Life Adolescence Quotes & Sayings

Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next. — Cesare Pavese

Adolescence is a tough time for parent and child alike. It is a time between: between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal responsibility, between life stage- managed by grown-ups and life privately held. — Anna Quindlen

Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, lemme tell you. Those are big years. Everybody always thinks of it as a time of adolescence - just getting through to the real part of your life - but it's more than that. Sometimes your whole life happens in those years, and the rest of your life it's just the same story playing out with different characters. I could die tomorrow and have lived the main ups and downs of life. Pain. Loss. Love. And what you all so fondly refer to as wisdom. Wanna know the difference between adult wisdom and young adult wisdom? You have the ability to look back at your past and interpret it. I have the ability to look at my present and live it with my whole body. — Lidia Yuknavitch

And the crazy part of it was even if you were clever, even if you spent your adolescence reading John Donne and Shaw, even if you studied history or zoology or physics and hoped to spend your life pursuing some difficult and challenging career, you still had a mind full of all the soupy longings that every high-school girl was awash in ... underneath it, all you longed to be was annihilated by love, to be swept off your feet, to be filled up by a giant prick spouting sperm, soapsuds, silk and satins and, of course, money. — Erica Jong

I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults. — Eric Hoffer

Combat and rape, the public and private forms of organized social violence, are primarily experiences of adolescent and early adult life. The United States Army enlists young men at seventeen; the average age of the Vietnam combat soldier was nineteen. In many other countries boys are conscripted for military service while barely in their teens. Similarly, the period of highest risk for rape is in late adolescence. Half of all victims are aged twenty or younger at the time they are raped; three-quarters are between the ages of thirteen and twenty-six. The period of greatest psychological vulnerability is also in reality the period of greatest traumatic exposure, for both young men and young women. Rape and combat might thus be considered complementary social rites of initiation into the coercive violence at the foundation of adult society. They are the paradigmatic forms of trauma for women and men. — Judith Lewis Herman

The signs that presage growth, so similar, it seems to me, to those in early adolescence: discontent, restlessness, doubt, despair, longing, are interpreted falsely as signs of decay. In youth one does not as often misinterpret the signs; one accepts them, quite rightly, as growing pains. One takes them seriously, listens to them, follows where they lead ... But in the middle age, because of the false assumption that it is a period of decline, one interprets these life-signs, paradoxically, as signs of approaching death. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

In no order of things is adolescence the time of the simple life. — Janet Erskine Stuart

Adolescence was only recognised as a life stage in the early 20th century, when psychologists got down to work. Today's generational battle obscures the fact that adulthood is happening later. A new transitional stage has emerged after adolescence: the twenties. — Jane Ridley

These what-if equations have kept her life static since adolescence. And if life proves one thing, it's that the best laid plans don't necessarily lead to the best results. — Nick Alexander

Life is . . . a stream flowing from high mountain ranges which wring it from the clouds, coursing down through all the manifold ways in which the water comes down at Lodore to the sea of eternity. Adolescence is the chief rapids in this river of life which may cut a deep canyon and leave its shores a desert. — Brian J. Mahan

Any book that can help you survive the slings and arrows of adolescence is a book to love for life; 'The Catcher in the Rye' did just that, and I still do love it. — Libba Bray

It was in reading Tristam Shandy that I noticed how it is primarily men who gravitate towards the game-playing self-reflexive style. There is an alienation from emotion in it, a Nervous Nelly fear of letting go and being "exposed." As an attitude towards life, it betrays a perpetual adolescence. Those who hurled themselves after Derrida were not the most sophisticated but the most pretentious, and least creative members of my generation of academics. — Camille Paglia

Ordinarily during the stage of your life when you're going through your adolescence and you're completely awkward and uncomfortable, the rest of the world isn't watching you with bated breath. It's different when you're an actor and you choose to work your way through that period because it only makes it worse. — Tina Majorino

We cannot know the young child's personality by studying his systems of interest, for his attention is as yet too labile, his reactions impulsive, and interests unformed. From adolescence onward, however, the surest clue to personality is the hierarchy of interests, including the loves and loyalties of adult life. — Gordon W. Allport

And walking back from the river I remember the galling loneliness of my adolescence, from which I do not seem to have completely escaped. It is the sense of the voyeur, the lonely, lonely boy with no role in life but to peer in at the lighted windows of other people's contentment and vitality. It seems comical
farcical
that, having been treated so generously, I should be struck with this image of a kid in the rain walking along the road shoulders of East Milton. — John Cheever

When faced with a challenge, happy families, like happy people, just add a new chapter to their life story that shows them overcoming the hardship. This skill is particularly important for children, whose identity tends to get locked in during adolescence. — Bruce Feiler

In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics. — Bertrand Russell

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly. — Umberto Eco

My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard. — James Joyce

There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer. — Edward Hoagland

There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: - through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom). and then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. — Herman Melville

If there was one thing that defined adolescence it was hysterical laughter. You never laughed like that again. In adolescence the brutal realisation that the world and life were completely absurd made you laugh until you couldn't catch your breath, whereas in later life it would only result in a weary sigh. — Antoine Laurain

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

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

Human life is a continuous thread which each of us spins to his own pattern, rich and complex in meaning. There are no natural knots in it. Yet knots form, nearly always in adolescence. — Edgar Friedenberg

Everything was brighter and more colorful in those years, as if my childhood was ending in an explosion of unreal passion that made my life feel sacred and holy. — Roman Payne

[ ... ] passion is by no means the fuller life which it seems to be in the dreams of adolescence, but is on the contrary a kind of naked and denuding intensity, verily, a bitter destitution, the impoverishment of a mind being emptied of all diversity, an obsession of the imagination by a single image. — Denis De Rougemont

I have always had a sense that we are all pretty much alone in life, particularly in adolescence. — Robert Cormier

As people move through life, passing from the hopeful ignorance of youth into sobering adulthood, they inevitably face an increasingly nagging question: Is this all there is? Childhood can be painful, adolescence confusing; most people, expect that in adulthood things will get better. During the early years of adulthood the future still looks promising. But inevitably the mirror' shows the first white hairs and confirms the fact that those few extra pounds are not about to leave; eyesight begins to fail and mysterious pains begin to shoot through the body...' Where's all that money I was to have made? Where are all of the good times I was going to have? — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is like what happens to every individual when he passes from childhood to adolescence and from youth to manhood. He loses what had hitherto guided his life and lives without direction, not having found a new standard suitable to his age, and so he invents all sorts of occupations, cares, distractions, and stupefactions to divert his attention from the misery and senselessness of his life. Such a condition may last a long time. — Leo Tolstoy

And then you grew up, went to school, and began to 'philosophize,' didn't you? We all go through the same thing. It seems that during adolescence a person's inner life is suddenly weakened, stripped of its natural courage. In his thinking he no longer dares stand face to face with reality or mystery; he begins to see them through the opinions of 'grown-ups,' through books and courses and professors. Still, a voice remains which is not completely muffled and which cries out every so often - every time its gag is loosened by an unexpected jolt in the routine. The voice cries out its great questioning of everything, but we stifle it again right away. — Rene Daumal

The faces of your young people in general are not interesting - I don't mean the children, but the young men and women - and they are awkward and clownish in their manners, without the quaintness of the elder generation, who are the funniest old dears in the world." "They will all be quaint enough as they get older. You must remember the sort of life they lead. They get their notions very slowly, and they must have notions in their heads before they can show them on their faces. — Thomas Hughes

My own first love was biology. I spent a great part of my adolescence in the Natural History museum in London (and I still go to the Botanic Garden almost every day, and to the Zoo every Monday). The sense of diversity of the wonder of innumerable forms of life has always thrilled me beyond anything else. — Oliver Sacks

The confusion boys experience about their identity is heightened during adolescence. In many ways the fact that today's boy often has a wider range of emotional expression in early childhood, but if forced to suppress emotional awareness later on makes adolescence all the more stressful for boys. Tragically, were it not for the extreme violence that has erupted among teenage boys throughout our nation, the emotional life of boys would still be ignored. Although therapists tell us that mass media images of male violence and domination teach boys that violence is alluring and satisfying, when individual boys are violent, especially when they murder randomly, pundits tend to behave as though it were a mystery why boys are so violent. — Bell Hooks

It has always seemed to me a disgrace that the embarrassments of early life should continue to smart throughout adulthood with undiminished intensity. Is it not enough that our youthful blunders made us cringe at the time, when we were at our tenderest, but must stay with us beyond cure, burn marks ready to flare up painfully at the merest touch? No: an indiscretion from earliest adolescence will still bring a blush to the cheek of the nonagenarian on his deathbed. — John Banville

As children inch their way into adolescence, the parent changes. He is an authority, a source of answers, and a chastising voice. Depending on the day, he may be resented, emulated, questioned, or defied.
Only as an adult can a child imagine his parent as a whole person, as a husband, a brother, or a son. Only then can a child see how his parent fits into the world beyond four walls. Saleem had only bits and pieces of his father, mostly the memories of a young boy. He would spend the rest of his life, he knew, trying to reconstruct his father with the scraps he could recall or gather from his mother. — Nadia Hashimi

I contemplated the phone for some time. Never had I heard her so oddly gay and forthright; as a matter of fact, we hadn't discussed sex since adolescence. Her entire inner life was secretive and mysterious, and no one dared violate it. She sent out powerful "No Trespassing" signals and I had learned to honor them. It crossed my mind that my sister was drunk. — Brooke Hayward

Camus-boy, you're always going to be the same you, just older. It's not like there's a moment when you wake up and go, Shit, I'm grown-up, I don't feel like myself anymore.'
I don't tell him, but this is the scariest fucking thing I've ever heard in my life. Being grown-up should feel like a big transition. It can't be something that, despite my best efforts, I've been drifting closer and closer to every summer. It needs to be a shock. I need to know at what point to stop holding on. And that moment will suck, and probably every moment after that will suck, but at least I'll know that everything that came before really was valid. I really was young and innocent. I wasn't fooling myself. — Hannah Moskowitz

One of the traps of adolescence is the sort of paranoid resentment that somehow you're never going to match up and that everybody else's life is going to be better and finer and fuller. That everyone else attended some secret lesson in which how to live was taught and you had a dental appointment that day, or you were somehow not invited. And the point of great writers like Wilde is that they make that invitation to you. — Stephen Fry

I couldn't understand how boldness and sorrow, how you're so hard and do you really care for me? could be so thoroughly bound together. Nor could I begin to fathom how someone so seemingly vulnerable, hesitant, and eager to confide so many uncertainties about herself could, with one and the same gesture, reach into my pants with unabashed recklessness and hold on to my cock and squeeze it. — Andre Aciman

When I remember how unhappy I was in adolescence - about the fact that, though I wasn't really using the term to or for myself, I knew that I was gay - I think, "Oh, if someone then could have shown me just an hour in the life that I have now, I would have made it through all of that misery and despair just fine." The pain lay in thinking that I had a desolate future. — Andrew Solomon

There's only one thing harder than living in a home with an adolescent - and that's being an adolescent. The moodiness, the volatility, the wholesale lack of impulse control, all would be close to clinical conditions if they occurred at another point in life. In adolescence, they're just part of the behavioral portfolio. — Jeffrey Kluger

It seemed to him [Otto Kugelblitz] obvious that the human life span runs through the varieties of mental disorder as understood in his day - the solipsism of infancy, the sexual hysterias of adolescence and entry-level adulthood, the paranoia of middle age, the dementia of late life ... all working up to death, which at last turns out to be sanity. — Thomas Pynchon

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

I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction. — Tahereh Mafi

Adolescence-is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us? — John Irving

For a terrible time of life a teen-ager deceives himself; he believes he can trick the world. He believes he is invulnerable. An adolescent who is an orphan at this phase is in danger of never growing up. — John Irving

I'm very comfortable with the nature of life and death, and that we come to an end. What's most difficult to imagine is that those dreams and early yearnings and desires of childhood and adolescence will also disappear. But who knows? Maybe you become part of the eternal whatever. — Hugh Hefner

For is it not possible that middle age can be looked upon as a period of second flowering, second growth, even a kind of second adolescence? It is true that society in general does not help one accept this interpretation of the second half of life. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, "words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn. — William James

Adolescence is that time in your life when you discover your ability to be depressed. — David Gerrold

If there was one thing thing that defined adolescence it was hysterical laughter. You never laughed like that again. In adolescence the brutal realisation that the world and life were completely absurd made you laugh until you couldn't catch your breath, whereas in later life it would only result in a weary sight. — Antoine Laurain

Personal change, growth, development, identity formation
these tasks that once were thought to belong to childhood and adolescence alone now are recognized as part of adult life as well. Gone is the belief that adulthood is, or ought to be, a time of internal peace and comfort, that growing pains belong only to the young; gone the belief that these are marker events
a job, a mate, a child
through which we will pass into a life of relative ease. — Lillian B. Rubin

All my life I've felt like there was something wrong with me. Something missing or damaged."
"Every teenager in the world feels like that, feels broken or out of place, different somehow, royalty mistakenly born into a family of peasants. — Cassandra Clare

As Elders, we are fully committed to the principle that all human beings are of equal worth. You will see that we highlight equality for girls and women - not just women's rights. That is important as girls, especially adolescent girls, have been almost invisible in debates on equal rights. Yet it is in adolescence that events can have a huge effect on a girl's life. — Mary Robinson

One thing that happens often times in family life is that people think maybe the challenge you are having with a child when they are a teenager or even in adolescence that this is going to go on forever and it doesn't. They get to their 20s, they change dramatically in their 20s. So sometimes it's just holding on for the ride, and just being there and holding on for the ride. — Michele Bachmann

Adolescence is the same tragedy being performed again and again. The only things that change are the stage props. — Lindsey Leavitt

It is as if, to every period of history, there corresponded a privileged age and a particular division of human life: "youth" is the privileged age of the seventeenth century, childhood of the nineteenth, adolescence of the twentieth. — Philippe Aries

Teenagers are my life and my triumph. I'd be nowhere without them. — Elvis Presley

I was influenced by the Beats because I actually just began to commit adolescence around 1955, when "Howl" and Rebel Without a Cause and a lot of other new things were popping up. (Again I'm trying to give you a finite version of this career.) And then I came under the sway of Wallace Stevens when I was in college and graduate school, and basically set as a life goal the ambition of writing third-rate Wallace Stevens. I thought I would be completely content if I was recognized at some later point in my life as a third-rate Wallace Stevens. — Billy Collins

Why, I wondered, do people who at one time or another have all been young themselves, who ought therefore to know better, generalize so suavely and so mendaciously about the golden hours of youth? That period of life when every sorrow seems permanent and every setback insuperable. — Vera Brittain

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 Eddings

Adolescence hits boys harder than it does girls. Girls bleed a little and their breasts pop out, big deal, but adolescence lands on a guy with both feet ... Your body is engulfed by chemicals of rage and despair, you pound, you shriek, you batter your head against the trees. You come away wounded, feeling that life is unknowable, can never be understood, only endured and sometimes cheated. — Garrison Keillor

We have to acknowledge that adolescence is that time of transition where we begin to introduce to children that life isn't pretty, that there are difficult things, there are hard situations, it's not fair. Bad things happen to good people. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Even if you were to start drinking milk during adolescence in an attempt to bolster peak bone mass, it probably wouldn't reduce your chances of fracture later in life. — Michael Greger

Adolescence is such a fun time in your life, because you think you know it all, and you haven't gotten to the point where you realize that you know almost nothing. — Anthony Kiedis

Stages of life are artifacts. Adolescence is a useful contrivance, midlife is a moving target, senior citizens are an interest group, and tweenhood is just plain made up. — Jill Lepore

We spend our whole lives recovering from high school. — Paula Danziger

Adolescence is interesting. I mean, all of life is interesting and all of life is transitionary. But I think there is an exponential growth physically, intellectually, emotionally and there is so much potential. — Bill Henson

Something went klunk. Like a nickel dropping in a soda machine. One of those small insights that explains everything. This was puberty for these boys. Adolescence. The first date, the first kiss, the first chance to hold hands with someone special. Delayed, postponed, a decade's worth of longing
while everybody around you celebrates life, you pretend, suppress, inhibit, deprive yourself of you own joy
but finally ultimately, eventually, you find a place where you can have a taste of everything denied. — David Gerrold

Something about the turbulence of adolescence makes you want to do something creative ... I thought as I got older I would stop writing about it, but I find adolescence, and popular depictions of it, very interesting. I like to see where my own life intersects or diverges from notions of what a teenager is supposed to be, or what a black person is supposed to be, or a woman. — Allison Joseph

Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. — C.S. Lewis

I'm pretty squeaky clean. No big tragedies in my childhood or adolescence or adulthood. I've had a very easygoing, simple life. — Vera Farmiga

Life after 50 or 60 is itself another country, as different as adolescence is from childhood, or as adulthood is from adolescence - and just as adventurous. — Gloria Steinem

For the first time in my life, I actually wished that everyone was the same. And I despised myself for my "differentness" or "uniqueness" as an individual. In the world there are lots of social groups people can fit into, and I've spent time roaming in and out of a few and being kicked out of many. Now I stand on the outside and look in. Wondering where is my place. Coming to a conclusion, I have no place. — Laura Hanna

I feel as though I have been having conversations like this all my life. None of us is young anymore, but what has just taken place could have happened when I was sixteen, or twenty, or twenty-five. We got to adolescence and just stopped dead; we drew up the map then and left the boundaries exactly as they were. — Nick Hornby

The donning of the ear buds marks the beginning of teen life, when children set off on their own for the passage through adolescence. — Amity Shlaes

I am made to think, not for the first time, that in my writing I have plunged ahead-head-on, heedlessly one might say-or 'fearlessly'- into my own future: this time of utter raw anguished loss. Though I may have had, since adolescence, a kind of intellectual/literary precocity, I had not experienced much;nor would I experience much until I was well into middle age-the illnesses and deaths of my parents, this unexpected death of my husband. We play at paste till qualified for pearl says Emily Dickinson. Playing at paste is much of our early lives. And then, with the violence of a door slammed shut by wind rushing through a house, life catches up with us. — Joyce Carol Oates

It's natural for children to drift through their early childhood taking their parents for granted, then adolescence rears its ugly head and insouciance morphs into rebellion as they strive to define themselves by being as different from those who gave them life as possible. But for me, now on the eve of my sixteenth year, familial insurrection had yet to seize me - and in reality, it never would. I was my father's son. His moral compass was inexorably mine. I knew that day I would forever define myself not by contrasts to my father, but by emulation, striving to be a "good man" like him. But the term "good man" was not adequate to describe him. Daddy was a great man who charted his own course in life, guided by his own light, irrespective of the opinions of others, be they my grandmother's or those of his Brothers in the Lodge. He was the kind of man I wanted to be, the kind of man I was already becoming without fully realizing it. — G.M. Frazier

The more intelligent and competent a woman is in her adult life, the less likely she is to have received an adequate amount of romantic attention in adolescence. — Susan Jacoby

The nice thing about being an adolescent is being able to make mature decisions when you need them and being able to just flow alone with life when you don't. — Michael A. Stackpole

I wouldn't say I'm stuck in my adolescence, but I think, like a lot of people, I carry my teen years with me. I feel really in touch with those feelings, and how intense and complicated life seems in those years. — Sara Zarr

Ironically, when I hit adolescence, I was approached about modeling and acting all the time. And, for five years, I said, "No, I'm not interested. I want a simple life, I don't want to be in the spotlight." — Evangeline Lilly

We're kicking our way into adolescence from the minute we're born. Gradually you form your own ideas of how you should lead your life. It's strange, but when you get hurt - really hurt, I mean - you're willing to throw those ideas aside for another set that now make sense to you and calm your hurt. — Carlos Baker

Oh, he's a sweet thing and I love him so--and I love life--and everything's beautiful! — Cornelia Spelman

Bittersweet: it's what life tastes like. And if you can handle the bitter, the sweet will come later. ~ Klyde, in Piranhas Like S'mores. — J.Z. Bingham

I remembered that time of life when most of what matters can be summed up by the phase 'the other kids,' and it struck me as pitiful. The dread was more complex ... Dread is a lure, and I cold feel its tug, but why? ... Perception is never passive. We are not only receivers of the world; we also actively produce it. There is a hallucinatory quality to all perception, and illusions are easy to create. [pp. 656-66] — Siri Hustvedt

In idyllic small towns I sometimes see teenagers looking out of place in their garb of desperation, the leftover tatters and stains and slashes of the fashion of my youth. For this phase of their life, the underworld is their true home, and in the grit and underbelly of a city they could find something that approximates it. Even the internal clock of adolescents changes, making them nocturnal creatures for at least a few years. All through childhood you grow toward life and then in adolescence, at the height of life, you begin to grow toward death. This fatality is felt as an enlargement to be welcomed and embraced, for the young in this culture enter adulthood as a prison, and death reassures them that there are exits. "I have been half in love with easeful death," said Keats who died at twenty-six and so were we, though the death we were in love with was only an idea then. — Rebecca Solnit

They validate perceptions that need validating, especially in adolescence
ie, under the bland, forced optimism of American life terrible forces are at work, things are not what they seem, and if you feel lonely, persecuted, a misfit, and in terror, you aren't crazy. You're right. — Joanna Russ

In hindsight, the grand hero ideal she always thought he encompassed chipped away and all that remained was a cheap imitation. He embodied everything she'd hidden from in her adolescence. Boyfriends, relationships, and sex all led to disaster. Being alone was better than shattered and broken like mother: disenchanted with the life she'd been forced into. — Callie Hunter

A lot of people move around in life chronically ashamed of how they look, or how they feel, or what they said, or what they did. It's like a permanent adolescent concern. Adolescence is when you're permanently concerned about what other people think of you. — Jon Ronson

I have decided to keep a full journal, in the hope that my life will perhaps seem more interesting when it is written down. — Sue Townsend

The salient feature of the absurd age I was at
an age which for all its alleged awkwardness, is prodigiously rich
is that reason is not its guide, and the most insignificant attributes of other people always appear to be consubstantial with their personality. One lives among monsters and gods, a stranger to peace of mind. There is scarcely a single one of our acts from that time which we would not prefer to abolish later on. But all we should lament is the loss of the spontaneity that urged them upon us. In later life, we see things with a more practical eye, one we share with the rest of society; but adolescence was the only time when we ever learned anything. — Marcel Proust

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

I could have lived through it all if only I continued to have the feeling that at the end of childhood, at the end of adolescence, there was something else in this life that would be mine, that I could make with my bare hands, and once I had made it, I could say, I did this to my life. I made my life so. — Paullina Simons

The intoxication with the theatre, with its limelight, costumes, and masks, and with its passions and conflicts, accords well with the adolescence of a man who was to act his role with an intense sense of the dramatic, and of whose life it might indeed be said that its very shape had the power and pattern of classical tragedy. — Isaac Deutscher

The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing merry-go-round. True, they are a merry-go-round of ill-gaited and wind-broken horses, painted first in pastel colors, then in dull grays and browns, but perplexing and intolerably dizzy the thing is, as never were the merry-go-rounds of childhood or adolescence; as never, surely, were the certain-coursed, dynamic roller-coasters of youth. For most men and women these thirty years are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life. — F Scott Fitzgerald

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