There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow old or else pay more for remaining the same.

For as I grow older, life seems to me simply an endless succession of problems to be solved, rather than hours to be enjoyed.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

There was that law of life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed.

Life is full of tough choices, indeed.

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

Simplify life as one might, one could not wholly escape its enormous complication.

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I'm starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life's sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it's my own choices that'll lock me in, it seems unavoidable — if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.

The simple life of our grandmothers is a thing of the past. For the woman of to-day each year life grows more complex, and we all know that the more complex the machinery the more competent must be those who run it. Does this not lead to a conclusion in perfect accord with the spirit of the age?

All teenagers knew this was true. The process of growing up was nothing more than figuring out what doors hadn't yet been slammed in your face. For years, parents tell you that you can be anything, have anything, do anything. That was why she'd been so eager to grow up-until she got to adolescence and hit a big fat wall ofreality. As it turned out, she couldn't have anything she wanted. You didn't get to be pretty or smart or popular just because you wanted it. You didn't control your own destiny, you were too busy trying to fit in.

Everybody dies. So much of growing up consists of coming to grips with this fact.

Growing older is to grow more wicked.

The difficulty in life is the choice.