Quotes About Adolescence

My nickname senior year was 'ugly duckling.'

From childhood, I grew up with a lot of apprehensions about my body and appearance. I was skinny, had acne on my face and suffered from an inferiority complex; I thought I was the ugly duckling in my school and college.

When I was a teenager, my mom got me a really nice baritone ukulele.

I used to have stomach ulcers and stuff when I was in the 10th grade. I'd be doubled over on the floor, I was hurting so bad. I was on Tagamet before it was over the counter.

I had years of therapy to recover from this. A lot of it had to with being a people pleaser, being the ultimate good girl. I wanted everyone to like me. I didn't really have a voice. I was afraid of growing up.

The teenage years are ridiculously crucial and hard and, um, awkward.

I was not a very... um... not a very popular girl. I think a lot of it was, you know, no boo-hoo about it - but I looked pretty strange for the first few years of my life.

I had managers approaching me in high school asking me if I wanted to act professionally, but to me, having to miss school to do that meant missing time with my friends, which was completely unacceptable.

At the age of 11 I was about 6 ft. tall and my voice had completely broken. That caused problems. I was this gangly, spotty, very unattractive kid. I wasn't cool and I wasn't a nerd. I didn't even want to fit in with anyone.

No 11-year-old girl wants to be 5-10. I always felt big and unattractive.

I like to write about teenagers because it's such an uncertain and dramatic time.

Books for teens are amazing and compelling, I think, because they're generally set in a time in people's lives when they are uncertain about who they are and who they love and what the right thing is to do.

A young body, a young heart, and endless courage. That last part is the most important. Don't let anyone tell you any differently. Why do you think we used to send so many kids your age off to war?

Remember when you were eleven years old and you thought how great it would be to get your period? And then you got it? That's what planning a wedding is like.

When I was in junior high school, the teachers voted me the student most likely to end up in the electric chair.

Other mathematical geniuses, Einstein and Bertrand Russell among them, recount similarly revelatory experiences in early adolescence.

Jeg fylte tolv før en utrolig oppriktig sanglærer sa at han heller ville lytte til et kor av agapadder enn meg, og at jeg burde finne på noe annet.

But that age; remember that age? They're not the same. They don't put things together. That's why half of what they do looks full-on certifiable, to you or me or any sane adult. Things don't make sense, when you're that age; you don't make sense. You stop expecting to.

I think when you're kids, you're less . . . defined? Then you get older and you start deciding what kind of person you want to be, and it doesn't always match up with what your friends are turning into.

He feels that nineteen-year-olds, almost all of them, don't have their feet on the ground. They're turning loose from their families and they haven't found anything else to moor themselves to; they blow like tumbleweed. They're unknowns, to the people that used to know them inside out and to themselves.

The sudden, painful flare of envy caught me by surprise. I was a loner, my last few years in school. I could have done with a friend like that.

Wayne," I said to Cassie, while we were getting him a Sprite and watching him pick his acne in the one-way glass. "Why didn't his parents just tattoo 'Nobody in my family has ever finished secondary school' on his forehead at birth?

I was twelve, after all, an age at which kids are bewildered and amorphous, transforming overnight, no matter how stable their lives are;

People you knew when you were teenagers, the ones who saw your stupidest haircut and the most embarrassing things you've done in your life, and they still cared about you after all that: they're not replaceable, you know?