Quotes / Coming of Age Story

"But never mind how the infant became a boy- this is the story of how Tristan Thorn becomes a man, a much greater challenge altogether..."

— Stardust

"I'm not sure if I've come of age, but I definitely feel older now."

—Oliver Tate, Submarine

"Look at you. You're all...grown up..."

—Pennywise, It: Chapter Two

The boy he had been just a few months before—the same boy who had gone to tug at the sheets of a comatose girl and then left her lying exposed while he ran away, the same boy who let others get hurt because he was too afraid to move and act to protect those he cared about -— wouldn't have even tried.
Shinji Ikari was not that boy anymore.
In the silence that followed, Shinji began moving around the table towards the entrance hall. His mother stepped to the side.
[...]
Taking a last look at her, trying to keep his head up, Shinji turned away and walked out of the apartment, and even as he did he knew there would be no going back. There never was.
Finally, he had grown up.

— Neon Genesis Evangelion: Genocide

There he stood, a small animal in the moonlit space between the forest and the sloping hills; then at last he trotted uncertainly after the herd. Konyek watched him disappear into the trees, and in the midst of his happiness there was a kernel of sadness, like the hidden pool in the heart of the forest on his hill. And he knew that with all men this must be so, and that for him, his initiation had begun the day the raiders had made their attack.
All was stillness and silence now, and he returned to the manyatta with the Calf of the November Cloud whom that night, his father had given him for his own.

— The Calf of the November Cloud

---