Quotes About Adolescence

Now, I've had boys of my own, and I know boys aren't that way. They don't learn, or grow, or have manners when you're looking at them. But turn away, and turn back, and there they are, smarter, taller, and charming everyone but their own mothers.

When she spoke his name, Beloved, he believed she meant it. He spoke of an adolescence I envied. Pampered, praised, educated . . . any child's dream. But we all awake from dreams.

When Hap had been ten, it had been so much easier to know that I was doing the right things for him. Feed him well, teach him to fish, see that he had clean clothes and slept well at night. That was most of what a boy needed. A young man was a different animal entirely.

He's probably hungry, too, isn't he, Lacey? I've heard that about boys...

It's significantly more satisfying to kick a wall than it is to kick thin air. For the rebellious teen- or the teen who wants to feel like a rebel- a clearly defined law gives you something to define yourself against.

It's different for guys. They don't feel the same way about proms that girls do. Girls see it as a chance to feel like a princess. Guys see it as a chance to have sex.

He'd never been shy, but he'd always been a little uncertain around girls. He just couldn't believe they liked him.

Because we don't need some skinny-ass white lady trying to save her soul by slumming it in the ghetto. Come on, have you looked in a mirror? This ain't your neighborhood." She delivers this with the kind of disdain only a teenager can muster.

Watching her, I'm filled with the age-old terror of making a mistake, looking foolish. How is it we all leave high school, but high school never leaves us?

Teenagers," he said into the silence, his smile knowing. "Can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em." "But you can ground them, if they still live with you," she said, and silently added, Even when they're in their twenties.

never having worn braces.

Ah, gym class. Remember it? Institutionally sanctioned torture for society's misfits.

A Separate Peace by John Knowles. Seminal coming-of-age tale. Intense adolescent friendship gone awry. Having to face yourself because of your own ugly deeds. Did Gene bounce the branch on purpose? Of course he did. Whether he realized it or not. No one else in class wanted to believe it. "It was an accident," the pert and pretty Jenna said. She sounded almost desperate. "He couldn't. He just wouldn't. They

She did love him, in that way that teenage girls love, like a lemming. Which is not love, of course.

Maybe it was hereditary, anger. Maybe it lay dormant in boyhood, the disease taking hold in late adolescence. Then it either burned out before any damage was done, or took control.

I see all the kids—the popular ones, the brains, the jocks, the punks, the burnouts. They are not who they will become. This moment, teenage life, it feels like the whole universe, but it's only a millisecond.

What was it about high school that made people think with their insecurities instead of their brains?

are you a wedgie? Asked Massie. No. Then why are you all up in my butt? Said Massie

What if others-adults-had, upon becoming Twelves, received in their instructions the same terrifying sentence? What if they had all been instructed: You may lie?

The front-buttoned jacket was the first sign of independence, the first very visible symbol of growing up.

FOR THE first time in his twelve years of life, Jonas felt separate, different.

Marlene had admitted in class that her boyfriend, a ninth-grader in another town, shoplifted all the time and that although she didn't like it much, she wouldn't dream of reporting him.

In fifteen years, all those disturbing biological blobs would be out on Kareenburg's streets, wearing strange fashions, listening to annoying music, and disagreeing politically with their beleaguered parents.

I think I was fourteen before I found out that Ivan wasn't your middle name.' Miles cut himself off. That-idiot-Ivan was beginning a lifetime of Imperial service tomorrow.