Oh God, I'm miss­ing the gene which makes you grow up and buy a flat in Streatham and start visiting Homebase every weekend. Everyone's moving on without me, into a world I don't understand.

To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.

Don’t worry if people think you’re crazy. You are crazy. You have that kind of intoxicating insanity that lets other people dream outside of the lines and become who they’re destined to be.

I know that your soul is on life support and that you feel lost and like you’re completely spinning out of control, but you’re finding yourself — here, tonight… even in this darkness.

Growing up is made up of a million small moments in time, and one of the most painful is the moment you're severed from the whole, when you realise that your parent is complicated, and fallible and human.

I ruin everything. I think that a bullet must have passed through my heart when I was very young, causing me to bleed out slowly, over things and people and every white surface that I’d ever come across.

We live through evolution ourselves, each of us, progressing through different apprehensions of the world, at each age forgetting the last age, every previous mind erased. We no longer see the same world at all.

For years I was deathly afraid of my own weaknesses, but when I closed my eyes and let myself be vulnerable to them it allowed miracles to take place. Miracles that were only alive when I accessed my BLIND faith.

There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don't lose yourself at happy hour, but don't lose yourself on the corporate ladder, either.

When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser.

When we grow up, we find ways to hide our anxieties, our loneliness, our fear and sorrow. But children hide nothing, putting everything into their tears, which they spread liberally about for the whole world to see.

The older I get the more mixed up life seems. When you're little, it's all so plain. It's all laid out like a game ready to play. You think you know exactly how it's going to go. But things happen...

It was a time before Facebook and Instagram and texting. I imagine it must be easier now, for college students. Home must not feel so far away anymore. But how do you cut the apron strings if the strings are virtual?

That’s the thing about being youngwe are textbook pagesof trial and errorfalling down and getting upnot by way of standing andbrushing off our jeansbuy by laying where we felluntil we were high enough to forget

We realized that the version of the world [our parents] rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about lawns.