Rodney Crowell Quotes

As a child, I thought, 'Once I am a grown-up, there will be no more fear, no more worries,' and it turns out that's not true.

A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants.

I must be more sensible and realize that at my age, illusions are hardly permitted and they will always destroy me.

Seeing my parents makes me realise that life is not a fairy tale.

Youth is a religion from which one always ends up being converted.

I started out with this 'La Boheme' fantasy, but as you get older, the 'La Boheme' fantasy becomes less sexy, believe me.

Back when I was an idealistic 18-year-old on my way to Chicago, I might have believed that being on the side of virtue would guarantee a good outcome. These many years later, I know better.

Love is not everything ... It is only when we are young that we think it is.

These things end,” she said. “They always end. Nobody marries their first love. First love is just that. First. It’s implied that something else will follow.

Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.

At twenty a man is full of fight and hope. He wants to reform the world. When he is seventy he still wants to reform the world, but he know he can't.

Perhaps the biggest myth about cynicism is that it deepens with age. I think what really happens is that experience painfully rips away layers of scales from our eyes, and so we do indeed become more cynical about many of the things we naively accepted when younger.

I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.

It is inevitable that many ideas of the young mind will later have to give way to the hard realities of life.

I'm a hopeless romantic and I believe that you can find love in many different places and be very conflicted. I've discovered as I've grown up that life is far more complicated than you think it is when you're a kid. It isn't just a straightforward fairytale.

As I get older the stars have gone from my eyes more, and I see that life is just something that has to be lived with, that it's better not to struggle.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

I was in a bar and I said to a friend, 'You know, we've become those 40-year-old guys we used to look at and say, 'Isn't it sad?'

No generation has escaped it - one morning, your skill with the eight-track or the record player or the cotton gin suddenly ceases to impress. It's just one of those inevitable disappointments that come with growing up, like the realization that Santa doesn't exist or the way that music always takes a turn for the worse after you turn 30.

It was quite a blow to have my perfect image of my father shattered, but that's something we all face before we come to full adulthood.

I'm no longer in my 20s, and I think, by default, the rose-colored glasses are off.

I'll never forget when I was 12 years old. I couldn't wait until the day I was 16 and could drive a car. I thought that'd be the end of life's problems. I mean, you can drive! What is there left? And then I turned 16 and realized there were still problems.

I used to love getting older.

Don't tell me you don't know what love is When you're old enough to know better.

Cynic: an idealist whose rose-colored glasses have been removed, snapped in two and stomped into the ground, immediately improving his vision