Quotes About Adolescence

Zoe tried to sound like an older sister.

they found considerable plasticity from the onset of puberty into the early twenties. Once this was discovered, it became obvious that the upheavals of adolescence and early adulthood coincide with a previously unrecognized sensitive period of brain maturation in the prefrontal cortex

Despite the fact that childbearing has been delayed into the 20s and 30s, the brain still expects this to happen at 12 or 13 years of age.

was the smile on the face of Gary Boone. He was in the seventh grade at Floyd Hicks

I hate to think I've got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as China Aster! It's bad enough being a girl, anyway, when I like boy's games and work and manners!

I think she is growing up, and so begins to dream dreams, and have hopes and fears and fidgets, without knowing why or being able to explain them.

As to the other three, if they had been perfection they would not have been real girls, and you could not have wept over their trials and laughed over their pleasures.

It's bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boys' games and work and manners!

Jo immediately sat up, put her hands in her pockets, and began to whistle. "Don't, Jo. It's so boyish!" "That's why I do it.

the uncomfortable appearance of a girl who was rapidly shooting up into a woman and didn't like it.

Don't try to make me grow up before my time.

The best have to get through the hobbledehoy age, and that's the very time they need most patience and kindness. People laugh at them, and hustle them about, try to keep them out of sight, and expect them to turn, all at once, from pretty children into fine young men. They don't complain much,--plucky little souls,--but they feel it.

Washington had a more relaxed style with girls and used to say ruefully that he could govern men but not boys.

Kids don't think about their folks nearly as much as everybody imagines. Parents are just there, like background music at the mall.

I'm fourteen now, and sometimes I feel I've done nothing except go to school.

Since my adolescence I have read two and sometimes three newspapers a day, frequently clipping an article that for obscure and soon forgotten reasons attracts me. I usually toss the clippings into a desk drawer, and later, often years later, I'll find myself reading through the clippings, throwing most of them out. It fills me with a strange sadness, a kind of grief for my lost self, as if I were reading and throwing out old diaries.

All the books warned that behavioral changes in early teens could be sudden and extreme, but the intensity of Benny's distress scared her. He acted spooked, haunted.

Unbelievable! It was a total setup. They were all watching me carefully now, my mom, Muji, Jiko, who I sensed could see me through her closed eyelids, and my dad, who was still on the balcony, pretending to be all nonchalant and casual. I hate it when grown-ups watch you like that. Makes you feel like a malfunctioning cyborg. Not quite human.

The winter before he was sixteen, Pup sold his soul to the devil.

You have to watch your step with women these days, Pops. She could be involved with Yakuza or something. Even some of the girls in my class -- you should hear the stuff they talk about. Fifteen years old, and there's nothing they don't know. We're not in the age of Peace and Love anymore.

Sinteen-years -old girls are probably the most sensitive and perceptive group of people in this entire country.

At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don't see how your gestures already mirror his; you don't see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don't hear his whisper in your blood.

Quichotte when young had been a little short, a little chubby compared to other boys his age. Then, in late adolescence, as if an invisible divine hand had grabbed him and squeezed him in the middle like a tube of toothpaste, he shot up to his present height and became as skinny as a shadow.

When you're five and you hurt, you make a big noise unto the world. At ten you whimper. But by the time you make fifteen you begin to eat the poisoned apples that grow on your own inner tree of pain. It's the Western Way of Enlightenment. You begin to cram your fists into your mouth to stifle the screams. You bleed on the inside.