“That’s one of the things we learn as we grow older — how to forgive. It comes easier at forty than it did at twenty.”

“Relax. You will become an adult. You will figure out your career. You will find someone who loves you. You have a whole lifetime; time takes time. The only way to fail at life is to abstain.”

“The right thing to do is so easy to see when you’re seventeen years old and don’t have to make any big decisions. When you know that no matter what you do, someone will take care of you and fix everything. But when you’re grown up, the world is not that black and white, and the right thing doesn’t a tidy little arrow pointing to it.”

“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.”

“Where’d the days go, when all we did was play? And the stress that we were under wasn’t stress at all just a run and a jump into a harmless fall”

“It’s hard at times, but it makes a kid strong in ways that most people can’t understand. Teaches them that even though people are left behind, new ones will inevitable take their place; that every place has something good – and bad – to offer. It makes a kid grow up fast.”

“We often don’t realize the passing of years until we see them in a child.”

“There is hell and there is war. The two are difficult to distinguish, but hopefully you’ll never know the sting of either. That’s why you need to be good girls. The world is a mysterious place, full of times. An abundance of times. Times. War times. Peace times. Sometimes it is difficult to figure out exactly what time. As you sit here today, ask yourself: What time is it?”

“How does one know you’ve “made it”?You no longer feel like you have anything to prove to anyone. You have no regrets or resentments from the past, anger that you’re working from. No people you want revenge on or songs you want to sing in order to finally speak your mind. Instead, you work from a place of wanting to do the work only, without any attachment to the outcome.”

“It is not natural for human beings to NOT grow to the next stage of life when they should.”

“Growing up takes time and effort.”

“Time can play all sorts of tricks on you. In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults. That’s what happened to me. Once upon a time, I was a boy named Hugo Cabret, and I desperately believed that a broken automaton would save my life. Now that my cocoon has fallen away and I have emerged as a magician named Professor Alcofrisbas, I can look back and see that I was right. The automaton my father discovered did save me. But now I have built a new automaton. I spent countless hours designing it. I made every gear myself, carefully cut every brass disk, and fashioned every bt of machinery with my own hands. When you wind it up, it can do something I’m sure no other automaton in the world can do. It can tel you the incredible story of Georges Melies, his wife, their goddaughter, and a beloved clock maker whose son grew up to be a magician. The complicated machinery inside my automaton can produce one-hundred and fifty-eight different pictures, and it can wrote, letter, by letter, an entire book, twenty-six thousand one hundred and fifty-nine words. These words. THE END”

“I know there are days when even one single positive thought feels like too much effort, but you must develop an unconditional love for life. You must never lose your childish curiosity for the possibilities in every single day. Who you can be, what you can see, what you can feel and where it can lead you. Be in love with your life, everything about it. The sadness and the joys, the struggles and the lessons, your flaws and strengths, what you lose and what you gain.”

“Great growth comes from loneliness. You have time to develop, dwell in your own mind and go a bit mad. All the great people are a bit mad. That’s good to remember. Don’t escape it. Great growth comes from time spent in foreign lands, watching foreign people with foreign cultures. It makes you forget about your own land and race and town for a while. Great growth also comes from rooting yourself into one place from time to time. Unpack your bags, get a nice bed, a bookshelf, some friends. Learn to show up, keep in touch, stick around. Growth comes in all sorts of forms and shapes, everywhere at all times, and it’s yours to take and consume. Do what ought to be done. Here and now, to get you somewhere — anywhere.”

“Like it or not, we either add to the darkness of indifference and out-and-out evil which surround us or we light a candle to see by.We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We’ve come to the point where it’s irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up…. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don’t look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it.”