Quotes About Adolescence

For the first time in weeks, Park didn't have that anxious feeling in his stomach on the way home from school, like he had to soak up enough Eleanor to keep him until the next day.

Our teen-agers withdrew to their bedrooms on their thirteenth birthday and didn't show themselves to us again until it was time to get married.

Debut: the first time a young girl is seen drunk in public.

The patterns became even more vivid at Cardinal Hayes High School. That's when I began failing subjects and running away from home for days at a time.

Quit while there is still time - at about 12 or 13 years of age!

I was really into hip-hop as a teenager. I dressed up like Tupac with baggy jeans and a dodgy bandanna around my head. I was pretty confused at that time.

Scout, I´m telling you for the last time, shut your trap or go home - I declare to the Lord you´re gettin´ more like a girl every day!" With that, I had no option but to join them.

I was 12 when I got a small part in a movie in Texas. And in my spare time, I play with my dogs and write music and go out with my friends.

Like a lot of inwardly drawn young people, I spent a lot of time in libraries. At my high school, I often spent my lunch breaks there.

Before I realized I had faults, I was already joking about it, to get attention. By the time I went to high school, I had a pretty practiced routine down.

The first time my mom found condoms in my room, she literally started crying hysterically.

I had a hard time in middle school. I was never really quite me until I was 16 or 17, and things like bullying didn't matter anymore.

High school is just horrible in general. So, I think it was a good time for me to have stopped acting. I got to be normal in high school.

I spent a lot of time not in school, so I didn't have deep relationships with kids my own age.

By the time I was a teenager, there wasn't a show I hadn't inhaled or a character I hadn't met.

It's a pretty scary time. So many emotions come up and you don't really have the wisdom to make the right choices. You can really screw yourself in adolescence.

We were just a bunch of high school kids who got into the Ramones together.

There are a thousand ways for a boy of fifteen to go wrong. The most gently reared will lash out, battered by gusts of mindless fury. The brightest can be swamped by black despair. The sweetest may turn sullen and withdrawn. The most rational are quick to anger.

By the time we got to Ferrington, I was laughing at Will's stories about Rockpoint High. It seemed the kids gave the teachers a hard time; they were always cutting up and saying funny things. Will was good at imitating their Down-East accents, but I had a feeling Susan was right about his not having any friends. It was as though Will spent most of his school day watching and listening.

By the time we got to Ferrington, I was laughing at Will's stories about Rockpoint High. It seemed the kids gave the teachers a hard time; they were always cutting up and saying funny things. Will was good at imitating their Down-East accents, but I had a feeling Susan was right about his not having any friends. It sounded as if he spent most of his school day watching and listening.

To be candid, things hadn't been good in our house since I'd turned thirteen and, as Mom put it, lost my mind overnight. Which meant I'd changed from an obedient child who never gave anyone a second's trouble into an obnoxious teenager who left wet towels on the bathroom floor and dirty dishes in front of the television, played loud music and argued about everything from politics to curfews.

This late-adolescent camaraderie gave their time at Meadow a fraught emotional quality that was like the shimmering fullness of a bead of water before it falls. They were all about to scatter and become different from one another, and this made them exult in their closeness and alikeness.

But the boys' bicycle pack also sent a stab of envy through me. If I couldn't yet capture John Cleary with my feminine wiles, then surely I deserved to enjoy the physical abandon he got, liberties I instinctively knew were vanishing. (I know, I know. Psychoanalytic theory would label this pecker envy and seek to smack me on the nose with it. To that I'd say, o please. Of actual johnsons I had little awareness. What I coveted was privilege.)

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. —William Matthews, "Mingus at the Showplace