Adults Quotes

“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Adults...struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“That was when it was all made painfully clear to me. When you are a child, there is joy. There is laughter. And most of all, there is trust. Trust in your fellows. When you are an adult...then comes suspicion, hatred, and fear. If children ran the world, it would be a place of eternal bliss and cheer. Adults run the world; and there is war, and enmity, and destruction unending. Adults who take charge of things muck them up, and then produce a new generation of children and say, "The children are the hope of the future." And they are right. Children are the hope of the future. But adults are the damnation of the present, and children become adults as surely as adults become worm food.
Adults are the death of hope.”
― Peter David, Tigerheart

“She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.”
― Peter De Vries

“Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good raw, and then put them in tins, and make them revolting.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up”
― Stephen King, It

“Why did adults have to be so thick? They always say “tell the truth,” and when you do, they don’t believe you. What’s the point?”
― Rick Riordan, The Red Pyramid

“You and I both know that love is for children,'' he said. ''We're adults. Compatibility is for adults.''

''Compatibility is for my Bluetooth and my car,'' Teresa replied. ''Only they get along just fine, and my car never makes my bluetooth feel like shit.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Sinner

“[E]verywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there's a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn't even hear.”
― Emma Donoghue, Room

“I bet if you look at the average teenager and the average adult, the average teenager has read more books in the last year than the average adult. Now of course the adult would be all like, 'I'm busy, I got a job, I got stuff to do.' WHATEVER! READ! I mean, you're watching CSI: Miami. Why would you be watching CSI: Miami, when you could be READING CSI: Miami, the novelization?”
― John Green

“He preferred smart questions to smart answers.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

“A rebel adult often seems like a glorious savior, whereas a rebel child often seems like a little devil.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“It's only adults who read the top layers most of the time. I think children read the internal meanings of everything.”
― Maurice Sendak, The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to Present

“I don't like being with grown-up people. I've known that a long time. I don't like it because I don't know how to get on with them.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don't want to think about the rest. Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“On the other hand, when you grow up you will discover that some of the people in this world never passed beyond the stage of the cave-man.”
― Hendrik Willem van Loon, The Story of Mankind

“Without knowing it, the adults in our lives practiced a most productive kind of behavior modification. After our chores and household duties were done we were give "permission" to read. In other words, our elders positioned reading as a privilege - a much sought-after prize, granted only to those goodhardworkers who earned it. How clever of them.”
― Mildred Armstrong Kalish, Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression

“...you seemed to be listening to me, not to find out useful information, but to try to catch me in a logical fallacy. This tells us all that you are used to being smarter than your teachers, and that you listen to them in order to catch them making mistakes and prove how smart you are to the other students. This is such a pointless, stupid way of listening to teachers that it is clear you are going to waste months of our time before you finally catch on that the only transaction that matters is a transfer of useful information from adults who possess it to children who do not, and that catching mistakes is a criminal misuse of time.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Progress should never be impeded by a need to coddle adults who respond to the world as children.”
― Kelli Jae Baeli, Supernatural Hypocrisy: The Cognitive Dissonance of a God Cosmology: Volume 3: Cosmology of the Bible

“Ender understood more than she said. Manipulation of gravity was one thing; deception by the officers was another; but the most important message was this: the adults are the enemy, not the other armies. They do not tell us the truth.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“Adults are just making things up as they go along. And when they’re scared, adults have no more answers than us kids”
― Mike A. Lancaster, Human.4

“Let's teach that loving isn't always loving. Like when you loved the hamster so much that it died. Some adults do that too. Too much, the wrong way. These are 'Stay away' zones on your body. These are 'Stay away' people. You don't have to obey all adults. Not even parents. Disagree respectfully. Run, if you need. Shout, if you need. Adults can be bad too.”
― Deborah Ainslie, All Flowers Are Not Yellow

“One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about.”
― Michael Ende

“Archie became absolutely still, afraid that the rapid beating of his heart might betray his sudden knowledge, the proof of what he'd always suspected, not only of Brother Leon but most grownups, most adults: they were vulnerable, running scared, open to invasion.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“It was them and not them, maybe the ones they’d never been. I could almost see those others standing in the garden where the pea plants were, feet planted between the rows. They stood without moving, their faces glowing with some shine a long time gone. A time before I lived. Their arms hung at their sides.

They’d always been there, I thought blearily, and they’d always wanted to be more than they were. They should always be thought of as invalids, I saw. Each person, fully grown, was sick or sad, with problems attached to them like broken limbs. Each one had special needs.

If you could remember that, it made you less angry.

They’d been carried along on their hopes, held up by the chance of a windfall. But instead of a windfall there was only time passing. And all they ever were was themselves.

Still they had wanted to be different. I would assume that from now on, I told myself, wandering back into the barn. What people wanted to be, but never could, traveled along beside them. Company.”
― Lydia Millet, A Children's Bible

“Adults tend to repress their pleasure. Sad to say, I think we become adults only through disappointment, grief, and lies. So of course gradually we become tough, less sensitive.”
― Jean-Louis Gassee

“Some people discard their childhood like an old hat.
They forget about it like a phone number that's no longer valid.
They used to be kids, then they became adults - but what are they now?
Only those who grow up but continue to be children are humans.”
― Erick Kästner