Quotes About Coming-of-age

She just turned fifteen.

Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina is a coming-of-age novel about Ruth Ann (Bone) Boatwright and a difficult childhood made even harder by her violent and predatory stepfather.

Nickerson began to understand, as only an adolescent on the verge of adulthood can understand, that the carefree days of childhood were gone forever: "Then it was that I, for the first time, realized that I was alone upon a wide and an unfeeling world . . . without one relative or friend to bestow one kind word upon me.

Hild watched them and the other not-yet-girdled girls-Cille and Leofe, who were already meant for each other, and half a dozen younger-and wondered when her mother might choose her gemæcce and who it might be.