Quotes About Youth

Boys can't seem to help but leave marks; they scatter them as carelessly as pebbles in a pond.

He was a little young to go crazy, but it happened to people.

You want to know whether the problems that you teenagers feel–will they follow you over the rest of your lives? Will your hearts always be aching?

I know we live in a very sexist world, and a lot of boys do nothing except get in trouble, until one day they grow up and dominate every aspect of society. But girls, at least while they're still girls and perform well, seem to do everything better for a while. Seem to get the attention.

Jules had had five sessions with a disheveled social worker named Melinda, who was as kind as the kindest mother, nodding in sympathy while Jules railed against the stupidity of college life. Later, she would barely remember what Melinda had said to her, but at the time her presence had been soothing and necessary,

Apparently you didn't require air when you were a teenager. You made your own air.

Greer, Zee, and Chloe were an unlikely trio, but she had heard this was typical of social life in the first weeks of college. People who had nothing in common were briefly and emotionally joined, like the members of a jury or the supervisors of a plane crash. Chloe took them across West Quad, and then they looped around behind the fortress of the Metzger Library, which was all lit up and poignantly empty, like a 24-hour supermarket in the middle of the night.

The two Lucys are going to go to the movies with Eli and I," Robby said, "Great. And you have English teachers for parents.

all the girls had secretly sprung up in height, even as the teachers and mothers had gotten squashed and lost height and calcium, their bones ground down with an invisible pestle.

when you're young, you don't really believe you'll ever be anything other than young.

Both beds had extra-long sheets, a weird detail of college life. After college, sheets would immediately shorten to their normal length.

The underaged had not been here before when Ethan was given his tour;

The New Coach. Did she look at us that first week and see past the glossed hair and shiny legs, our glittered brow bones and girl bravado? See past all that to everything beneath, all our miseries, the way we all hated ourselves but much more everyone else?

But maybe I cared too, because sometimes I found myself wondering about those things. I just didn't show it. It was high school; you didn't show things.

Walking past all the cops, all the detectives, I raise my runner's shirt a few inches, like I'm shaking it loose form my damp skin. I let them all see my stomach, its tautness. I let everyone see I'm not afraid, and that I'm not anything but a silly cheerleader, a feather-bodied sixteen-year-old with no more sense than a marshmellow peep. I let them see I'm not anything. least of all what I am.

That was what gymnastics did, though. It aged girls and kept them young forever at the same time. And

About Devon, about the lonesomeness of her daughter's life, about—

But she became Gabby's friend in that way that can happen, because the girl with the cool boots always finds the girl with the occasional slash of pink in her hair. The two of them like a pair of exotic birds dipping over the school's water fountains—you knew they would find each other.

There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.

I was seventeen and there were so many things I didn't know yet, but I knew about hiding.

The true terrorism of girls is the accuracy of their aim.

There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.

Where'd that world go, that world when you're a kid, and now I can't remember noticing anything, not the smell of the leaves or the sharp curl of dried maple on your ankles, walking? I live in cars now, and my own bedroom, the windows sealed shut, my mouth to my phone, hand slick around its neon jelly case, face closed to the world, heart closed to everything.

I was so mad when I was younger," she said. "And then you grow up and think you're not that girl anymore. The girl you were at fifteen, sixteen. Angry and nasty. Hungry for love—" "—I guess some girls are like that," Katie said, cooly. "But the thing is, you're always that girl," Hailey said, stepping out of the car. "She never goes away. She's inside you all the time. That girl is forever.