Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.

She was a grown up now, and she discovered that being a grown up was not quite what she had suspected it would be when she was a child. She had thought then that she would make a conscious decision one day to simply put her toys and games and little make-believes away. Now she discovered that was not what happened at all. Instead, she discovered, interest simply faded. It became less and less and less, until a dust of years drew over the bright pleasures of childhood, and they were forgotten.

Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way.

One loses, as one grows older, something of the lightness of one's dreams; one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no great loss perhaps.

The beautiful thing about losing your illusions, he thought, was that you got to stop pretending.

I passed from childhood into the world of the adult. But what
a disappointing world it turned out to be. The colors of the sky, the grass, the
flowers were gone, muted and grayish. Everything was blurred by the pattern
over my eyes.

I had grown accustomed to living within myself. I was resigned to the knowledge that I had lost all appreciation of the outside world, that the loss of its bright colors was an inseparable part of the loss of my childhood, and that, in a certain sense, one had to pay for freedom and maturity of the soul with the renunciation of this cherished aura. But now, overjoyed, I saw that all this had only been buried or clouded over and that it was still possible — even if you had become liberated and had renounced your childhood happiness — to see the world shine and to savor the delicious thrill of the child’s vision.

First melted off the hope of youth Then Fancy's rainbow fast withdrew And then experience told me truth In mortal bosoms never grew 'Twas grief enough to think mankind All hollow servile insincere But worse to trust to my own mind And find the same corruption there

I, then a young and omniscient student (alas, I was soon to lose both these virtues)...

I suffered at the time from an ugliness I no longer find on my childhood face.

When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

But illusions die hard, and the brighter they are the longer they take adying.

Whether it is because the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or because reality takes shape in the memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers.

but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart