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Quotes About Adolescence

She was always saying, 'Fuck this school,' or 'I can't wait until I get out of here.' But so did lots of kids.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
Psychologists agree that adolescence is much more fraught with pressures and complexities than in years past. Often, in today's world, the extended childhood American life has bestowed on its young turns out to be a wasteland, where the adolescent feels cut off from both childhood and adulthood. Self-expression can often be frustrated. More and more, doctors say, this frustration can lead to acts of violence whose reality the adolescent cannot separate from the intended drama.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
From my birth when they went undetected, to my baptism where they upstaged the priest, to my troubled adolescence when they didn't do much of anything and then did everything at once, my genitals have been the most significant thing that ever happened to me.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
It's a kind of fugue state, anyway, early sex.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
Obviously, doctor, you've never been a thirteen year-old girl.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
She walked to the cupboard, then stopped and folded her hands behind her. "It's private. Do you mind?" she said, and Peter Sissen sped down the stairs, blushing, and after thanking Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, hurried off to tell us that Lux Lisbon was bleeding between the legs that very instant, while the fish flies made the sky filthy and the streetlamps came on.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
Callie rises up inside me, wearing my skin like a loose robe. She sticks her little hands into the baggy sleeves of my arms. She inserts her chimp's feet through the trousers of my legs. On the sidewalk I'll feel her girlish walk take over, and the movement brings back a kind of emotion, a desolate and gossipy sympathy for the girls I see coming home from school.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
We passed the sticky receiver from ear to ear, the drumbeats so regular we might have been pressing our ears to the girls' chests
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
obviously, dr, she said, you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
So that was our love affair. Wordless, blinkered, a nighttime thing, a dream thing. There were reasons on my side for this as well. Whatever it was that I was was best revealed slowly, in flattering light. Which meant not much light at all. Besides, that's the way it goes in adolescence. You try things out in the dark. You get drunk or stoned and extemporize.
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
From the beginning I was aware that there was something improper about the way I felt about Clementine Stark, something I shouldn't tell my mother, but I wouldn't have been able to articulate it. I didn't connect this feeling to sex. I didn't know sex existed
~ Jeffrey Eugenides
If I may, I'd like to take a moment to praise Mark Zuckerberg's parents for not procreating sooner. Praise be to all that is holy that Facebook didn't exist when I was that age and the Internet then was but a Usenet group for Star Trek fans. I feel like the luckiest person in the world to have grown up when cameras used actual film because the only thing that stood between infamy and me was the clerk who developed photos at Walgreens. Thank God for him.
~ Jen Lancaster
Another study compared fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds who had close friendships to those who were popular, with larger friend groups but fewer close relationships—so the cheerleaders and partiers on the A-list. The study found that at age twenty-five, those who had fewer but closer friends had higher feelings of self-worth and less social anxiety and depression than the cool kids. 174 The lesson here is you should never peak in high school.
~ Jen Lancaster
By seventh grade, the notes stopped and it was assumed that I'd know how to fend for myself for dinner if there was a ten-dollar bill on the table. There were three dinner options at my house. In reverse order of preference: Number three—broiled chicken dusted with paprika. Number two—ten on the table. And number one—dinner with Mom and her boyfriend, David, at a five-star restaurant.
~ Jennifer Coburn
Don't even think about it. Well, when can I walk by myself? When you get your driver's license. You always, always say that. Dillie scowled at him. That's when everything happens. It's going to be a busy day, Phin agreed.
~ Jennifer Crusie
She is fifteen years old that summer, a thoughtful, book-struck girl with long-lashed hazel eyes and a long-legged body that still doesn't completely feel like her own.
~ Jennifer Weiner
It was high school. Evil is kind of the name of the game.
~ Jennifer Weiner
She's in tenth grade,' he said. 'I hear she's been homeschooled till now.' Maybe that explains it,' I said.
~ Jerry Spinelli
Every day I hold my breath until I see her. Sometimes in class, sometimes in the hallway. I can't start breathing until I see her smile at me. She always does, but the next day I'm always afraid she won't. At lunch I'm afraid she'll smile more at BT than at me. I'm afraid she'll look at him in some way that she doesn't look at me. I'm afraid that when I go to bed at night I'll still be wondering. I'm always afraid. Is that what love is - fear?
~ Jerry Spinelli
And whenever she saw Palmer with them at school, she acted as if she did not know him. Palmer sensed that she was doing this for his sake.
~ Jerry Spinelli
On the bright side, I have figured out how to fix the American educational system. End it at sixth grade." "Brilliant. Then what?" "Lock them up in empty factories, give them all the Red Bull, condoms, and nachos they want, pipe in club music, and check back when they're twenty-five. Anyone still alive, we send to grad school." Wade pushed his glass forward. "How's that for a campaign platform?
~ Jess Walter
Relax," Edith says. "The perfect name will come to you in time." Which is when Gogol announces, "There's no such thing." "No such thing as what?" Astrid says. "There's no such thing as a perfect name. I think that human beings should be allowed to name themselves when they turn eighteen," he adds. "Until then, pronouns.
~ Jhumpa Lahiri