Quotes About Adolescence

This was a typical statement from my mother: lucid, opinionated, explicitly impatient of opposing views. Her dominance of the family, and her certainties about the world, made things usefully clear in childhood, restrictive in adolescence, and grindingly repetitive in adulthood.

Está la cuestión de la soledad. Pero no es como te la imaginas (si alguna vez has intentado imaginarla). Hay dos tipos de soledad esenciales: la de quienes no han encontrado a nadie a quien amar, y la de quienes se han visto privados del ser amado. El primero es el peor. Nada es comparable a la soledad del alma en la adolescencia

His experience of life had left him with the belief that getting through the first sixteen years or so was fundamentally a question of damage limitation.

Dabei steckte mir nach meiner traurigen Jugend das altbekannte, für die späte Pubertät so typische Gefühlsgemisch aus Stolz und Verzweiflung noch tief in den Knochen, wenn man sich hochnäsig für etwas Besseres hält, aber gleichzeitig an sozialer Paranoia leidet.

Girls scare me more than boys. Boys are cruel. Girls are mean.

Why did one have to put up a hue and cry about anything so trifling as the skin on one's face, which, after all, was only a small part of the human capsule? ... While such a situation would be understandable in a pimply adolescent who lives in visions, it was ridiculous for me, the section head of a respectable laboratory, moored securely to this world by an anchor-like weight, to be afflicted by psychological hives.

Priscilla was my age and lived two blocks away. For the first fifteen years of my life, those were the only qualifications I needed in a best friend. We had first bonded over our mutual fascination with the abacus in a playgroup for gifted kids. But that was before freshman year, when Priscilla's glasses came off, and the first in a long string of boyfriends got on

In the feudal fiefdom of school, rank was determined early. You could change your hair and clothes. You could, having learned your lesson, not write a paper on Julius Caesar entirely in iambic pentameter or you could not tell anyone if you did. You could switch to contact lenses, compensate for your braininess by not doing your homework. Every boy in school could grow twelve inches. The sun could go fucking nova. And you'd still be the same grotesque you'd always been.

There was no point in telling my father. He'd never let me quit after only one day. He couldn't help me and he'd make some terrible blunder if he tried. Parents are too innocent for the Boschian landscapes of middle school.

One day a package of junior-sized tampons was left on my bed along with a pamphlet that looked technical and boring, so I didn't read it. Nothing was ever said to me about the tampons. It was just blind luck I didn't smoke them.

Brent Lockwood had been sixteen (almost seventeen) to Julia's fifteen (closer to fourteen). He had asked her father for permission to take her out, and her father had told him to get a haircut, get a job, and get back to him.

You were still trying to figure out what to do with all the rage and lust and anger that sparked up like a forest fire for no reason. Will had been exactly like them at that age—so damn desperate for someone to show him how to be a man.

There was nothing more vicious than a teenage girl. Maybe it was because boys were more capable of settling an argument with their fists, but girls at this age were much more conniving and torturous than anyone wanted to believe.

Marlee was fourteen. A dangerous age, although, let's face it, Jackson thought, every age was a dangerous age for a woman.

Modesty becomes a young man. [Lat., Adolescentem verecundum esse decet.]

I was between A man and a boy, A hobble-de-hoy, A fat, little, punchy concern of sixteen.

He [Winston Churchill] is a man suffering from petrified adolescence.

-she remembered them kindly, for there was a sweetness in boys that didn't last long, once they became men.

We were still at the age when girls are years older than guy, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to.

Some people are boys longer than others.

Men and women are different. I don't think men grow a brain until 26 or even 30. Girls mature a lot quicker.

I've been getting chatted up by men ever since I was 14.

Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men's magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kid knew all about.

I'm interested in youth culture - when your parents are running your life, but you think you're the big man - but I'm not trying to make a statement.