t try to present your art by making other people read or hear or see or touch it; make them feel it. Wear your art like your heart on your sleeve and keep it alive by making people feel a little better. Feel a little lighter. Create art in order for yourself to become yourselfand let your very existence be your song, your poem, your story.Let your very identity be your book.Let the way people say your name sound like the sweetest melody.So go create. Take photographs in the wood, run alone in the rain and sing your heart out high up on a mountainwhere no one will ever hearand your very existence will be the most hypnotising scar.Make your life be your artand you will never be forgotten.

You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be.

6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days,and I still don’t know which month it was thenor what day it is now.Blurred out linesfrom hangovers to coffeeAnother vagabond lost to love.4am alone and on my way.These are my finest moments.I scrub my skinto rid me from youand I still don’t know why I cried.It was just something in the way you took my heart and rearranged my insides and I couldn’t recognise the emptiness you left me with when you were done. Maybe you thought my insides would fit better this way, look better this way, to you and us and all the rest.But then you must have changed your mindor made a wrongbecause why did youleave?6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days,and I still don’t know which month it was thenor what day it is now.I replace cafés with crowded bars and empty roads with broken bottlesand this town is healing me slowly but still not slow or fast enough because there’s no right way to do this.There is no right way to do this.There is no right way to do this.

I am a free soul, singing my heart out by myself no matter where I go and I call strangers my friends because I learn things and find ways to fit them into my own world. I hear what people say, rearrange it, take away and tear apart until it finds value in my reality and there I make it work. I find spaces in between the cracks and cuts where it feels empty and there I make it work.

I am not collarbones or drunken letters never sent. I am not the way I leave or left or didn’t know how to handle anything,at any time,and I am not your fault.

In the boundaryless forests, there’re dancers of nude.Yet in the confines of pasture, there’s promise of food.On which is your side?Ô, but tarry and bide,ere you decide,in both do confide.

I am not a finished poem, and I am not the song you’ve turned me into. I am a detached human being, making my way in a world that is constantly trying to push me aside, and you who send me letters and emails and beautiful gifts wouldn’t even recognise me if you saw me walking down the street where I live tomorrowfor I am not a poem. I am tired and worn out and the eyes you would see would not be painted or inspiredbut empty and weary from drinking too much at all timesand I am not the life of your party who sings and has glorious words to speakfor I don’t speak muchat alland my voice is raspy and unsteady from unhealthy living and not much sleep and I only use it when I sing and I always sing too muchor not at alland never when people are around because they expect poems and symphonies and I am nota poembut an elegyat my bestbut unedited and uncut and not a lot of people want to work with me because there’s only so much you can do with an audio take, with the plug-ins and EQs and I was born distorted, disordered, and I’m pretty fine with that,but others are not.

If onlyyou could have witnessed howmuch I have changed: sit alonein a disused theatre and feel whatI have felt, see how the world hastransformed me, like the metamorphosisof a caterpillar.

For years I was deathly afraid of my own weaknesses, but when I closed my eyes and let myself be vulnerable to them it allowed miracles to take place. Miracles that were only alive when I accessed my BLIND faith.

Starting over can be the scariest thing in the entire world, whether it’s leaving a lover, a school, a team, a friend or anything else that feels like a core part of our identity but when your gut is telling you that something here isn’t right or feels unsafe, I really want you to listen and trust in that voice.

Being a Dream Girl is never going to be about what you look like or how much you weigh. After all, our physical appearances are just reflections of our inner worlds. What makes you a Dream Girl is your emotional sensitivity, your self-awareness, and your ability to communicate who you are effectively and compassionately in the world.

This is your life – not your parents’, teachers’ or significant other’s. If you ever find yourself on a path that just doesn’t feel safe anymore, you have every right to stop the car, get out – change your shoes and start walking.

I never want you to deny anything about yourself because you have grown up thinking it’s unacceptable or inconvenient for the people around you.

So many people will tell you ”no”, and you need to find something you believe in so hard that you just smile and tell them ”watch me”. Learn to take rejection as motivation to prove people wrong. Be unstoppable. Refuse to give up, no matter what. It’s the best skill you can ever learn.

Can you identify the source preventing you from feeling good every single day, from loving yourself unconditionally and making your dreams come true? Is it a voice in your head or a gut wrenching ache that compromises your inner peace and doesn’t allow you to accept the love around you? Is there one thing, or maybe many things, keeping you from forgiving your past and moving forward, tormenting you with lies like “You don’t deserve real love so just settle for whatever you can get,” “You’re not smart enough to achieve your dream so don’t even try,” or “Look at your past… you should hate yourself way more than you actually do!”?Welcome to your Little Monster.

Even if we try to conform to ideals and strive for perfection, we will always be pulled back to our core identity because it’s the path of least resistance for our souls – an energy force that wants nothing more than for us to honor and accept who we are and discover what we’re meant to do in the world.

Love is my drug of choice, even if it comes laced with pain and disaster.

Today is a new day and it brings with it a new set of opportunities for me to act on.I am attentive to the opportunities and I seize them as they arise.I have full confidence in myself and my abilities.I can do all things that I commit myself to.No obstacle is too big or too difficult for me to handle because what lies inside me is greater than what lies ahead of me.I am committed to improving myself and I am getting better daily.I am not held back by regret or mistakes from the past.I am moving forward daily.Absolutely nothing is impossible for me.

When you work on something that only has the capacity to make you 5 dollars, it does not matter how much harder you work – the most you will make is 5 dollars.

But if you forgive someone for something they did to you, it doesn’t mean you agree with what they did or believe it was right. Forgiving that person means you have chosen not to dwell on the matter anymore; you have moved on with your life.

Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.

When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser.

What I've found about it is that there are some folks you can talk to until you're blue in the face--they're never going to get it and they're never going to change. But every once in a while, you'll run into someone who is eager to listen, eager to learn, and willing to try new things. Those are the people we need to reach. We have a responsibility as parents, older people, teachers, people in the neighborhood to recognize that.

In Your Early Years people Tell You, Correct You and Forgive You. But when you become an Adult, they Neither Correct you nor Forgive You

Despite the fact that I have no regrets about how things turned out in my life, I still can't help wanting to understand my intense relationship with Leo, as well as that turbulent time between adolescence and adulthood when everything feels raw and invigorating and scary-and why those feelings are all coming back to me now.

High school will probably be better. I mean, some kids will still be jerks, but it's not so bad if you have at least one good friend. Someone who gets you.

Every man has two educations – that which is given to him, and the other, that which he gives to himself. Of the tow kinds, the latter is by far the most valuable. Indeed all that is most worthy in a man, he must work out and conquer for himself. It is that, that constitutes our real and best nourishment. What we are merely taught, seldom nourishes the mind like that which we teach ourselves.

It was strange, because she always felt that she hid herself from Erika, that she was more 'herself' with her 'true' friends, where the friendship flowed in an ordinary, uncomplicated, grown-up fashion (emails, phone calls, drinks, dinners, banter and jokes that everyone got), but right now it felt like none of those friends knew her the raw, ugly, childish, basic way that Erika did.

It's hard at times, but it makes a kid strong in ways that most people can't understand. Teaches them that even though people are left behind, new ones will inevitable take their place; that every place has something good - and bad - to offer. It makes a kid grow up fast.

There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don't lose yourself at happy hour, but don't lose yourself on the corporate ladder, either.

The right thing to do is so easy to see when you're seventeen years old and don't have to make any big decisions. When you know that no matter what you do, someone will take care of you and fix everything. But when you're grown up, the world is not that black and white, and the right thing doesn't a tidy little arrow pointing to it.

That's one of the things we learn as we grow older -- how to forgive. It comes easier at forty than it did at twenty.

I wonder that if you keep growing and changing like you're supposed to, if you always end up embarrassed about how stupid you used to be. Every year I realize how dumb I was the year before.

Thank you Jonah." He lowers his head at the break in my voice. I ignore the moisture in his eyes and pretend that mine don't sting. "For what?" he whispers. " For showing me that people can change. Even if it is one person out of a million.

If it doesn't agree with your spirit let it go.

You are either the person you were or the person you are, eventually you have to let go of one

Forgiveness is the subjective and fertile ground the acorn falls upon when gifted to ourselves and others.

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. Between the wish and the thing, the world lies waiting.

Where'd the days go, when all we did was play? And the stress that we were under wasn't stress at all just a run and a jump into a harmless fall

Relax. You will become an adult. You will figure out your career. You will find someone who loves you. You have a whole lifetime time takes time. The only way to fail at life is to abstain.

Time can play all sorts of tricks on you. In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults. That's what happened to me. Once upon a time, I was a boy named Hugo Cabret, and I desperately believed that a broken automaton would save my life. Now that my cocoon has fallen away and I have emerged as a magician named Professor Alcofrisbas, I can look back and see that I was right. The automaton my father discovered did save me. But now I have built a new automaton. I spent countless hours designing it. I made every gear myself, carefully cut every brass disk, and fashioned every bt of machinery with my own hands. When you wind it up, it can do something I'm sure no other automaton in the world can do. It can tel you the incredible story of Georges Melies, his wife, their goddaughter, and a beloved clock maker whose son grew up to be a magician. The complicated machinery inside my automaton can produce one-hundred and fifty-eight different pictures, and it can wrote, letter, by letter, an entire book, twenty-six thousand one hundred and fifty-nine words. These words. THE END

We often don't realize the passing of years until we see them in a child.

It would be inappropiate, undignified, at 38, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour or intensity of a 22 year old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry? Crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photobooths? Taking a whole day to make a compilation tape? Asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or TS Eliot or, god forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at 38, to expect a song or book or film to change your life.

There’s a different flavor to children’s literature you read after you grow up than there was reading it as a child. Things that were sweet as a child become bitter once you grow up.

I get so god damn lonely and sad and filled with regrets some days. It overwhelms me as I’m sitting on the bus; watching the golden leaves from a window; a sudden burst of realisation in the middle of the night. I can’t help it and I can’t stop it. I’m alone as I’ve always been and sometimes it hurts…. but I’m learning to breathe deep through it and keep walking. I’m learning to make things nice for myself. To comfort my own heart when I wake up sad. To find small bits of friendship in a crowd full of strangers. To find a small moment of joy in a blue sky, in a trip somewhere not so far away, a long walk an early morning in December, or a handwritten letter to an old friend simply saying ”I thought of you. I hope you’re well.”No one will come and save you. No one will come riding on a white horse and take all your worries away. You have to save yourself, little by little, day by day. Build yourself a home. Take care of your body. Find something to work on. Something that makes you excited, something you want to learn. Get yourself some books and learn them by heart. Get to know the author, where he grew up, what books he read himself. Take yourself out for dinner. Dress up for no one but you and simply feel nice. it’s a lovely feeling, to feel pretty. You don’t need anyone to confirm it.I get so god damn lonely and sad and filled with regrets some days, but I’m learning to breathe deep through it and keep walking. I’m learning to make things nice for myself. Slowly building myself a home with things I like. Colors that calm me down, a plan to follow when things get dark, a few people I try to treat right. I don’t sometimes, but it’s my intent to do so. I’m learning.I’m learning to make things nice for myself. I’m learning to save myself.I’m trying, as I always will.

For all her faults, it was actually my mom who instilled in me a love of reading, and books, for which I will always be grateful. She’s a complete bibliophile, so I’ve pretty much grown up around libraries and books.

it feels so scary getting old.

Growing up, imagination gave way to cynicism. Ignorance was traded in for world weariness. Fears remained, but they were the dull, suburban fears of illness, destitution, and death. The visceral terror of the unknown- of unseen things lurking under the bed or creeping out of the cupboard- became a fuzzy memory.

Now whenever I left class to go to the boys' room, I worried that I would end up on the blue tiled floor in a puddle of piss and blood.

I’m not everything I want to be, but I’m more than I was, and I’m still learning.

We had been younger. Yup, you can grow a lot in the blink of an eye.

Every day you say something or do something that challenges me, changes me.

We grow apart because we grow in different stages and not all of our stages align.

I've loved him my whole life, and somewhere along the way, that love didn't change but grew. It grew to fill the parts of me that I did not have when I was a child. It grew with every new longing of my body and desire until there was not a piece of me that did not love him. And when I look at him, there is no other feeling in me.

I’m learning persistence and the closing of doors, the way the seasons come and go as I keep walking on these roads, back and forth, to find myself in new time zones, new arms with new phrases and new goals. And it hurts to become, hurts to find out about the poverty and gaps, the widow and the leavers. It hurts to accept that it hurts and it hurts to learn how easy it is for people to not need other people. Or how easy it is to need other people but that you can never build a home in someone’s arms because they will let go one day and you must build your own.

I think people make their own faces, as they grow.

Never did the world make a queen of a girl who hides in houses and dreams without traveling.

I think she is growing up, and so begins to dream dreams, and have hopes and fears and fidgets, without knowing why or being able to explain them.

Resting on the roots of this old oak I lean back against his knotted trunk, shine my granny smith on my sleeve And ponder the days…

We were girls, you see, not even women, just girls, most of us when we started. And the boys were just boys, not men, most of them. We’d only begun to live life, we knew little and understood less. We were unformed, incomplete. It’s funny how easy it is to see that now. If you’d called me a child three years ago when this started I’d have been furious. But looking back? We were children just getting ready to figure out what adulthood was all about.

Don't you find it odd," she continued, "that when you're a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you're older, somehow they act offended if you even try.

We had so many dreams as children. Where do they go when we grow? Are they swallowed up by the mundane things of everyday life? Or do we lose them, leave them behind us in the dust, for new children to find and take up?

My dreams are going through their death flurries. I thought they were all safely buried, but sometimes they stir in their grave, making my heartstrings twinge. I mean no particular dream, you understand, but the whole radiant flock of them together—with their rainbow wings, iridescent, bright, soaring, glorious, sublime. They are dying before the steel javelins and arrows of a world of Time and Money.

FORKED BRANCHESWe grew up on the same street,You and me.We went to the same schools,Rode the same bus,Had the same friends,And even shared spaghettiWith each other's families.And though our roots belong toThe same tree,Our branches have grownIn different directions.Our tree,Now resembles a thousandOther treesIn a sea of a trillionOther treesWith parallel destiniesAnd similar dreams.You cannot envy the branchThat grows biggerFrom the same seed,And you cannotBlame it on the sun's direction.But you still compare us,As if we're still those twoKids at the parkSlurping down slushies andEating ice cream. Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun (2010)

We grew up on the same street,You and me.We went to the same schools,Rode the same bus,Had the same friends,And even shared spaghettiWith each other's families.And though our roots belong toThe same tree,Our branches have grownIn different directions.Our tree,Now resembles a thousandOther treesIn a sea of a trillionOther treesWith parallel destiniesAnd similar dreams.You cannot envy the branchThat grows biggerFrom the same seed,And you cannotBlame it on the sun's direction.But you still compare us,As if we're still those twoKids at the parkSlurping down slushies andEating ice cream.Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun (2010)

Have you ever dreamed of one thing for so long, wanted nothing more than to have that dream fulfilled, only to find out that maybe it wasn't what you actually wanted all along?"He juggled four stones lightly. "I believe that's called growing up.

She wondered if old dreams could haunt rooms - if, when one left forever the room where she had joyed and suffered and laughed and wept, something of her, intangible and invisible, yet nonetheless real, did not remain behind like a voiceful memory.

When you're a kid, the world can be bounded in a nutshell. In geographical terms, a child's universe is a space that comprises home, school and—possibly—the neighbourhood where your cousins or your grandparents live. In my case, the universe sat comfortably within a small area of Flores that ran from the junction of Boyacá and Avellaneda (my house), to the Plaza Flores (my school). My only forays beyond the area were when we went on holiday (to Córdoba or Bariloche or to the beach) or occasional, increasingly rare visits to my grandparents' farm in Dorrego, in the province of Buenos Aires.We get our fist glimpse of the big wide world from those we love unconditionally. If we see our elders suffer because they cannot get a job, or see them demoted, or working for a pittance, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the world outside is cruel and brutal. (This is politics.) If we hear our parents bad-mouthing certain politicians and agreeing with their opponents, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the former are bad guys and the latter are good guys. (This is politics.) If we observe palpable fear in our parents at the very sight of soldiers and policemen, our compassion translates our observations and we conclude that, though all children have bogeymen, ours wear uniforms. (This is politics.)

Everyone was always becoming someone else.Sometimes, when you were older, you became someone younger. And me, I felt old. How can aguy who’s about to turn seventeen feel old?

We were still at the age when girls are years older than guy, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to.

It is so demanding to be born into a house full of women, where everyone loves you so overwhelmingly that they end up suffocating with their love; a house where you, as the only child, have to be more mature than all the adults around....But the problem is that they want me to become everything they themselves couldn't accomplish in life.....As a result, I had to work my butt off to fulfill all their dreams at the same time.

What I feel now doesn't matter at all? But at what point am I entitled to say to myself, what I am feeling now is valid? After all, Anna-' Here Tommy turned to face her: 'one can't go through one's whole life in phases. There must be a goal somewhere.' His eyes gleamed out hatred; and it was with difficulty that Anna said: 'If you're suggesting that I've reached a goal, and I'm judging you from some superior point, then it's not true.''Phases,' he insisted. 'Stages. Growing pains.''But I think that's how women see-people. Certainly their own children. In the first place, there's always been nine months of not knowing whether the baby would be a girl or a boy. Sometimes I wonder what Janet would have been like if she'd been born a boy. Don't you see! And then babies go through one stage after another, and then they are children. When a woman looks at a child she sees all the things he's been at the same time. When I look at Janet sometimes I see her as a small baby and I feel her inside my belly and I see her as various sizes of small girl, all at the same time.' Tommy's stare was accusing and sarcastic, but she persisted: 'That's how women see things. Everything in a sort of continuous creative stream-well, isn't it natural we should?

Oh", she thought, "how horrible it is that people have to grow up-and marry-and change!

...I didn't run away to come home the same. -Claudia

I never said it was easy to find your place in this world, but I’m coming to the conclusion that if you seek to please others, you will forever be changing because you will never be yourself, only fragments of someone you could be. You need to belong to yourself, and let others belong to themselves too. You need to be free and detached from things and your surroundings. You need to build your home in your own simple existence, not in friends, lovers, your career or material belongings, because these are things you will lose one day. That’s the natural order of this world. This is called the practice of detachment.

I was banished from that world forever, I knew. I couldn't go back now. One day soon I would go away from here entirely; I would leave this house, perhaps never to return.I hugged myself, comforting my fear. Very well then, I thought, I will be my own house. I will build myself a house out of my own flesh and bones where my frightened child-self can find shelter. After all, isn't that one of the things that women do? We are houses for our children, shielding them from harm within the stronghold of our bodies, until they are strong enough to breathe and walk alone. So surely I must be able to give myself shelter now.

Everything changes, sweetheart. The universe loves to happen.

Everything changed when I learned to honour my body instead of fighting it. When I learned to take care of it, like a precious castle to protect this weary heart. To stop harming it, punishing it for looking like this or that, feeling like this or that. I don't look like they all told me I had to do, but I'm healthy and strong and vital. That is enough.

I could feel the ghosts of all the girls I'd been behind me in the alleyway, creeping in my wake. I could almost hear my own footsteps as an echo. For a moment it was so real that I spooked myself. I stopped and turned to look. There was only silence and darkness. I walked on.

Roseanne, Roseanne, if I called to you now, my own self calling to my own self, would you hear me? And if you could hear me, would you heed me?

When you’re a kid, you don’t think about big stuff that could change your life. You think about small things that might terrify you –like a bad report card or missing a goal in front of all your friends or your friends no longer wanting to play with you. Because that's the biggest stuff you know. The biggest disappointments are all tied to this small little universe of yours, because bigger things cannot fit into a small universe. If you wanted bigger things in there you needed to have more room –or make more room. Perhaps you thought about your parents or your pets dying, which was rare. But all you knew was you would be terribly sad and lonely. And on those occasions when people or pets actually died, someone usually came along and distracted you from feeling too much of your actual feelings. Grownups did that –they never left you alone to feel alone or think alone too much. They tended to think you are too small to know how to think and feel in big heaps, so they took parts of your heap onto themselves. To help – but in the long run –it doesn’t help at all. Because if you do not see, or feel or think, or taste the bitter things in life, you don’t know they exist. You have not seen enough of the world to know how terrible it could be. And unfortunately for Sam, this inability to process change persisted into adulthood.

At a certain point you have to leave childish things behind, and one of the childish things is a sense that 'Wow, I can draw' or in my case 'Wow, I can read'... You feel you have what's called a talent, but as you become an adult, if you hope to make things, you have to give up the preoccupation with talent otherwise you'll spend your life painting beautiful pictures of fruit bowls that look like fruit bowls.

I was always the girl growing up who just wasn’t quite like the rest of them. I liked working hard. I liked contorting my body until I could feel the ache inside my bones, until I could feel the pain in my teeth. I liked to wear lipstick and nothing else and found myself fascinated with the shape of my lips and the different colors I could make them. I ate too little. Slept too much. Masturbated far too often and at far too young an age. I enjoyed the feeling of being naked alone behind closed doors, exploring my deepest secrets within my imagination, as I put my hand over the rapid pace of my heart to feel how nervous it made me. I blushed at the faintest mention of my name and almost perished when complimented. I loved to find the answers behind someone’s eyes. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of when someone REALLY looks at you. And I read. Every chance I got.

Sara couldn't help but think that she had somehow missed the moment when life was meant to begin. For a long time she had simply drifted through it, reading. While everyone around her was teenaged, unhappy, and foolish, this hadn't been a problem. But then suddenly everyone had grown up around her, and she had done nothing but read.

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 after another, with the dull periods of peace skimmed over when they happened.

People say you're born innocent, but it's not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can't wash off. ... We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent.

It was the hate of the used and tormented, who are the children of the used and tormented, and whose own children will be used and tormented.

I nodded again, but I knew I would not grow up to drive a bulldozer. It would be awful to be dirty all day like these men. I didn't say it, but at best I would keep one in the backyard, like a goat.

Sometimes the gap between what you are and what you want to be is a little piece of paper called your college degree. So jump.

Milkers don’t spend half as long with their mothers." Eli spread his chore coat over Little Joe. "Not more than a few weeks. Sometimes one day. Maybe not even ... If you were a peeper, it’d be even worse. They don’t even get to see their mamas. They’re still jelly beans when they’re left alone to hatch.

The afternoon had passed to a ghostly gray. She was struck by the immensity of things, so much water and sky and forest, and after a time it occurred to her that she’d lived a life almost entirely indoors. Her memories were indoor memories, fixed by ceilings and plastered white walls. Her whole life had been locked to geometries: suburban rectangles, city squares. First the house she’d grown up in, then dorms and apartments. The open air had been nothing but a medium of transit, a place for rooms to exist.

Most people want peace without the aloneness of [spiritual] power. And they want the self-confidence of adulthood without having to grow up.

The moment you realize that life will hurt more than your death. While existing, we're forced to become acquainted with sadness. There's no antibiotic for the ridding of distress, and no alleviation of these intervals of pain we must encounter. Behind our eyes, are all these things: our stories, our dreams, our deficiencies, and our scars. Today would leave a scar.

The realization that my parents, too, felt pain and fear frightened me more than any strangers could.

I'd like to go back to five years old again. Just sometimes. To be turning over rocks and looking for pill bugs and holding earthworms, playing dolls, erecting forts, digging through dirt for marbles, burrowing in leaf piles, failing at igloo building, when my biggest concern was going to sleep with the lights off. I wish I was five again, before things got hard, before I was forced to grow up way too early and been stuck in this "adult" thing way too long. I wish I could sit in my Grandpa's lap and let him sing me crazy Irish songs and go over the names of the planets. "Gwampa, tell me about Outer Space." ... "Gwampa, sing the Swimming Song."I wish I could go back there, just for a little while, and pick raspberries by myself in the sun and find secret hideaways and not hurt, not worry, not carry the heavy things. If I could be five years old....just for a few minutes. Remember what it felt like to be free. That would be something.

[Jo to her mother] I knew there was mischief brewing. I felt it and now it's worse than I imagined. I just wish I could marry Meg myself, and keep her safe in the family.

Then, when I've got a degree in maths, or physics, or maths and physics, I will be able to get a job and earn lots of money and I will be able to pay someone who can look after me and cook my meals and wash my clothes, or I will get a lady to marry me and be my wife and she can look after me so I can have company and not be on my own.

There is no in between, we all have to touch our own bottom.

We bring champagne to Franklin and Jeffrey, and I offer a final toast, 'Wishing you all good things in your life together.' Short, simple, to the point. I look at Meredith, relaxed in her ivory gown, my sister is all grown up. I'm grateful we did our growing up together.

We do not get to choose how we start out in life. We do not get to choose the day we are born or the family we are born into, what we are named at birth, what country we are born in, and we do not get to choose our ancestry. All these things are predetermined by a higher power. By the time you are old enough to start making decisions for yourself, a lot of things in your life are already in place. It’s important, therefore, that you focus on the future, the only thing that you can change.

Whenever I am in a difficult situation where there seems to be no way out, I think about all the times I have been in such situations and say to myself, "I did it before, so I can do it again.

Or maybe memories are like karaoke - where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen's bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn't even know the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning - and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it's better not to know the lyrics to your life.

James, you’d like Lou Reed,” Michael insisted. “He was bisexual.”Their laughter turned to coughs. They were all staring at me when I turned around. I told myself to relax.“Oh, yeah?” I said. “He doesn’t sound bisexual.”Michael just shook his head, but Ronan and Glenn smiled.“They did electroshock therapy on him when he was a teenager,” Michael said.“Electro-what?” said Glenn. “They electrocuted people?”“Kind of. They zapped their brains to alter their personalities. That’s how they tried to make gay people straight back then.”They all looked at me for a response.I shrugged. “So, he was bisexual? It worked halfway?

7 Up soda pop mixed with bright pink grenadine with a chemical-tasting maraschino cherry stuck to the plastic straw. It was one of those drinks marketed for children, but Mandy could see that she wasn’t the only adult ordering one. For some reason or other these old-fashioned restaurants always seemed to attract old ladies ordering strawberry Jell-O with whipped cream, truck drivers ordering “worms and dirt” (chocolate pudding with Oreo cookies squished over the top in a glass bowl, fruit-flavoured gummy worms over the cookie crumbs) and businessmen trying not to get syrup from their hot fudge sundaes on their neckties and tailored suits. Mandy figured that maybe they were all trying to grasp a time way back in the past when they were all little children, excitedly ordering desert for a special occasion under the warm incandescent light from above, cheerful and bouncing music filling their minds. Hurriedly she ate the food, paid the tab and hurried back to her car in the bitter wind, not wanting to stick around for very long.

At what point in your life do you say I have had enough... money, food, clothes, these possessions that we keep killing one another for even power and dominance? One advice, look at your age and declare that my age dictates I start doing this thing, I should stop doing this and that, I should say this and not that... in essence grow your brain to reason. Just like that.

I was stressed and scared and I had to hurry to be someone, become something, do something. I was running and talking and cursed myself when I wasted my time on things that wouldn’t get me anywhere. It was work and it was money and I was never where I was, always somewhere else in my head far, far away.

I could turn up the volume on their songs and that loudness matched all my panic and fear, anger and emotions that seemed up until that point to be uncontrollable, even amorphous.

It all takes time and lessons and places, but I’m learning to listen to my restless heart, telling me to “go, go, go!

By the second cycle of the solstice of the warm time, the One will face the enemy. And the One will unearth the Shield of the Northern Lights and smote the enemy with daring and intelligence. The heart of the One is pious and evil will cower. Couatl will rise.

And the One will win the Armor of the Easter Dawn and defeat the enemy with audacity and wisdom. The body of the One is strong and ready to lead. Lammasu will pounce

And the One will take the Sword of the Western Sun and triumph over the enemy with boldness and insight. The arm of the One is steady and heads will roll. Snow Giants will battle

And the One will reveal the Bow of the Southern Star and conquer the enemy with courage and fine judgment. The sight of the One is true and the enemy cannot hide. Griffon will fly

Without making mistakes, there won't be lessons learned. Without getting hurt, there won't be knowledge gained. The only way we grow is by learning from the past. Always be willing to learn and grow daily. It's how we come to know who we are and what we are made of.

The worst thing that can happen to you as a young person, is to refuse to grow up. You refuse to grow up when you believe that someone else must take responsibility for your life and life circumstances.

Look forward to the wonderment of growing up, raising a family and driving by the gas station where the popular kids now work.

I wanted only a familiar voice, someone who knew me. Not some earlier, larval version of myself. . .

How can it be, after all this concentrated effort and separation, how can it be that I still resemble, so very closely, my own detestable mother?

It’s hard to describe, this feeling of seeing your kids spending time together like adults, meeting up again after being out there in the world like free agents. There’s something giddy and unreal about it. I knew that boy when he was afraid of strangers. I knew them both before they knew how to talk.

I always envisioned myself as traveling the ocean of life in a rowboat where my mother was one oar and my father, the other. Having two good, solid oars made rowing much easier.

Growing up is like that, I suppose. The strings fall away and you're left standing on your own.

My grandfather had been the ugliest, darkest, foulest, most depraved figure of my childhood, more beast than human, and I had grown up to be him, locked in the basement with my secrets as the rest of the family reveled in the petty and ordinary upstairs. Down there, I saw my black, ancient, ineluctable core exposed, like a crab forced out of its shell--dirty, vulnerable, and obscene. For the first time in my life, I was truly alone.

In some ways, forcing me to leave was the best thing that could have happened to me. In other ways, it was a disaster. I'm still glad they did it though, because I think I might have just died if I had stayed at the coast. Although I ended up there a couple years later, when my mother relapsed on a whim, I think I needed that two years away from that horrible little coastal town where time is frozen and ideas creep forward too slow to notice any progress.

Intimidated, old traumas triggered, and fearing for my safety, I did what I felt I needed to do.

John was still making comments regarding violent things that he shouldn't, but I hoped he was just being a big mouth. Nobody was going to listen to me anyway.

He told me that if I hung up, he'd do it. He would commit suicide. He told me that if I called the cops he would kill every single one of them and I knew that he had the potential and the means to do it

No amount of me trying to explain myself was doing any good. I didn't even know what was going on inside of me, so how could I have explained it to them?

It is not a single crime when a child is photographed while sexually assaulted (raped.) It is a life time crime that should have life time punishments attached to it. If the surviving child is, more often than not, going to suffer for life for the crime(s) committed against them, shouldn't the pedophiles suffer just as long? If it often takes decades for survivors to come to terms with exactly how much damage was caused to them, why are there time limits for prosecution?

The story of my birth that my mother told me went like this: "When you were coming out I wasn't ready yet and neither was the nurse. The nurse tried to push you back in, but I shit on the table and when you came out, you landed in my shit."If there ever was a way to sum things up, the story of my birth was it.

I never really grew up until I had kids.

When you choose to forgive the same people over and over again you do so because you don't want to believe your time loving them was wasted. Bad relationships over time can become investments, that are hard to let go of. The key to freedom is to realize that love is never wasted. The only thing wasted in life is the time you spend focusing on an unhappy situation that will never change to fit your needs, and not realizing the true investment of time and love are the lessons God wanted you to learn.

Unfortunately, some family members are so psychotic that no matter how hard you try to forge a healthy relationship, nothing will help. Now that you're an adult, take refuge in the fact that some things are beyond your control. You owe it to yourself to steer clear of people who are harmful to your health.

And though I had misgiving--obvious ones, too--one overwhelming thing drove me on: on the borderlands, my father would need me as much as I'd need him. That's what made me so blindly ready to go off with him. What boy doesn't wait his whole childhood to walk alongside his father on equal terms?

Healthy boys grow into healthy men.

According to most studies on the subject, boys who grow up without fathers grow up at a disadvantage.

Teaching a boy to be a man is the primary job of a father.

There’s a wound most troubled boys share, which, at its core, comes from the feeling that they don’t have their father’s unconditional love.

When a boy feels as if no one cares about him, or as if he will never amount to anything, he truly believes it doesn’t matter what he does.

Despite what you might believe right now, your son’s future is bright. You only need the right tools to help him get there.

It’s time to stop dreaming about who you want your son to be and help him become the healthy, happy, and successful man he’s supposed to be.

Healing, it turns out, is a journey. It doesn’t happen all at once.

I am living a simple life with a complicated mind and I have yet to find a state of mind where I feel safe with who I am, where I am, with what I do.

Living in this skin is hard and painful, most of the times, because I never volunteered to take this on. The daily sacrifice of heart over mind,the forever ongoing task of explaining this and that,and why I don’t want to look like this and be like thatbut still here I am and if this is the body I’ve been given I’m sure as hell gonna make it work.

CHILDREN Are Like ANGELS And On Earth, ANGELS Have No Color.... It's The Society To Blame That Teaches Racism, Turning An ANGLE To A Civilized Beast While They Are Growing Up....

My mother says when I get older my dusty hair will settle and my blouse will learn to stay clean, but I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain.In the movies there is always one with red lips who is beautiful and cruel. She is the one who drives the men crazy and laughs them all away. Her power is her own. She will not give it away. I have begun my own quiet war. Simple. Sure. I am the one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate.

My mother says when I get older my dusty hair will settle and my blouse will learn to stay clean, but I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain.In the movies there is always one with red lips who is beautiful and cruel. She is the one who drives the men crazy and laughs them all the away. He power is her own. She will not give it away. I have begun my own quiet war. Simple. Sure. I am the one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate.

A young hero is the world's greatest attraction.

I was running and deliberately lost my way. The world far off and nothing but my breath and the very next step and it’s like hypnosis. The feeling of conquering my own aliveness with no task but to keep going, making every way the right away and that’s a metaphor for everything.

I think I’m learningthat sometimes the bravest thing is not to face the world,but to turn away from it.

Sometimes you’re left with only 1 choice: Take what’s yours and run for you life.

Becoming a man means doing the right thing even though it may be hard or difficult. Boys do what is easiest. A man does what is right, whether easy or not.

I am a worried person with a stressed out soul, living a simple life with no capital.

No, you become a man when you first decide to put away the things of childhood, the talk of childhood, and the thoughts of childhood. You decide because you cannot be treated as both a man and a boy. Because you are either one or the other, but you are not both . . .

I am constantly torn between the will to be seen and still hidden so god damn well, a contradiction I never figured out.

Brushing my little teeth every morning of my childhood, I stood on my tippy toes, leaned over the sink and said to myself that when I am a big girl I will see from this high.Today I did the same thing, but the view from my toes was the same from flat feet.I'm a big girl now.

As a man begins to understand the sacrifices he must make to live the life he dreams of, he often loses his courage for such a life.

Your passions don’t have to connect to one another and no one needs to sign off on them. Passion isn’t logical… it’s only the fuel which keeps our souls alive. Let it be that simple.

And I realized that some things just don't work that way. Life isn't a fairy tail. And the person you fall in love with doesn't always love you back. But that's ok, because at the very least it makes you stronger. And brings you to a place where you can fall in love with yourself. And that to me is more important than finding someone that only makes you complete when they are around, It's really about Finding the person that will teach you ALL the lessons you need to know ...so that you feel complete all by yourself.

My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and would do all the veshches I had done, yes perhaps even killing some poor starry forella surrounded with mewing kots and koshkas, and I would not be able to really stop him. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world...

You set it, You hit it!And meanwhile you work hard to hit real quick.

So much has been done to my body, and still, somehow, not enough.

I tried to push my body through his and completely disappear.

I lost my innocence very young and it had nothing to do with sex.

The adult were once young.The young have not yet attained adulthood.

The child who refuses to travel in the father's harness, this is the symbol of man's most unique capability. "I do not have to be what my father was. I do not have to obey my father's rules or even believe everything he believed. It is my strength as a human that I can make my own choices of what to believe and what not to believe, of what to be and what not to be.

How awful it was, thought Tessa, remembering Fats the toddler, the way tiny ghosts of your living children haunted your heart; they could never know, and would hate it if they did, how their growing was a constant bereavement.

Without you there would be no me. I am everything reflected in your eyes. I am everything approved by your smile. I am everything born of your guidance. I am me only because of you.

She didn't like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she'd been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all.

Thoughts are such fleet magic things. Betsy's thoughts swept a wide arc while Uncle Keith read her poem aloud. She thought of Julia learning to sing with Mrs. Poppy. She thought of Tib learning to dance. She thought of herself and Tacy and Tib going into their 'teens. She even thought of Tom and Herbert and of how, by and by, they would be carrying her books and Tacy's and Tib's up the hill from high school.

I am but the reflection in your eyes, the effect of your expressions, and the sum of your praise and criticism.

Validate my existence with your words and I will speak to you all the day long.

How do you explain to a child who likes everyone in the world that adult life consists to a great extent of cutting people away?

The phrase ‘Boys will be boys,’ reflects that a male child is expected to be unpredictable and occasionally troublesome.

The first sound a child hears is very important. It determines character. A Muslim child always hears the Azan first. Words in praise of God. Words to live by.

Your chronological age makes you older, grownNess is a state of mind!

Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own.

She wished for a moment that they were all children again. It still seemed extraordinary to her, that everything had turned out the way it had.

We can all share with Nora and then she will have breakfast too!

This not how you hide, Corin!

It’s Ms. Hilda’s magic drawer! That’s where Ms. Hilda finds everything we need. Crayons, papers, glitters, candies, everything!

Candy. He spoke of candy. Was he still in the child's world where candy stood for something sweet enough to hold back tears? I had grown older, and had lost enthusiasm for childish delights. I wanted what every teenager wants -- freedom to develop into a woman, freedom to have full control over my life! Though I tried to tell him this, my voice had dried up along with my tears.

What are you doing?” Alecto asked in surprise, stepping back. Laughing brightly, she dragged him towards the greenhouse, the shattered glass reflecting rainbows as brilliant as a million Kodak flashcubes, glittering as they were cascaded through the breeze. “See, don’t be afraid of the glass, it can’t hurt us,” Mandy laughed, spectacularly eccentric, her eyes reflecting the fallen glass.“I wasn’t afraid of the glass, but this isn’t a very secluded place that you just decided to vandalize,” Alecto cautioned, smiling despite his words. Before Mandy could reply, she heard loud whispering in the air, behind the trees… it sounded like a group of people, all whispering in unison… “Somebody’s out there,” she exclaimed nervously.“Yeah, you’re right,” Alecto replied. Suddenly a sharp new vibrancy seemed to fill his eyes and he smiled coldly, taking the tree branch from Mandy and rapidly smashing in all of Mrs. Matthias’ stained glass house windows with it. Blue, green, yellow, red, turquoise, purple and an array of other colors showered through the sky noisily, sounding like wind chimes and crashing waves. “They’ll go away,” he told her, glancing up at the sky.“…Alecto, do you like me?” Mandy questioned, holding out her arms like a lopsided scarecrow as the glass fell through her dark red hair.“Yeah, sure,” he answered.“Will you be my friend, then? A real friend, not just another person who feels sorry for me?” Mandy asked.“…Alright, Mandy Valems,” Alecto agreed.

Suddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you're young enough, you don't know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair. A dandelion growing out of a crack in the side walk outside your front door is a garden. You could believe that a song your partner was singing in the evening was the most tragic opera in the world. It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you

Despite how lonely or broken down you might feel, we need you with us helping to make the world better, kinder and safer, especially for the little girls coming up.

children betrayed their parents by becoming their own people

I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.'...We sat there, side by side, on the old wooden bench, not saying anything. I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children books hidden in the middle of dull, long books. The kind with no pictures or conversations.

Shall I tell her? Shall I be a kind and merciful narrator and take our girl aside? Shall I touch her new, red heart and make her understand that she is no longer one of the tribe of heartless children, nor even the owner of the wild and infant heart of thirteen-year-old girls and boys? Oh, September! Hearts, once you have them locked up in your chest, are a fantastic heap of tender and terrible wonders - but they must be trained. Beatrice could have told her all about it. A heart can learn ever so many tricks, and what sort of beast it becomes depends greatly upon whether it has been taught to sit up or to lie down, to speak or to beg, to roll over or to sound alarm, to guard or to attack, to find or to stay. But the trick most folk are so awfully fond of learning, the absolute second they've got hold of a heart, is to pretend they don't have one at all. It is the very first danger of the hearted. Shall I give fair warning, as neither you nor I was given?

I don't know as much about children as I would like to. I am godmother to a wonderful three-year-old boy named dominic, the son of my friend Sophie. They live in Scotland, near Oban, and I don't get to see him often. I am always astonished, when I do, at his increasing personhood - no sooner had I gotten used to carrying about a warm lump of baby that he stopped being one started scurrying around on his own. I missed six months, and lo and behold, he learned how to talk! Now he talks to himself, which I find terribly endearing since I do, too.

The joy of reading with our children doesn't stop as they, and we, get older; it simply changes.

Mamas are always crying about how one day they see you as a baby, and the next morning, they see you growed up.

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day-A sunny day with the leaves just turning,The touch-lines new-ruled - since I watched you playYour first game of fotball, then, like a satelliteWrenched from its orbit, go drifting awayBehind a scatter of boys. I can seeYou walking away from me towards the schoolwith the pathos of a half-fledged thing set freeInto a wilderness, the gait of oneWho finds no path where the path should be.That hesitant figure, eddying awayLike a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,Has something I never quite grasp to conveyAbout nature's give-and-take - the small, the scorchingOrdeals which fire one's irresolute clay.I had worse partings, but none that soGnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughlySaying what God alone could perfectly show-How selfhood begins with a walking away,And love proved in the letting go.

Judith Rey watches the young woman. Once upon a time, I had a baby daughter. I dressed her in frilly frocks, enrolled her for ballet classes, and sent her to horse-riding camp five summers in a row. But look at her. She turned into Lester anyway. She kisses Luisa’s forehead. Luisa frowns, suspiciously, like a teenager. “What?

The idea of not being a kid anymore terrifies me. I am an adult and I have been hurled out of the world of boys and girls into the fray of men and women, and expected to function as a grown-up when I never functioned very well as a kid.

It was a time before Facebook and Instagram and texting. I imagine it must be easier now, for college students. Home must not feel so far away anymore. But how do you cut the apron strings if the strings are virtual?

A child, like your stomach, doesn't need all you can afford to give it.

Children are meant to grow up, and not to become Peter Pans. Not to lose innocence and wonder, but to proceed on the appointed journey: that journey upon which it is certainly not better to travel hopefully than to arrive, though we must travel hopefully if we are to arrive.

Growing up in a household where something is terribly wrong, you feel the weight of that mysterious something even though it's unspoken. It eats at you. Confuses you. It leaves you wondering if your view of the world will ever make sense.

And why is it that so many years later it is so easy to distinguish the bullies from their prey? Adult bodies surrounding the children of long ago. The years have changed nothing.

Katie soon learned there was a problem with hope.

Tell your children the most important things To Be when they grow up, is to be kind and compassionate, to be loving and grateful, and to be happy and at peace with who they are, no matter of what they chose to do when they grow up.

How you spend your time when you are not working or studying says everything about who you are and what is motivating your life.

You battled monsters. You sweat and cried your way to this one prolific moment where you finally realize that those dark days and sleepless nights were pre-requisites to your becoming.

I never want a girl to lose all hope that her life can’t completely turn around, even if she feels that she is at the edge, standing on one foot, and ready to say goodbye.

We live in a world where there is such a clear definition of what a girl should be that it takes almost no effort at all to completely hate ourselves.

Remember, nothing happens before it’s supposed to, so trust that, as you are striving for authenticity and personal excellence, the recognition of your life’s purpose is nearing closer.

I think it all basically breaks down to something like this: You have to look and feel great first. If you eat well, exercise and get enough sleep, you will have ample energy and the proper self-confidence to create and produce beyond your wildest dreams! Looking great and radiating positive energy, while presenting your highest quality work, is what will always make you the most valuable and only logical choice in whatever it is that you reach for.

Although many things may still need to happen before you identify what your exact work will be, I know that every single person whom you’re meeting and every experience that you’re having is necessary to you discovering your purpose. They are points on a map leading you to the moment where a match will finally be lit and you will be able to see through the darkness.

Recognize that you have been chosen to be alive, right now, at this exact moment in time and know that none of that is random. There is something about you, your past or your future that is required at this exact moment in history. We need to know who you are and what you have been through.

Finding yourself and creating a life that feels authentic and safe is the hardest, most important work that we will ever do and for girls, especially young girls, there is no one more equipped to do this work.

The only way that you can identify and then fulfill your life’s purpose is for you to love yourself, charge up your life and serve the world.

Sometimes you have to let go a little bit and travel the path of least resistance but this doesn’t mean that you quit when things get tough, as you are working towards a goal! It just means that you may only be able to see a rough draft of your final destination, right now, and that it’s safe to explore along the way.

As girls, we will do anything for the person whom we love. We will scale buildings in the rain or run through fire if it means saving our love’s life. There is absolutely nothing more life altering that the fire burning inside of our souls for the one we want most…

For most of us free-thinking, wild hearts, our relationship with God or the Universe will go through peaks and valleys – transforming into new concepts and beliefs, completely disappearing, at times, only then to instantly explode back into existence by something even as small as a sunset!

I am a strong and powerful woman.I am proud to be a woman and I celebrate the qualities that I have as a woman.I am not defined by other people’s opinion of who I should be or what I should do as a woman. I determine that, not anyone else.I am not passed up for a position, title, or promotion because I am a woman.I fully deserve all the good things that comes my way.Irrespective of what anyone might think, being a woman places no boundaries or limits on my abilities.I can do anything I set my mind to.I celebrate my womanhood and I am beautiful both inside and out.

Growing up is, at heart, the process of learning to take responsibility for whatever happens in your life. To choose growth is to embrace a love that heals.

Adults always teased me about having boyfriends, but there was an age where it was no longer a joke, the idea that boys might actually want you.

A self-made man" - not of woman born but alchemized, through sheer force of will, by the man himself. This is what I want to be. I want to be a self-made woman. I want to conjure myself out of every sparkling, fast moving thing I can see. I want to be the creator of myself. I'm going to begat myself

I was never afraid of the dark and I spent my youth walking through empty playgrounds at midnight, worried mothers telling girls to be careful and ”the world is an ugly place and not everyone wants you well”. But I was not afraid and I wished for adrenaline to make my veins pulsate in that way that puts them more on the outside of my skin than inside.After the first night with you I never walked alone at night again because suddenly I had something to lose. Something to save.

It is us who change. We grow stronger, and the problems appear less imposing.

And this is what being an artist means, being a poet? To sacrifice yourself for your art, sacrifice your heart for your art, because it’s only through something broken that something beautiful can grow.

Why is a caterpillar wrapped in silk while it changes into a butterfly? So the other caterpillars can't hear the screams. Change hurts

Growing up is never straight forward.There are moments when everything is fine, and other moments where you realize that there are certain memories that you'll never get back, and certain people that are going to change, and the hardest part is knowing thatthere's nothing you can do except watch them.

This the kind of world, if you don’t die, you just keep on growing up and living through everything that comes.

In a way it scared me, having a summer of experiences and feelings that belonged to me alone. What happened in front of my friends felt read. What happened to me by myself felt partly dreamed, partly imagined, definitely shifted and warped by own fears and wants. And who knows? Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.

I am a complicated person with a simple life.