Before we get started I would like to send a shout out to my little sister who is graduating today. I remember that she once wrote me a letter consisting entirely of quotes that said what she wanted to say, but better. So I decided that I would do the same for her on her high school graduation, in the form of authors who have captured the essence of graduating high school and growing up.

“All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, ‘Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!’ This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“It’s about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone.. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

“Just because you don’t know what you want yet, it doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to want.”
― Emily Henry, The Love That Split the World

“We’re not the Faster-than-the-Speed-of-Light Generation anymore. We’re not even the Next-New-Thing Generation. We’re the Soon-to-Be-Obsolete Kids, and we’ve crowded in here to hide from the future and the past. We know what’s up – the future looms straight ahead like a black wrought-iron gate and the past is charging after us like a badass Doberman, only this one doesn’t have any letup in him.”
― Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now

“Most of us won’t see one another after graduation, and even if we do it will be different. We’ll be different. We’ll be adults–cured, tagged and labeled and paired and identified and placed neatly on our life path, perfectly round marbles set to roll down even, well-defined slopes.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“There are moments that you’ll remember for the rest of your life and there are moments that you think you’ll remember for the rest of your life, and it’s not often they turn out to be the same moment.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Scorpio Races

“And maybe what growing up really means is knowing that you don’t have to be just a character, going whichever way the story says. It’s knowing you could be the author instead.”
― Ava Dellaira, Love Letters to the Dead