Adolescence
Quotes - Belonging to the peer group is paramount
“I
felt like some old diary she'd found in a drawer: a reminder of a more innocent
and foolish time in her life.”
―
Zadie Smith, Swing Time
“I
spent that night lying next to her in the cool of a summer breeze. I watched her
drift and dream next to me, while I harnessed the weight of a thousand feelings
alongside her. Her face glowed as she slept, as if she could not be any
happier.
Something
profound happened that night, and I did not know what it was. All I knew was
that something had changed. It was in the way she gazed at me, in the way her
fingers would seek out the comfort of my hands. In retrospect, maybe it was
that she had fallen in love for the first time, even though she had yet to say
so. But as with all things beautiful, words merely got in the way. So, I didn’t
care for them. I felt it in her presence that what we shared went beyond the
effable, beyond what could be written about. It was the infinite space between
the unspoken I-love-yous that resounded so clearly all around us.
When
the gods finally lit the stars for the night, and the moon had slipped into
oblivion, I watched little rays of starlight twirl in full-bodied color on her
celestial face. I wanted to stretch out my hands and caress her, to take hold
of her and say, “Where you go, I will go, and where you stay, I will stay. Your
people will be my people, and your God my God.”
Like
Jacob wrestling that terrible angel, I, too, wanted to grasp her—if only for a
temporal second—so that I could encounter the divine.
But
I dared not disturb what was sacred, so I let her sleep.”
―
Moses Yuriyvich Mikheyev, Strange Deaths of the Last Romantic
“Belonging
to the peer group is paramount. One's whole sense of identity is coming
together in adolescence. If one has a good foundation prior to adolescence, the
sense of self can be preliminarily defined. Identity is always social―one's
sense of self needs to be matched by others: one's friends, teachers and
parents. Adolescence is the time the brain (frontal lobes) is reaching full
maturity. It is a time of ideals, of questioning and projecting into the
future. An adolescent needs to have the discipline of mind the philosopher
Thomas Aquinas called studiasitas. Studiasitas is a disciplined focus on
studies and thinking, a kind of temperance of the mind. Its opposite is
curiositas, a kind of mental wandering all over the place without limits.
Healthy
shame at this stage is the source of good identity, a disciplined focus on the
future and on studious limits in pursuing intellectual interests.”
―
John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You
“Immediately
after the Christmas holidays I stopped speaking to her. The guy who had spotted
me near the station seemed to have forgotten the incident, but I had been
afraid even so. In any case, dating Bardot would have demanded a moral strength
far superior to the one I could, even at the time, pride myself on. Because not
only was she ugly but she was plain nasty. Goaded on by sexual liberation (it
was right at the beginning of the 80s, AIDS still did not exist), she couldn't
make appeal to some ethical notion of virginity, obviously. On top of that she
was too intelligent and too lucid to account for her state as being a product
of "JudeoChristian influence" - in any case her parents were
agnostics. All means of evasion were thus closed to her. She could only assist,
in silent hatred, at the liberation of others; witness the boys pressing
themselves like crabs against others' bodies; sense the relationships being
formed, the experiments being undertaken, the orgasms surging forth; live to
the full a silent selfdestruction when faced with the flaunted pleasure of
others. Thus was her adolescence to unfold, and thus it unfolded: jealousy and
frustration fermented slowly to become a swelling of paroxystic hatred.”
―
Michel Houellebecq, Whatever
“Everyone
who is at all successful in comedy has had a secret comedy dork life in their
adolescence. Whether it's sitcoms or stand-ups, wallowing in the muck of comedy
and repeating classic routines and jokes through your teenage years is what
gives every aspiring comic or comedic actor the seed of their absurdist
imagination that later takes flower.”
―
Rainn Wilson, The Bassoon King: My Life in Art, Faith, and Idiocy
“It's
all that time reading, dreaming, and goofing off with fellow oddballs where our
best selves get to involve as teenagers.”
―
Rainn Wilson
“After
we graduate, our identities just become nervousness and worrying all the time.”
―
Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song
“Are
you kidding? It was beautiful!' exclaimed the janitor. 'Just because you did
something when you were younger doesn’t make it stupid. It doesn’t matter if it
was a little college show or Broadway, meaningful things are still meaningful
things. People can make fun of you for it, sour people, call you childish, but
I been around a long time. Both of your two lives combined. And there’s no
guarantee people get to do a great show of A Doll’s House ever again. Either
life happens or death happens and we may never get another chance. Least thing
we can do is to wake up in the morning and protect the good things that were.
The past deserves it.”
―
Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song
“The
face Isaac made when bonding with his aluminum toy would have made you smile.
The innocence of it. It was one of those mind-lending activities that make us
like people—like spying on someone playing the piano or solving a puzzle. Every
person looks like a child when de-seeding a pomegranate. If you watch someone
open a juice box, however old, you’ll see them young again—their soft,
wondering face. It’s one of the most ephemeral beauties for the eyes to partake
in.”
―
Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song
“After
finishing his breakfast. Charlie decided to clean the kitchen, but wanted to do
it entirely with one leg. He laughed his way through the cabinets, inside the
sink, on the floor, under the table, and against the walls like a kid who gets
a kick out of making things harder for themself. It was none other than the
heart of sport, for what was a sport but a project made to be harder for a
player? To pass the ball but only with your feet. To have three chances to bat.
To play catch with a friend, but without gloves. The fun was to see if you
could do it. But when non-athletic hardships come, the adults mysteriously
run.”
―
Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song
“We think they’re better than us, the
white-haired folks we call grandma and grandpa. But being old doesn’t mean
you’ve adjusted to the loneliness. They are saddened, desiring, passionate
folks who want adventure.”
―
Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song
