Quotes About Adolescence

I got really good input up until the age of 11, which is perfect. That's when adolescence starts, when I would have really wanted to rebel. Up until that point, though, it didn't feel like doctrine, and it gave me a great moral structure.

High school is all about hierarchies, labels, cliques - we are labeled and structured. Everyone goes through it, more or less.

When I was 15, I changed my name legally. I think it was largely due to my struggle about being gay. Everything just didn't fit, and I was trying to find things I could identify myself with, and it started with my name.

I've never struggled with boys.

Super Sad Generation' was essentially about the struggles that you go through when you're growing up in the world and trying to figure out what kind of person you want to be.

Between 12 and 14, I shot up a ridiculous amount. The muscles were struggling to stretch and grow at the rate my bones were growing. It gave me problems with my back and my hamstrings.

My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.

However much I might have yearned to be one of The Beautiful Ones, particularly at those ghastly school discos, where any desperate attempt to impress the opposite sex lead to at best deep humiliation, I now feel extremely blessed that I wasn't.

You're on Facebook, and you're supposed to know your sexual orientation at 13... Nobody really knows what's going on at that time, and people seem to... know stuff, or they have to act like they do, and they make decisions before they really need to.

Growing up in San Antonio, I was the dork at the Friday night football games with my head buried in a book - Jack Kerouac or Oscar Wilde, years before I really understood them.

It was funny being at high school and also grocery shopping and having a job. Other kids were going home to their parents, who were doing their laundry, and I was like, 'Wait, what?' I was super isolated. I was 16, alone in New York, and modelling.

I didn't know what gay was. There was no such thing when I was growing up. I knew I had crushes on boys, but I didn't think there was anything wrong with that until I started to hear about it from the other kids in school.

Other kids did drugs; I did crafts. I never knew where I fit in.

I knew I was different when I was about six years of age but I just knew that I wasn't like everybody else. I mean I wasn't like the other kids. I didn't know what that was. But I guess it was when I was in seventh or eighth grade, I'm like, 'Hey, something's wrong here.'

I always wonder what my life would be like if I had parents like the other kids who went to my high school.

I was barely 17 when our father decided to part ways with my mother.

From 1967 to '70, Nigeria fought a war - the Nigeria-Biafra war. And in the middle of that war, I was 14 years old. We spent much of our time with my mother cooking. For the army - my father joined the army as a brigadier - the Biafran army. We were on the Biafran side.

My dear dad always tried to introduce me to children of his friends, but I just never took to them. Those were the people we were shoved with at school dances, usually Eton boys because it was the cleverest boys' school, and ours was supposed to be the cleverest girls' school.

I remember, as a kid, my first breakup at 14 years old, I was jamming to Toni Braxton trying to heal out here. Why did an angel break my heart? Hell, I don't know.

I was always this weird outcast kid.

I used to wear bandanas around my head and beaded necklaces that I had made myself. This was my 'cool' outfit that I was convinced would bring me attention.

From 13/14 I was always hanging about with older boys. Boys in school used to call me names. But outside older boys would pay me attention because I looked older for my age. I was going to clubs from 14. I wanted to be loved.

I grew up in a high school where it was very conservative, and I felt like people disapproved of me, and I felt like an outsider.

I felt like an outsider in middle school. Horrible.