Parenting & Family Quote by Alice Hoffman

Growing up, in Hoffman’s telling, isn’t a ladder you climb and retire from; it’s a terrain you keep crossing, sometimes with different maps, sometimes without one. The line works because it refuses the comforting myth that adulthood is a settled destination. Instead, it frames maturity as an ongoing negotiation - with desire, fear, memory, responsibility - that doesn’t stop when the birthday candles do.

Her most pointed move is the “two different universes” metaphor. It isn’t just that kids and adults disagree; it’s that they experience reality through incompatible physics. Children live in immediacy: emotion is evidence, time is elastic, rules feel arbitrary because they’re externally imposed. Adults live in consequence: time hardens, choices accrete, and the rules often arrive disguised as “common sense.” Calling them universes suggests translation problems, not moral failures. That’s classic Hoffman: she’s less interested in blaming a generation than in dramatizing the loneliness inside miscommunication.

The subtext also carries a quiet critique of adult certainty. If adults and kids occupy different universes, then adults who claim to “know what’s best” may be mistaking authority for comprehension. Hoffman’s fiction often treats adolescence as a site where the ordinary brushes up against the uncanny; here, “process” hints that the uncanny is structural, not a phase. We keep changing, and we keep failing to recognize the person in front of us - especially when that person is younger, closer to raw feeling, and therefore easier to dismiss.