Adolescence
Quotes - We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds
“It's
easier to floss with barbed wire than admit you like someone in middle school.”
―
Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
“Common
sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”
―
Albert Einstein
“So
you try to think of someone else you're mad at, and the unavoidable answer pops
into your little warped brain: everyone.”
―
Ellen Hopkins
“Maturity
is when your world opens up and you realize that you are not the center of it.”
―
M.J. Croan
“To
look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been
looking plain the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle
can ever receive.”
―
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
“Felicity
ignores us. She walks out to them, an apparition in white and blue velvet, her
head held high as they stare in awe at her, the goddess. I don't know yet what
power feels like. But this is surely what it looks like, and I think I'm
beginning to understand why those ancient women had to hide in caves. Why our
parents and suitors want us to behave properly and predictably. It's not that
they want to protect us; it's that they fear us.”
―
Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty
“And
when she started becoming a “young lady,” and no one was allowed to look at her
because she thought she was fat. And how she really wasn’t fat. And how she was
actually very pretty. And how different her face looked when she realized boys
thought she was pretty. And how different her face looked the first time she
really liked a boy who was not on a poster on her wall. And how her face looked
when she realized she was in love with that boy. I wondered how her face would
look when she came out from behind those doors.”
―
Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
“We
must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the
best years of their lives preparing for examinations.”
―
Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions
“Adolescence
is like having only enough light to see the step directly in front of you.”
―
Sarah Addison Allen, The Girl Who Chased the Moon
“Peter,'
she asked, trying to speak firmly, 'what are your exact feelings for me?'
Those
of a devoted son, Wendy.'
I
thought so,' she said, and went and sat by herself at the extreme end of the
room.
You
are so queer,' he said, frankly puzzled, 'and Tiger Lily is just the same.
There is something she wants to be to me, but she says it is not my mother.'
No,
indeed, it is not,' Wendy replied with frightful emphasis.”
―
J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
“I
feel like I'm way down this deep, deep hole and I'm looking up and all there is
is this little dot of light and I have to shout at the top of my lungs for
anyone to hear me and even when I do, I say the wrong thing or they don't
really listen or they're just humouring me.”
―
Patrick Ness, The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“I
believe that everyone else my age is an adult whereas I am merely in disguise.”
―
Margaret Atwood
“After
all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote
from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless,
we longed to be seized by any whim or passion and follow it to the farthest
reaches of our natures. We wanted to live – to die – to burst into flame – to
be transformed into angels or explosions. Only the mundane offended us, as if
we secretly feared it was our destiny . By late afternoon our muscles ached,
our eyelids grew heavy with obscure desires. And so we dreamed and did nothing,
for what was there to do, played ping-pong and went to the beach, loafed in
backyards, slept late into the morning – and always we craved adventures so
extreme we could never imagine them. In the long dusks of summer we walked the
suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something
to happen.”
―
Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter
“You
forget what it was like. You'd swear on your life you never will, but year by
year it falls away. How your temperature ran off the mercury, your heart
galloped flat-out and never needed to rest, everything was pitched on the edge
of shattering glass. How wanting something was like dying of thirst. How your
skin was too fine to keep out any of the million things flooding by; every
color boiled bright enough to scald you, any second of any day could send you
soaring or rip you to bloody shreds.”
―
Tana French, The Secret Place
“Standing
in the line at the food court, I try to be myself. But I forget how I usually
stand when I'm myself.”
―
Susane Colasanti, When It Happens
“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
“Until
recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge
of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the
older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years
before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless
horror of wavering purpose, which was youth.”
―
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
“Despite
the fact that I have no regrets about how things turned out in my life, I still
can't help wanting to understand my intense relationship with Leo, as well as
that turbulent time between adolescence and adulthood when everything feels raw
and invigorating and scary-and why those feelings are all coming back to me
now.”
―
Emily Giffin, Love the One You're With
“The
groove is so mysterious. We're born with it and we lose it and the world seems
to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the
world unifies around us, and both stupid and cool fall away.
I am
grateful to those who are keepers of the groove. The babies and the grandmas
who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing
is better than no dancing at all.”
―
Lynda Barry, One Hundred Demons
“For
the first time, she recognized the symptoms of infatuation which she had felt
incipiently as a child, as a girl in her early teens, and later as a young
woman. The recognition did not lessen the reality, the poignancy of the
revelation by any suggestion or promise of instability. The past was nothing to
her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery
which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant; was
hers, to torture her as it was doing then with the biting conviction that she
had lost that which she had held, she had been denied that which her
impassioned, newly awakened being demanded.”
―
Kate Chopin, The Awakening