Quotes About Adolescence

If it's the right person tickling you in that adolescent stage of being on the cusp of sexuality, maybe, just maybe, that tickling is going to be followed by something really good, like hand-holding. In contrast, if it's Slobodan Milosovic who is tickling you, maybe, just maybe, it will be followed up by his trying to ethnically cleanse you.

THE DELAYED MATURATION of the frontal cortex suggests an obvious scenario, namely that early in adolescence the frontal cortex has fewer neurons, dendritic branches, and synapses than in adulthood, and that levels increase into the midtwenties. Instead, levels decrease.

The frontal cortex is the last brain region to fully mature, with the most evolutionarily recent subparts the very last. Amazingly, it's not fully online until people are in their midtwenties.

Thus, as adolescence dawns, frontal cortical efficiency is diluted with extraneous synapses failing to make the grade, sluggish communication thanks to undermyelination, and a jumble of uncoordinated subregions working at cross-purposes; moreover, while the striatum is trying to help, a pinch hitter for the frontal cortex gets you only so far. Finally, the frontal cortex is being pickled in that ebb and flow of gonadal hormones. No wonder they act adolescent.

The page of girlhood had been turned, as by an unseen finger, and the page of womanhood was before her with all its charm and mystery, its pain and gladness.

It does not do to laugh at the pangs of youth. They are very terrible because youth has not yet learned that 'this, too, will pass away.

I heard someone once say that the years from fifteen to nineteen are the best years in a girl's life.

Rilla was fond of italics, as most girls of fifteen are.

Oh, WHY can't boys be just sensible!

In two more years I'll be really grown up. It's a great comfort to think that I'll be able to use big words then without being laughed at." "Ruby

Dreams and make-believes are all very well in the daytime and the sunshine, but when dark and storm come they fail to satisfy. One wants real things then. But you don't know this . . . seventeen never knows it.

Allan thinks it is a proper book for a girl thirteen and three-quarters to read.

Seems to me you must always have been afraid to be young. It takes courage, I can tell you that

Even the most impassioned devotee of the ghost story would admit that the taste for it is slightly abnormal, a survival, perhaps, from adolescence, a disease of deficiency suffered by those whose lives and imaginations do not react satisfactorily to normal experience and require an extra thrill

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

You don't want to hear about the time I was a naughty little boy.

No one at fifteen was ever in love, outside of Romeo and Juliet, and maybe not even them. Old Giff used to argue that the star-crossed lovers simply were buzzed on the fumes of forbidden lust. Give them thirty years of togetherness, Old Giff always said, and Juliet would be plunging the dagger into Romeo.

i felt my being flutter. each tousled head that came through the door i wanted to be his, but no and on, a dozen boys entered, yet not the one.

There had to be a circle of Hell where you were eternally fourteen, eternally in junior high. One of the lower circles.

There is a time lag between the activation of brain systems that excite our emotions and impulses and the maturation of brain systems that allow us to check these feelings and urgings—it's like driving a car with a sensitive gas pedal and bad brakes.

If it were up to me, all boys would come with a label: Failure to take in small doses may result in irrational behavior, poor judgment, and estrangement from one's friends.

It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache.

I would never be popular. I didn't want to be; I liked being shy. I'd never be the smartest or the hottest or the happiest. By eighth grade you start to figure out your limits.

Dead girl walking" the boys say in the halls. "Tell us your secrets" the girls whisper, one toilet to another. I am that girl. I am the spaces between my thighs, daylight shinning through. I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.