Quotes About Adolescence

We should consider the idea that youth is not actually wasted on the young. That their dramas are no more grand than they should be. That their emotions make perfect sense, once you adjust for inflation. For someone going through adolescence, life feels epic and tragic simply because it is.

My dad liked a lot of Motown, but I didn't listen to it until my teenage years.

High School is like a spork: it's a crappy spoon and a crappy fork, so in the end it's just plain useless.

She knew she should be happy the girls were outside riding their very expensive horses. Girls who rode became interested in boys and makeup and cigarettes much later than their nonriding counterparts.

hobbledehoys,

I want to be involved with young people in some way. Teenagers. Because that's the most vulnerable time. I have a fantasy of becoming a teacher one day.

the sexual activity of girls is "particularly subject to the watchful guardianship of their mothers," which may contribute an element of hostility toward their own sex. But all of these remarks simply confirm that the wave of repression in puberty is not biological but is rather a matter of social organization and conventions.

Still perfect sixteen, and she glares when Ellie and I burst out laughing.

I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.

It can fuck you up, if you meet the most important person in your life when you're sixteen, seventeen. You imprint on them, and you never escape from it. That's what happened to me.

Before autumn Ellen was fifteen. During the summer there had always been food and she had grown less thin. Her bones had withdrawn under the flesh and her eyes were no longer hollow. Signs of woman begun to appear on her meagre body; woman took possession of her although she was hard like spines and sharp like flint. She looked at herself in the mirror of the creek, for she dared not unrobe herself in the house before the eyes of her mother.

There are a million rules for being a girl. There are a million things you have to do to get through each day. High school has things that can trip you up, ruin you, people say one thing and mean another, and you have to know all the rules, you have to know what you can and can't do.

I suppose he's making a real fashion statement, but this is high school. You're not supposed to be real. You're supposed to be enough like everyone else to get through and out into the waiting world.

That's you, right?' he asks me. 'Yeah.' 'Cute. Not that I, uh, think little kids are cute. Just that you were cute. I mean, you can see how you turned out to be so...oh.

My name is Danielle. I'm eighteen. I've been stealing things for as long as I can remember.

I knew from Brianna that being beautiful wasn't all great. Brianna had changed in middle school. One day we were both seventh graders and the next, she was a supermodel who had a seventh grader for a best friend.

Then one day he returned from school to learn he was going to be married. He was thirteen—certainly not too young for the prearranged marital match that was considered essential to a Hindu household. His bride Kasturbai Makanji, also thirteen, was the daughter of a merchant who lived only a few doors down from the Gandhis' old house in Porbandar.

The best of our theater is standing on tiptoe, striving to see over the shoulders of father and mother. The worst is exploiting and wallowing in the self-pity of adolescence and obsessive keyhole sexuality. The way out, as the poet says, is always through.

No one's serious at seventeen, When lindens line the promenades

On n'est pas sérieux, quand on a dix-sept ans Et qu'on a des tilleuls verts sur la promenade.

I kissed my first girl and smoked my first cigarette on the same day. I haven't had time for tobacco since.

Once when I was 16 I had my car taken away from me for being past curfew. Oh, and I said a bad word once, and I actually did get my mouth washed out with soap.

It is the land of perpetual pubescence, where cultural lag is mistaken for renaissance.

Brody McTavish. Harper grimaced in embarrassment. She'd been half in love with him as far back as she could remember. Not that he had looked twice at her. He'd been the handsome rowdy teen she used to spy on from a distance.