Adolescence
Quotes - Adolescence feeds on drama
“Adolescence--the
time when teens begin to do things adults do--now happens later.
Thirteen-year-olds--and even 18-year-olds-- are less likely to act like adults
and spend their time like adults. They are more likely, instead, to act like
children--not by being immature, necessarily, but by postponing the usual
activities of adults. Adolescence is now an extension of childhood rather than
the beginning of adulthood.”
―
Jean M. Twenge, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less
Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for
Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us
“Your
mom shoulda told you she was just the diseased old slit all the local hobos
used as a cum dumpster when they drank away their money and couldn't afford new
porno mags.”
―
Matthew Rosenberg, 4 Kids Walk Into a Bank
“You
can’t walk me to school,” Tommy said. He came into the kitchen, sat down before
his plate, and stared at it, waiting for Sammy to pile it with eggs. “Mom, you
can’t possibly. I would die. I would absolutely die.”
“He
would die,” Sammy told Rosa.
“Which
would be very embarrassing for me,” Rosa said. “Standing there next to a dead
body in front of William Floyd Junior High.”
―
Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
“Adolescence
feeds on drama, it is most happy when living in extremis, and Ferguson was no
less vulnerable to the lure of high emotion and extravagant unreason than any
other boy his age ...”
―
Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1
“The
teenage brain sees more than meets the eye.”
―
Forrest Gold
“One
girl to send her to the guillotine, one to cut the rope, and one to eagerly
await the result.”
―
Wataru Watari, やはり俺の青春ラブコメはまちがっている。4
“I
came back [to school] in the fall, as a full-time boarder, with a certain set
to my jaw, determined to go it alone. A summer passed in thoughtful isolation,
rowing on a mountain lake, diving from a pier, had made me perfectly reckless.
I was going to get myself recognized at whatever price. It was in this cold,
empty gambler’s mood, common to politicians and adolescents, that I surveyed
the convent setup. If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by
badness.”
―
Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
“If
you want to know the truth, I can’t even stand ministers. The ones they’ve had
at every school I’ve gone to, they all have these Holy Joe voices when they
start giving their sermons. God, I hate that. I don’t see why the hell they
can’t talk in their natural voice. They sound so phony when they talk.”
―
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
“I
was cursed or blessed with a prolonged adolescence; I arrived at some seeming
maturity when I was past thirty. It was only in my forties that I really began
to feel young. By then I was ready for it.”
―
Henry Miller, Sextet: Six essays
“When
children become teenagers, their feelings are often invalidated by others
because they have a hard time expressing them. They can’t find the words to use
so adults deem their emotions as a “stage of adolescence.” As a result,
everything beautiful and raw about life is reduced to a phase they're supposed
to grow out of. Although how often is our growth just abandonment? Some people
don’t mature, they just run away from their problems faster than they used to
and happen to age. We greatly underestimate the tragedy of leaving behind the
unaddressed. Many of our most intuitive and sincere experiences are lost to
time. It is one of life’s saddest deficits”
―
Karl Kristian Flores, Cardiac Ablation
“He
has not the faintest idea that I am ugly and we are very happy together.”
―
Jane Gardam, Bilgewater
“You
can never really trust someone who remembers every embarrassing detail of your
adolescence.”
―
Daniel Clowes, David Boring
“...some
adolescent survivors describe feeling special, powerful, and sometimes
entitled. This is especially true of those for whom excessive attention was
part of the abuse relationship by virtue any power they held over the abuser or
members of the family - especially their mothers in some cases of
father-daughter incest - and of any affection or sexual pleasure they
experienced. All of these feelings can coexist with self-loathing and shame or
might alternate with them. Some victims experience this power as personally
affirming, resulting in feelings of grandiosity, whereas others believe
themselves to be malignantly powerful and defective. As children, these victims
may have developed the belief that they could willfully manipulate others and
"make or break" the family or their peer group (or the broader
community setting) with their terrible powers or the secrets they hold. In
adolescence these largely implicit ideas no longer manifest mainly or only as
the egocentrism associated with early childhood. A more pervasive form of
narcissistic entitlement and power and an apparently callous indifference to
and contempt for others can lead to conduct disturbances and the victimization
of others. Many individuals with apparent sociopathic tendencies and conduct
disorders were victimized as children. Such individuals at some point had the
capacity for respect, empathy, and genuine social responsibility that was lost
and corrupted in the struggle to survive, to make sense of, and to remove
themselves from the receiving end of victimization. Identification with the
perpetrator and the victimization of others is specifically included as a core
feature of complex PTSD.”
―
Christine A. Courtois, Treatment of Complex Trauma: A Sequenced,
Relationship-Based Approach
“As
parents we want our children to reach the point where they can function
independently of us. We want this for their own good and also for ours, since
we have been through many years of the hard work of parenting and now desire
the freedom that comes with the empty nest. Parenting has wonderful rewards but
it also requires an exacting price.
Having
done the hard work of parenting, we look forward the time when we can enjoy the
fruit of our labors, watch our children follow their own dreams while we
explore new horizons for ourselves. It is the way life is designed - children
to become adults.”
―
Gary Chapman, Ross Cambell
“When
children become teenagers, their feelings are often invalidated by others
because they have a hard time expressing them. They can’t find the words to use
so adults deem their emotions as a “stage of adolescence.” As a result,
everything beautiful and raw about life is reduced to a phase they’ll grow out
of. Although how often is our growth just abandonment? Some people don’t
mature, they just run away from their problems faster than they used to and
happen to age. We greatly underestimate the tragedy of leaving behind the
unaddressed. Many of our most intuitive and sincere experiences are lost to
time. It is one of life’s saddest deficits.”
―
Karl Kristian Flores, Cardiac Ablation
“This
notion of oneself as a kind of continuing career-- something to work at, work
on, 'make an effort' for and subject an hour a day of emotional Nautilus
training, all in the interest of not attaining grace, but of improving one's
'relationships'-- is fairly recent in the world, at least in the world not
inhabited by adolescents,' Didion wrote. 'The message that large numbers of
people are getting... is that this kind of emotional shopping around is the
proper business of life's better students, that adolescence can now extend to
middle age.”
―
Jessica Weisberg, Asking for a Friend: Three Centuries of Advice on Life, Love,
Money, and Other Burning Questions from a Nation Obsessed
