That's the worst of growing up, and I'm beginning to realize it. The things you wanted so much when you were a child don't seem half so wonderful to you when you get them.
Interpretation
As we mature, the things we dreamed of as children may lose their allure and not fulfill our expectations.
This quote reflects the disillusionment that often accompanies adulthood, where the desires and dreams of childhood may not translate into the happiness or fulfillment one anticipated. It suggests that growing up brings a complex understanding of reality, often leaving us to confront the bittersweet nature of our aspirations versus their actual outcomes.
In practice
During a graduation speech to remind students about the realities of adulthood.
A broken heart in real life isn't half as dreadful as it is in books. It's a good deal like a bad tooth, though you won't think THAT a very romantic simile. It takes spells of aching and gives you a sleepless night now and then, but between times it lets you enjoy life and dreams and echoes and peanut candy as if there were nothing the matter with it.
A house isn't a home without the ineffable contentment of a cat with its tail folded about its feet. A cat gives mystery, charm, suggestion.
Gilbert darling, don't let's ever be afraid of things. It's such dreadful slavery. Let's be daring and adventurous and expectant. Let's dance to meet life and all it can bring to us, even if it brings scads of trouble and typhoid and twins!" (Anne to Gilbert)
Youth is not a vanished thing but something that dwells forever in the heart.
I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.
She had dreamed some brilliant dreams during the past winter and now they lay in the dust around her. In her present mood of self-disgust, she could not immediately begin dreaming again. And she discovered that, while solitude with dreams is glorious, solitude without them has few charms.
Growing old has been the greatest surprise of my life.
You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different.
When I remember bygone days I think how evening follows morn So many I loved were not yet dead, So many I love were not yet born.
People don't realize it, but no one lives that rock and roll life 24-7. They think it's hundreds of bottles of champagne flowing and private jets and money. But there's a lot of time when you're traveling - time to think, time to be lonely. Sometimes it gets to you.
Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don't do that by sitting around.
I mourn my old life here. We barely scraped by, but I knew where I fit in, I knew what my place was in the tightly interwoven fabric that was our life. I wish I could go back to it because, in retrospect, it seems so secure compared to now, when I am so rich and famous and so hated by the authorities in the capitol.
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