Adolescence
Quotes - I spent half my childhood trying to be like my dad
“Most
of the students there, he said, don't know what they think. You tell 'em,
they'll think it. I plan to tell 'em.”
―
John Knowles, Peace Breaks Out
“Snow
and adolescence are the only problems that disappear if you ignore them long
enough.”
―
Earl Wilson
“I've
had a great deal of experience with adolescents over the centuries, and I've
discovered that as a group these awkward half children take themselves far too
seriously. Moreover, appearance is everything for the adolescent. I suppose
it's a form of play-acting. The adolescent knows that the child is lurking
under the surface, but he'd sooner die than let it out, and I was no different.
I was so intent on being "grown-up" that I simply couldn't relax and
enjoy life.
Most
people go through this stage and outgrow it. Many, however, do not. The pose
becomes more important than reality, and these poor creatures become hollow
people, forever striving to fit themselves into an impossible mold.”
―
David & Leigh Eddings
“If
a society is to preserve stability and a degree of continuity, it must learn
how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, values, and fantasies
on everyday life.”
―
Eric Hoffer
“It
wasn't until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there
looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes
and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison cell that it really hit
home that he was vanishing out of our lives and into his own.”
―
Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After
Twenty Years Away
“What
was he? A mere human, stuck between the rungs of blended adolescence and
nascent adulthood. What power did he command over the mysterious forces of
love? Which sword could shatter the impenetrable armour of desire?”
― Faraaz
Kazi
“For
as long as I could remember, I had been transparent to myself, unselfconscious,
learning, doing, most of every day. Now I was in my own way; I myself was a
dark object I could not ignore. I couldn't remember how to forget myself. I
didn't want to think about myself, to reckon myself in, to deal with myself
every livelong minute on top of everything else - but swerve as I might, I
couldn't avoid it. I was a boulder blocking my own path. I was a dog barking
between my own ears, a barking dog who wouldn't hush.
So
this was adolescence. Is this how the people around me had died on their feet -
inevitably, helplessly? Perhaps their own selves eclipsed the sun for so many
years the world shriveled around them, and when at least their inescapable
orbits had passed through these dark egoistic years it was too late, they had
adjusted.
Must
I then lose the world forever, that I had so loved? Was it all, the whole
bright and various planet, where I had been so ardent about finding myself
alive, only a passion peculiar to children, that I would outgrow even against
my will?”
―
Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
“...
to wander far from the familiar "home" of his adolescent ways of
belonging, doing, and being. He must, as poet Mary Oliver puts it, "stride
deeper and deeper into the world." His culture will greatly influence the
manner in which he wanders, as will his gender, physical constitution,
psychological temperament, age, and bio-region. In one culture, his wandering
might take him geographically far from his hometown or village. In another
culture, geographic movement will have little importance for the true depth of
his wandering. What is critical is not whether he engages in this practice or
that, or undergoes this ritual or another, but that his wandering changes his
relationship to the world, that he leaves the home of his adolescent identity,
and that his border crossings usher him into the mysteries of nature and
psyché.”
―
Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in
a Fragmented World
“Until
recently the locus of sexual fantasy was peopled with images actually glimpsed
or were sensations actually felt, or private imaginings taken from suggestions
in the real world, a dream well where weightless images from it floated,
transformed by imagination. It prepared children, with these hints and traces
of other people's bodies, to become adults and enter the landscape of adult
sexuality and meet the lover face to face. Lucky men and women are able to keep
a pathway clear to that dream well, peopling it with scenes and images that
meet them as they get older, created with their own bodies mingling with other
bodies; they choose a lover because of a smell from a coat, a way of walking,
the shape of a lip, belong in their imagined interior and resonate back in time
deep into the bones that recall childhood and early adolescent imagination.”
―
Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
“Tombstones
covered the dale, the smooth marble surfaces bright. She had spent days here as
a teenager, though not out of any awareness of mortality. Like every
adolescent, she intended to live forever.”
―
Thomm Quackenbush, We Shadows
“Everybody
else going through the terror and joy of their first crushes, their first
dates, their first kisses while Oscar sat in the back of the class, behind his
DM's screen, and watched his adolescence stream by. Sucks to be left out of
adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun
appears for the first time in a hundred years.”
―
Junot DÃaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“I
spent half my childhood trying to be like my dad. True for most boys, I think.
It turns with adolescence. The last thing I wanted was to be like my dad. It
took becoming a man to realize how lucky I’d been. It took a few hard knocks in
life to make me realize the only thing my dad had ever wanted or worked for was
to give me a chance at being better than him.”
―
Tucker Elliot, The Rainy Season
“...the
changes during adolescence are not something to just get through; they are
qualities we actually need to hold on to in order to live a full and meaningful
life in adulthood.”
―
Daniel J. Siegel, Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain
“His
voice dropped, gone was the soft, sweet lilt. Russia was eighteen but still had
the raspy timbre of adolescence, the kind of voice that make you want to say
yes even if he's just asking you the time.”
―
Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness
“The
teenage years are the soundtrack of discovery — loud, raw, and full of the
music of becoming.”
―
Ayoub Imilouane, Tales of Habib the Hoaxter: Sometimes Hoaxed, Always Good for
a Laugh
