Laura

“I thought about it, about what I felt, about this, and I don’t want to get mawkish or anything,’ she said, ‘but first love, I think it’s like a song, a stupid pop song that you hear and you think, well that is all I will ever want to listen to, it’s got everything, it’s clearly the greatest piece of music ever written, I need nothing else. ’Course we wouldn’t put it on now. We’re too hard and experienced and sophisticated. But when it comes on the radio, well, it’s still a good song.”
― David Nicholls, Sweet Sorrow

“Standing before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible. It is not the disgust of seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun pumped outside of Becca Arrington's house. This cannot be addressed by breathing exercises. This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“It felt now as if I’d never known them and I couldn’t know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I’d grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“Imagine adulthood as a garden. We enter through a gate, leaving childhood behind a place we can glance at over the fence, but never actually return to. Being eighteen is to lean on the gatepost and look at the garden ahead, map in hand. There are hundreds of paths to choose from. Some lead to pristine lawns, rose gardens, bluebell woods, lily ponds or vegetable allotments. There are abandoned water butts with lurking toads, streams with banks of wild garlic, dense woodland with ancient, gnarly trees, and boiling greenhouses with tropical, poisonous plants. There are treehouses and garden sheds, green pools and rusty trampolines, upturned gnomes and dried-up fountains, crumbling walls and rickety fences. There are beauties to stop and admire: arches of rambling roses, and dragonflies dancing on water. But there are dangers, too: wasps that sting and rabbit holes that, if you're not looking, can twist an ankle.

Some of us take the main path, content to settle down in a deckchair, basking in the dappled sunlight. Some of us divert from the path to swim in streams, tumble down hills or clamber up trees, risking life and limb. Some are given the wrong directions, ending up in the sculpture park when they hoped to be in the wildflower meadow.

But that's not a problem. All of us, at any point, have the option to return to the starting gatepost, to take a new path and begin a new journey. It is at this moment we champion this daring eighteen-year-old outlook. We revisit that place of uncertainty, of risk, of potential, of excitement. And from here we venture forth down a new path.”
― Alice Loxton, Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives