If cynicism is inevitable as one ages, so is the yearning for innocence. To children heaven is being an adult, and to adults heaven is being children again.
The clash between child and adult is never as stubborn as when the child within us confronts the adult in our child.
All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.
Until you can intelligently articulate the other side's position, you are not an adult. You are a liberal.
Any mature, responsible adult doesn't run around stomping their feet and screaming 'I'm a mature, responsible, adult. '
Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude-but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.
I am twenty years old. To a world-wise adult, I am little more than a child. To any child, however, I am old enough to be distrusted, to be excluded forever from the magical community of the short and beardless.
Behind every successful child is an adult who believed in him.
There's simply no way you can tell a woman you work with that you disapprove of her relationship with her adult child, no matter how much you think it would be better for him to move out.
The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.
Frequently parents forget that children are people. I don't try to treat Kristen as an adult, but I do try to treat her as a person, with a child's sensibilities.
Every child should have a caring adult in their lives. And that's not always a biological parent or family member. It may be a friend or neighbor. Often times it is a teacher.
It's very easy to turn a toy into an adult toy: Location, location, location.
Naturally, I have compensated in my adult years by owning very large numbers of books.
A child speaks more sense than an adult half of the time.
The fact is I am guilty of sexual immorality. And I take responsibility for the entire problem. I am a deceiver and a liar. There's a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it for all of my adult life.
Sometimes I don't feel like a functioning adult
We believe that what matters most is not narrow appeals masquerading as values, but the shared values that show the true face of America; not narrow values that divide us, but the shared values that unite us: family, faith, hard work, opportunity and responsibility for all, so that every child, every adult, every parent, every worker in America has an equal shot at living up to their God-given potential. That is the American dream and the American value.
I thought being an adult meant knowing what you believe, but that has not been my experience.
Every adult in the world has some sense that he or she might be obliterated at any time by these weapons that we have created.