Young Adulthood Quotes

“L'Age Licence. As in: License to experience, mess up, license to fail, license to do... whatever, before you're settled.”
― Lucy Knisley, An Age of License: A Travelogue

“The years between eighteen and twenty-eight are the hardest, psychologically. It’s then you realize this is make or break, you no longer have the excuse of youth, and it is time to become an adult – but you are not ready.”
― Helen Mirren, In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures

“I stepped from the air-conditioned compartment onto the station platform, and the motherly breath of the suburbs enfolded me. It smelt of lawn sprinklers and station wagons and tennis rackets and dogs and babies.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I wouldn't think of leaving college. It's just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they're never coming again, and I'm not really getting all I could out of them.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“The worst thing about looking back is seeing all that wasteful embarrassment surrounding you like the polystyrene foam of early adulthood, weightless and toxic. Wanting to go
back and explain that you’ll always be like this, so you might as well make the best of it. You are both more and less interesting than you think. Your sadness is not a virtue. Stop wanting to be someone else and resolve to be your own febrile self.”
― Soula Emmanuel, Wild Geese

“In a use-it-or-lose-it fashion, the new frontal lobe connections we use are preserved and quickened. Those we don't use just waste away through pruning. We become what we hear and see and do every day. …Twentysomethings who use their brains by engaging with good jobs and real relationships and the 'real world' are learning the language of adulthood just when their brains are primed to learn it.”
― Meg Jay, Attached, The Defining Decade, How to Talk to Anyone, Make it Happen 4 Books Collection Set