“Adolescents are simply those people who haven't as yet chosen between childhood and adulthood. For as long as anyone tries to hold on to the advantages of childhood—the freedom from responsibility, principally—while seeking to lay claim to the best parts of adulthood, such as independence, he is an adolescent. […] Eventually most people choose to be adults, or are forced into it. A very few retreat into childhood and never leave it again. A large number remain adolescents for life.”

— Gene Wolfe

Volume 2, Ch. 23
Fiction, The Book of the Short Sun (1999–2001)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Adolescents are simply those people who haven't as yet chosen between childhood and adulthood. For as long as anyone tr…" by Gene Wolfe?

Gene Wolfe 102

American science fiction and fantasy writer 1931–2019

Related quotes

“Childhood in large parts of modern Britain, at any rate, has been replaced by premature adulthood, or rather adolescence. Children grow up very fast but not very far. That is why it is possible for 14 year olds now to establish friendships with 26 year olds - because they know by the age of 14 all they are ever going to know.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Frontpage Magazine interview (August 31, 2005).

“What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is like what happens to every individual when he passes from childhood to adolescence and from youth to manhood.”

Leo Tolstoy A Letter to a Hindu

Source: A Letter to a Hindu (1908), VI
Context: What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is like what happens to every individual when he passes from childhood to adolescence and from youth to manhood. He loses what had hitherto guided his life and lives without direction, not having found a new standard suitable to his age, and so he invents all sorts of occupations, cares, distractions, and stupefactions to divert his attention from the misery and senselessness of his life. Such a condition may last a long time.

“Childhood is for spoiling adulthood.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

08 Jul 92
Source: The Days Are Just Packed

“Between childhood, boyhood, adolescence and manhood (maturity) there should be sharp lines drawn with tests, deaths, feats, rites, stories, songs, and judgments.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

“Pity those—adventurers, adolescents, authors of young adult fiction—who make their way in the borderland between worlds. It is at worst an invisible and at best an inhospitable place. Build your literary house on the borderlands, as the English writer Philip Pullman has done, and you may find that your work is recommended by booksellers, as a stopgap between installments of Harry Potter, to children who cannot (one hopes) fully appreciate it, and to adults, disdainful or baffled, who 'don't read fantasy.' Yet all mystery resides there, in the margins, between life and death, childhood and adulthood, Newtonian and quantum, 'serious' and 'genre' literature. And it is from the confrontation with mystery that the truest stories have always drawn their power.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Dust & Daemons, The New York Review of Books (March 25, 2004)

“These days adolescence stretches much further into adulthood than it used to. There's no longer any encouragement to be mature.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

As quoted in Elevator Music (1994) by Joseph Lanza
Context: I began to become an adult when I was 24 and got married and had children. That matures you, but I wouldn't say I was fully an adult until I was in my forties. The trouble with the whole adult debate is that if you're asking 18-year-olds to go out and fight wars for you then you can't deny them adult rights even though in sorts of other ways they wouldn't qualify until they were about 25. These days adolescence stretches much further into adulthood than it used to. There's no longer any encouragement to be mature.