Adolescence Quotes

In youth, our blood rises and becomes volatile. Desire, worry, and anxiety increase. External circumstances now direct the rise and fall of emotions. Will and intention become constrained by social conventions. Competition, conflict, and scheming are the norm in interactions with people. The approval and disapproval of others become important, and the honest and sincere expression of thoughts and feelings is lost.

~ Liezi

It's hard, omigod remember? Being a kid.

~ Erica Lorraine Scheidt

I was there laughing and joking with everyone else, but it’s like there was some part of mestanding back, watching, thinking, “Is this as good as it gets?

~ Margaret Peterson Haddix

It’s hard not to be impatient with the absurdity of the young; they tell us that two and two make four as though it had never occurred to us, and they’re disappointed if we can’t share their surprise when they have discovered that a hen lays an egg. There’s a lot of nonsense in their ranting and raving, but it’s not all nonsense. One ought to sympathize with them; one ought to do one’s best to understand. One has to remember how much has to be forgotten and how much has to be learnt when for the first time one faces life. It’s not very easy to give up one’s ideals, and the brute facts of every day are bitter pills to swallow. The spiritual conflicts of adolescence can be very severe and one can do little to resolve them.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

Bailey took an exasperated breath and sat up in the seat. “You can’t reason with a teenage girl.”Elise’s eyebrow shot up. “Bailey, you’re a teenage girl.”“Exactly.

~ Heather Mcvea

So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

They didn't really have a childhood. Just them and Mom and then her liver went and she died and it was just them. Except they never learned to be grown-ups. And they never learned to be just kids, either. Stuck in never-never land. Kinda sad.

~ Gerry Boyle

Jenny remembers what it was like, all those years ago. It was never dolls for her, nothing so tangible as that. It was more of a feeling. As if, for the first several years of her life, everything held over her a sort of knowledge and insistence. Fence posts, wallpaper, the lawn at certain hours of the day. These things glowered at her, or smiled. Even something as ordinary as the blue rolling chair in her father's office had some hold on her, some whisper of a new dimension in its puffs of dust sent upward by her fists against its cushions. There was an intensity inherent in everything until, one day, there wasn't. The blue chair rolled on its wheels to the window when she pushed it. The rising dust was rising dust. And when it was gone, there was only a knot of longing somewhere deep inside of her, a vacant ache: adolescence. Boredom.It's why we fall in love, Jenny will tell June.We fall in love to get back to that dimension, that wonder.She goes to the laundry room, where, from a pile of clean clothes, she picks out a few articles of June's, folds them, then goes upstairs to knock on her daughter's door and tell her that this, this lost doll world, is the reason there is love.

~ Emily Ruskovich

Unresolved issues from childhood revisit us in adulthood.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

People who grew up in major cities may wonder why the hell I would act like it's a big deal to be unaccompanied in New York City at that age. It's populated with both adults and children, it's a functioning metropolis, Kevin McCallister was only ten in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and that kid saved Christmas. Conversely, people from suburban areas act like my parents sent me wandering around the site of the Baby Jessica well, blindfolded and holding a flaming baton. So pick a side and prepare to judge me either way!

~ Anna Kendrick

People who grew up in major cities may wonder why the hell I would act like it's a big deal to be unaccompanied in New York City at that age. It's populated with both adults and children, it's a functioning metropolis, Kevin McCallister was only ten in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and that kid saved Christmas. Conversely, people from suburban areas act like my parents sent me wandering around the site of the Baby Jessica well, blindfolded and holding a flaming baton. So pick a side and prepare to judge me wither way!

~ Anna Kendrick

Once upon a time there was a girl named Debbie Jacobs and a boy named Teddy Dennis.

~ Rick Remender

When you're a kid all you want to do is be somewhere else.

~ John Scalzi

I met Baba Yaga at the end of childhood – past pigtails and fairytales, but not quite ready to give up on make-believe.

~ Kirsty Logan

This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal.

~ Ryū Murakami

He'd possessed all the key elements of a school shooter: hormones, misery, ammunition. People wondered how something like Columbine could happen. Jude wondered why it didn't happen more often.

~ Joe Hill

We're so happy, even when we're smiling out of fear.

~ Lorde

Adolescence impelled her eyes to stay at an even keel, to deal with the ground before flickering to the heavens. Night became not dotted with fairy clouds of celestial brilliance, but simply the time when the sun was out of sight.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

But I was living my life sideway. I did not act on what I wanted, I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted; no matter what I was doing, I was always imagining something else.

~ Curtis Sittenfeld

The drone in my ear, it’s like the tornado drill in elementary school, the hand-cranked siren that rang mercilessly, all of us hunched over on ourselves, facing the basement walls, heads tucked into our chests. Beth and me wedged tight, jeaned legs pressed against each other. The sounds of our own breathing. Before we all stopped believing a tornado, or anything, could touch us, ever

~ Megan Abbott

Maturity is when your world opens up and you realize that you are not the center of it.

~ M.j. Croan

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

Childhood introduces children to the wounds of the world.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I learned that adults were not soaring gods, but rather back-yard birds with broken wingtips.When you are thirteen, about to free-fall into the real world, discovering the broken wingtips is terrifying.

~ Janet Turpin Myers

Except that today, oblivious to everyone, there is a hair standing tall inside his shorts: a single hair: long, black and shining. Sprouting out of nowhere, it stands rebelliously erect on his tiny barren orb, not thwarted by the force of the cloth of his underwear, announcing its eventual arrival with élan.

~ Mohit Parikh

At seventeen, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you became as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked this too shall pass - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something that everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgettingone how painful it had been at the time.

~ Jodi Picoult

How do you teach a classroom of Sybils who are breaking apart and reforming right in front of you?

~ David Brooks

It's easier to floss with barbed wire than admit you like someone in middle school.

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

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

Laura began to model herself more and more on those around her, to grasp that the unpardonable sin is to vary from the common mould.

~ Henry Handel Richardson

Just out of high school, you didn't realize you were creating drama for the sake of drama.

~ Donald Miller

Snow and adolescence are the only problems that disappear if you ignore them long enough.

~ Earl Wilson

They didn't have very far to fall - I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board. My childhood visits to the family doctor were stressful events for that reason. He'd ask me gentle questions: How was I feeling? How would I describe the pain? Was it more sharp or more spread out? I'd just look at him with desperation. I needed to be told, that was the whole point of going to the doctor. To take a test, be put through a machine that could comb my insides with radiated precision and tell me what the truth was. Of course the girls didn't leave the ranch: there is a lot that can be borne. When I was nine, I'd broken my wrist falling from a swing. The shocking crack, the blackout pain. But even then, even with my wrist swelling with a cuff of trapped blood, I insisted I was fine, that it was nothing, and my parents believed me right up until the doctor showed them the X-ray, the bones snapped clean.

~ Emma Cline

Oh, she was okay, just tired, tired of trying to be the one you wanted, the one you couldn't live without, the one you found yourself reaching out an arm for as she teetered from crisis to crisis to crisis only to collapse in your bed at the end of the day, a tortured sylph in black lace. Except she never really was. And you never really did. Or maybe you did for one night. The next night was another matter. It turned out the world was filled with beautiful girls. It turned out being beautiful wasn't nearly enough

~ Lucinda Rosenfeld

Nobody, she felt, understood her--not her mother, not her father, not her sister or brother, none of the girls or boys at school, nadie--except her man.

~ Raquel Cepeda

We are at that age that balances between independence and conferring with your friends about every miniscule decision you make. I've never liked that part of adolescence.

~ Tarryn Fisher

There comes a time. The pain of existence transcends the fear of change. There comes a time.

~ Moshe Kasher

Twisting the nipple so I inhaled audibly, and he hesitated for a moment but kept going. His dick smearing at my bare thighs. I would be shunted along whatever would happen, I understood. However he piloted the night. And there wasn't fear, just a feeling adjacent to excitement, a viewing from the wings. What would happen to Evie?

~ Emma Cline

Because they do burn leaves here, the older folks do, and I remember now that I love it and always have. The way fall feels at night because of it, because of the crackling sound and walking around the sidewalks, like when you’re a kid, and kicking those soft piles, and seeing smoke from backyards and Mr. Kilstrap standing over the metal drum with the holes in the top, the sparking embers at his feet.

~ Megan Abbott

In ancient Greece, adolescence was a time when young men left their biological families to become the lovers of adult men. Sexuality was but one element of an affectional and educational relationship in which youths learned the ways of manhood

~ Barry D. Adam