Alice Hoffman Quotes

Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.

When you are 20 years old, you are immature.

One doesn't remain a teenager forever.

Maturity is only a short break in adolescence.

I have this sense that I didn't really start growing up until my twenties.

I used to be a child. It came naturally to me. I was an adult for a time, too. That came less naturally.

I am a child who is getting on.

There are children born to be children, and others who must mark time till they can take their natural places as adults.

A boy has two jobs. One is just being a boy. The other is growing up to be a man.

Nobody understands anyone 18, including those who are 18.

Children who have been in work for a long time suddenly get a thud down to earth once the cuteness fades, hips widen, voices drop and jawlines strengthen.

Like many other people of my generation, I don't think I ever really bothered to grow up. I wasn't ever really a proper teenager until I was about 19, and maybe I got a bit stuck there, because it seemed to go on and on.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.

You must remember that anyone under 30 - especially a ballplayer - is an adolescent. I never got close to being an adult until I was 32. Even though I was married and had a son at 20, I was a kid at 32, living at home with my parents. Sure, I was a manager then. That doesn't mean you're grown up.

Age is an accumulation of life and loss. Adulthood is a series of lines crossed.

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.

For many of us, the curtain had just come down on childhood.

Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.

When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you.

Growing up is scary because it happens without you knowing it.

We all, one day, realize that we’re not going to be kids forever and we’re going to grow up.

But I'm warning you, we're growing up.

For me, the end of childhood came when the number of candles on my birthday cake no longer reflected my age, around 19 or 20. From then on, each candle came to represent an entire decade.

Many of the things that I have written on have focused, at least a big part of the story, on adolescents. I think that in that period of life, so much happens, and it's the period of life where you're forming into an adult. In certain ways, you're already an adult and in certain ways you're still a kid.