Quotes About Adolescence

'Catcher In The Rye' was my favorite book, honestly. I read it when I was thirteen, and the book was a bit of a family heirloom because it was passed down from my grandfather to my father to my older brother and then to me.

I started writing when I was about thirteen.

I used to play 'Grand Theft Auto' when I was an early teen, between eleven and thirteen.

But, when I was about thirteen, I began to sort of sing in my neighborhood.

I was born in Massachusetts and lived there until I was thirteen years old.

There was a point in school when I was, like, thirteen, that I didn't feel comfortable at all.

Throughout the entire time I was filming 'Thirteen,' I'd just lock myself in my room and listen to Garbage's first album. It was Shirley Manson, Nirvana and Radiohead who got me through everything. Also, Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos. They were so beautiful and strange, and they gave women permission to be angry and emotional, but also strong.

When I was thirteen years old, I didn't exactly discover epic fantasy on my own. I acquired it as a social defence mechanism.

I know I wanted to be a comic when I was nine. I was thirteen the first time I did it. I was attending a Methodist Church youth retreat at the University of Southern Alabama. They held a talent show on the last night. I won, and then I made out with a 14-year-old girl from Prattville, Alabama.

I always ran very fast and jumped very high but when I was about thirteen it was more of a choice between football and tennis, and I went for tennis.

When I turned thirteen, I moved up to the junior bull scale. They didn't really classify them by how big they were but how bad they were. The first time I got on one of the big boys I was absolutely terrified but excited at the same time.

I started in theatre when I was 13 or 14 years old and did a lot of theatre until my early thirties. Off-Broadway stuff - off-off-off-off-Broadway stuff - and I do love it.

Between the time I was 16 until I was about 20, the books I read were by people like Thomas Mann, James Baldwin, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Bishop. All gay, of course, although I swear I didn't know that at the time. Yet all of them, it turned out, had had a parent who died during their childhood. Sexuality is nothing compared to that.

My first celeb crush was Hanson. I loved all three of them. My sister and I would always fight, and whenever they would come on the TV, we would always give them a kiss on the TV. And I also had a crush on Jonathan Taylor Thomas. Every time he would come on the screen, he was like my boyfriend. I was such a nerd like that.

Let's face it. No kid in high school feels as though they fit in.

I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.

When we're 16, we have lots of heavy thoughts. And these are the heavy thoughts, where, when we're in our 30s, we look at 16-year olds and sort of scorn it.

The knot of intimacy at the center of 'Ten Thousand Saints' is the friendship between Teddy McNicholas and Jude Keffy-Horn.

I grew up in an upper-middle-class town with a population around 12,000. My high school held around a thousand kids. All smart. We had a strict dress code. If you wore blue jeans to school, they sent you home.

Growing was only one of two serious matters that deeply bothered Travis; the second was his fear of the dark. How many 12-year-olds still needed a night-light? But most of the time, his fear of the dark was something he could keep to himself and his family, but how could you hide your size?

Raising a teenager makes the terrible twos seem like a holiday in Hawaii.

This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal.

Kids hated. That's what we did. It's what we do best. We hate our hair, our zits, our friends, our parents... We hate, we hate, we hate, we hate, all no differently than how kids have hated for centuries.

Humanity is in big trouble when adults behave like malicious teenagers and teenagers behave like malicious adults.