Grown ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets.

Grown ups are certainly very strange.

Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.

Most adults, by contrast, find it hard to be playful — no doubt because they have to take care of all the responsibilities that come with an adult’s life. Creative adults, however, have not forgotten how to play.

Grown-ups have developed an unpleasant habit of comforting themselves for their degradation by pretending that children are childish.

I wonder if realizing you're not sure about stuff is what makes you a grown up?

We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

Not all games are innocent. Some come dangerously close to cruelty.

Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.

Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

Adults are only kids grown up

Grown people know that they do not always know the way of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof.

Even in this world of course it is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.

When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they don’t really know what they mean.