Quotes About Adolescence

When I was 12, I thought I wanted to be a witch.

I was fat and ugly. In school, I was disgustingly obese. I used to be the butt of ridicule, and that made me withdraw into a shell. It made me miserable, unsure of myself. I was far from confident.

In junior high school, I was an object of pure ridicule for my dress, withdrawal, and asocial manner. Dozens of times, I saw individuals laugh and smile more in ten to fifteen minutes than I did in all my life up to then.

Every time we moved on, I joined a different class in a different school with different girls until, aged 13, my father had taken the decision to pull me out of school altogether. Everything I needed, he reasoned, could be found within the rich language of Shakespeare's plays at which, by then, I was something of an old hand.

I was not a witty girl.

Puberty hit me pretty hard. All of a sudden, I woke up, and I had really curly hair.

My mother tells me of when I was 10 or 11 and I'd wear really tight, short skirts and crop tops. All the local men would wolf whistle and stop and stare, but I didn't realise why at the time.

But now it's kind of a given that a 15-year-old would have a record deal and sell a quarter of a million records. No one's expecting her to answer any deep theological questions. And I'll tell you, I was asked some deep theological questions from the git-go.

I got into therapy in the fifth grade because I said in a sarcastic way that I was going to kill myself, and they didn't get it then. Nothing's changed.

I was in therapy for six years and then stopped. You get hardwired at adolescence, like a caterpillar that pupates and re-assembles itself as an insect. It's very hard to change after that.

When I was in high school, I wanted to be so thick that I'd eat all the pizza and all the McDonald's and everything.

I was skinny. I wore thick glasses. I had acne.

High school was difficult for me because I was in the thick of dealing with my depression and anxiety.

I would always hunch over, I was always taller than the boys. I had the extremely skinny legs... I would double up my socks, those ones from Footlocker, to make my legs look thicker.

I look back at pictures of myself in high school, and I was a cheerleader, and I had hair just as thick if not thicker and long - down to my hips.

I had zits on my thighs when I was a kid. I remember feeling so disgusting and grossed out by them.

People called me 'cottage cheese thighs' all through school.

At school, I got teased because I was so thin and awkward-looking.

I was always small and thin. I wasn't the kid who got invited to parties.

As a kid, I was always very thin, and I kind of didn't know that I was skinny.

I look back on being 17 and think, 'Oh my God, how did I not die?'

I have a 15-year-old daughter who thinks that I always had this self confidence that I have now at the age of 60. And I always tell her that what she is going through - the low self-esteem as a teenager - that is a right of passage.

I think everyone still thinks I'm 13.

And I was the only black kid in my school for almost all of my childhood, until I was a teenager. So imagine, if you will, being 6 feet tall by third grade, so essentially being a living maypole.