Quotes & Sayings About Puberty

Adolescence: The stage between puberty and adultery. — Ambrose Bierce

High school is the time of puberty. And puberty is a time of intense exposure and vulnerability. Whatever toxic shame a person carries from childhood will be tested in high school. Often teenage groups look for a scapegoat, someone everyone can dump and project their shame onto. This was Arnold's fate. He was viciously shamed by his female peer group. This accounted for his problem with women. — John Bradshaw

I think I went through puberty. I'm, like, 20 now and I was, like, 17 then, ... You know, I've experienced different things and am having a lot more fun with it. — Fefe Dobson

At that age I looked at women with brutal and emotionless judgement. Assessing the slope of their breasts, imagining how they would look in very crude positions. — Emma Cline

E have become wealthy, and wealth is the prelude to art. In every country where centuries of physical effort have accumulated the means for luxury and leisure, culture has followed as naturally as vegetation grows in a rich and watered soil. To have become wealthy was the first necessity; a people too must live before it can philosophize. No doubt we have grown faster than nations usually have grown; and the disorder of our souls is due to the rapidity of our development. We are like youths disturbed and unbalanced, for a time, by the sudden growth and experiences of puberty. But soon our maturity will come; our minds will catch up with our bodies, our culture with our possessions. Perhaps there are greater souls than Shakespeare's, and greater minds than Plato's, waiting to be born. When we have learned to reverence liberty as well as wealth, we too shall have our Renaissance. — Will Durant

Speaking figuratively, the study of theology often produces overgrown youths whose internal organs have not correspondingly developed. This is a characteristic of adolescence. There is actually something like theological puberty. — Helmut Thielicke

I am realizing how old I am 'cause I am meeting so many people that were born in the 80s, which is crazy to me that I was going through puberty and [they weren't] even alive. — Rob Corddry

I was probably not the first to lose my virginity among my friends. I was definitely one of the last ones to reach puberty - I didn't grow until the last couple years of high school. — Simon Baker

She had doll-like, almost delicate limbs, small hands, and hardly any hips.
But she now had breasts.
All her life sje jad been flat-chested, as if she had never reached puberty. She thought it had looked ridiculous, and she was always uncomfortable showing herself naked.
Now, all of a sudden, she had breasts. They were by no means gigantic - that was not whatshe had wanted, and they would have looked ridiculous on her otherwise skinny body - but they were two solid, round breasts of medium size. The enlargements had been well done, and the proportions were reasonable. But the difference was dramatic. — Stieg Larsson

If God wanted teenagers to be abstinent, puberty would begin at twenty. — Jacob M. Appel

He's in that larva stage, the damp, pained shedding of the child's body. This is what boarding school is for. To store them away during years like this, so they can suffer without the embarrassment of their parents watching. — Adam Haslett

By puberty I learned that nothing worth having could be easily attained and to succeed one must be single minded. — Russell Brand

I was the naughty kid that the teachers liked. I bullied a kid in the 1st year when I was in the 2nd, who then hit puberty like a plane crash and grew into a gorilla who bullied me when he was in the 4th year and I was in the 5th. That's Karma. — Simon Pegg

If I can help get anybody through puberty, I say, 'Good!' — Cheryl Ladd

I began drinking alcohol at the age of thirteen and gave it up in my fifty sixth year; it was like going straight from puberty to a mid-life crisis. — George Montgomery

I used to wonder if a mother could see the shift when her child became an adult. I wondered if it was clinical, like at the onset of puberty; or emotional, like the first time his heart was broken; or temporal, like the moment he said I do. I used to wonder if maybe it was a critical mass of life experiences - graduation, first job, first baby - that tipped the balance; if it was the sort of thing you noticed immediately when you saw it, like a port-wine stain of sudden gravitas, or if it crept up slowly, like age in a mirror. Now I know: adulthood is a line drawn in the sand. At some point, your child will be standing on the other side. I — Jodi Picoult

The result was that Preston successfully negotiated quite a few decades without ever coming within hailing distance of puberty. In this state of arrested development, he defiantly lived through many a perverse adventure. And he still lives in the pages of those books I wrote about him, though I stopped writing them some years ago. — Thomas Ligotti

Puberty was the main culprit in ending my acting career. I went from being kind of this chunky little kid to looking different, and I was really bummed because I loved acting. — Jeff Cohen

Going through puberty as a young girl is so confusing. This monster invades your body, changes things and makes things grow, and no one tells you what's going on. — Katharine Isabelle

There are surprisingly few real students of the game in baseball; partly because everybody, my eighty-three year old grandmother included, thinks they learned all there was to know about it at puberty. Baseball is very beguiling that way. — Alvin Dark

No [Peter] Pan has ever survived past puberty. When their bodies start changing, they start looking for the rope and the razor blades. There are some betrayals of the flesh that they simply aren't designed to endure. — Seanan McGuire

Blame your body. The whole biological purpose of existence is to mate, so from the time we hit puberty, our hormones are demanding us to couple up. Maybe it's basic instinct to feel inadequate if you're single."
"That's what sucks. There's so many more interesting things than guys, but guys are what we spend most of our time talking about."
"I think that's just the way it is, though. No matter what we do, it's always more special if there's a boyfriend to share it with."
"Or a best friend. — Daria Snadowsky

Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendant horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. — David Foster Wallace

For your information, Lester, there are at least five wonderful parts of the female body that can be viewed by the owner only with a hand mirror. — Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

J.T Woodland, known as "the cute one" in The Corporation's seventh-grade boy band, Boyz Will B Boyz. Due to the success of their triple-platinum hit, "Let Me Shave Your Legs Tonight, Girl," Boyz Will B Boyz ruled the charts for a solid eleven months before hitting puberty and losing ground to Hot Vampire Boyz. — Libba Bray

Ever since puberty I have believed in the value of two things: kindness and clear thinking. At first these two remained more or less distinct; when I felt triumphant I believed most in clear thinking, and in the opposite mood I believed most in kindness. Gradually, the two have come more and more together in my feelings. I find that much unclear thought exists as an excuse for cruelty, and that much cruelty is prompted by superstitious beliefs. — Bertrand Russell

After puberty, you look to one sex for more than friendship and to the other for less-than-complete intimacy. — Rafael Yglesias

Early on, girls begin to menstruate, which is dramatic but not obvious to their playmates. They grow taller and rounder, but underneath their makeup they are still recognizably themselves. For boys it is far more disorienting. Puberty comes later, sometimes much later, and its delay is humiliating. While the tall round girls are getting themselves up like grown women, the prepubertal boys, with their featureless, hairless bodies, are just dirty little kids who could pass for the children of the hypermature girls. — Frank Pittman

Even without overt sexual abuse, all young women are known to experience a descent into low self-esteem at puberty, probably as they realize their role as sexual objects. The highly sensitive girl will sense all the implications even more and make self-protection a higher priority. Some overeat to become unattractive, some overstudy or overtrain so they have no free time, some pick one boy early and hang on to him for protection. — Elaine N. Aron

Song for the Puberty Rite of a Girl Named Cowaka:
A poor man takes the songs in his hand
And drops them near the place where the sun sets.
See, Cowaka, run to them and take them in your hand,
And place them under the sunset. — Frances Densmore

You see, my version of why anyone would want to become an actor is that it's some psychological fixation, something that happened in puberty that you didn't outgrow in time, which is normal. Nevertheless, if you make it a profession, it can be really neurotic. — Christoph Waltz

Oh my God, can we not talk about puberty?! I'm still not over my mom's "you're a woman now" speech. — G. Willow Wilson

Most of us abandoned the idea of a life full of adventure and travel sometime between puberty and our first job. Our dreams died under the dark weight of responsibility. Occasionally the old urge surfaces, and we label it with names that suggest psychological aberrations: the big chill, a midlife crisis. — Tim Cahill

I was the ugly duckling until I reached puberty. — Tanya Roberts

The dark realization came to him that a difficult and miserable age had begun for him, and he couldn't imagine when it would end. [Puberty] — Alberto Moravia

Puberty is an extremely traumatic process even if you don't realize it. It kind of lives with you for like 10 years. — Andrea Riseborough

Back in 1982, when there were still only a manageable number of 'X-Men' titles on the racks (by which I mean just one), Marvel quite reasonably figured the world could stand another team of beleaguered mutant superheroes. And so were born 'The New Mutants,' junior X-Men whose powers had just begun to manifest at the onset of puberty. — Greg Van Eekhout

I started puberty very late. I was nearly sixteen. And for complicated reasons this late arrival of my puberty caused me to stop playing competitive tennis. But before my puberty problem, I had trouble with my lower back and with my left testicle. — Jonathan Ames

When I was five years old, I told my parents that I wanted to take ballet. So, ballet was the focus of my life ... until puberty. Then I discovered boys and started dating a guy with a mohawk who'd come to my ballet class and freak everybody out. Shortly after that is when I quit. — Chandra West

I woke up screaming. Or pretty close to screaming, considering I was still getting over a cold I'd caught from Josh two weeks ago that had left me sounding like a chain-smoker going through puberty. — Mariana Zapata

When most boys were making fun of girls who hit puberty, I was sitting on the swings wondering if I already knew you and if not, when would I? — Marilyn Grey

Hey, look - your girlfriend is saying something.
Artemis had a vast mental reserve of scathing comebacks at his disposal, but none of them covered girlfriend insults. He wasn't even sure if it was an insult. And if it was, who was being insulted? Him or the girl? — Eoin Colfer

Dancers are kept in a perpetual state of pre-puberty, and for young girls in particular, that type of pressure breeds insecurities. — Mia Wasikowska

I wasn't just crying about Will. I was crying about Seb and Shona and my job and my sister's aggression and my parent's refusal to be proud of me and Lauren's wedding and every last shit little thing that had happened to me from birth, from the big disasters like puberty, to the things that didn't even seem to matter at the time, like when I put milk in my tea last Thursday and then found out it had gone off. — Lindsey Kelk

All those adorable towheaded kids in the promotional film are going to turn thirteen. Once a family member hits puberty, odds are that everybody is not going to have the same ideals. Unless everybody gets together and agrees that the new ideals involve turning the front yard into a skate ramp and officially changing Dad's name to Fuckhead. — Sarah Vowell

We are American at puberty. We die French. — Evelyn Waugh

Most observers of the French Revolution, especially the clever and noble ones, have explained it as a life-threatening and contagious illness. They have remained standing with the symptoms and have interpreted these in manifold and contrary ways. Some have regarded it as a merely local ill. The most ingenious opponents have pressed for castration. They well noticed that this alleged illness is nothing other than the crisis of beginning puberty. — Novalis

Our model citizen is a sophisticate who, before puberty, understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato — Wendell Berry

Why are entire flocks of industrial birds dying at once? And what about the people eating those birds? Just the other day, one of the local pediatricians was telling me he's seeing all kinds of illnesses that he never used to see. Not only juvenile diabetes, but inflammatory and autoimmune diseases that a lot of the docs don't even know what to call. And girls are going through puberty much earlier; and kids are allergic to just about everything, and asthma is out of control. Everyone knows it's our foods ... Kids today are the first generation to grow up on this stuff ... — Jonathan Safran Foer

Puberty was not kind to me. I had acne, eczema and had a stye in my eye, so it was quite hard to go in to somewhere where the majority were boys. At that age, they were quite vocal about what they thought of your looks. — Sophie Wu

More than that, the thought rattled uncomfortably in my child brain that I would one day become one of them. My body then was sexless. Though I had seen the curves of adults, I couldn't fathom the chrysalis that would turn my featureless body into something with heft and gravity, curves and the inclination to use them. — Valentine Glass

I studied voice and piano as a child, although, at least with voice, you start over at puberty, because your voice completely changes. — Victoria Legrand

I remember I could do - I did Bart Simpson once on the bus. I did, like, a really good Bart Simpson voice on the bus, obviously before I hit puberty. And everybody went, 'Whoa, that sounds just like Bart Simpson.' — Bill Hader

The tallest adults are the ones who had the most childhood and adolescent growth before puberty started; puberty typically tacks on a standard nine inches, and then the game's over. "The children who are going to be the biggest adults are those who are tall by age one or two, and have a relatively late puberty," says Rosenfeld. — Arianne Cohen

When I was going through puberty, I had all these feelings of being unstable through those years, and being uncontrollably drawn to things of beauty and things that are bad. — Park Chan-wook

Your being born makes your parents God. You owe them your life, and they can control you. Then puberty makes you Satan, just because you want something better. — Chuck Palahniuk

Yet alongside this rebellion against the father, a respect for and acceptance of his authority continued to exist. This ambivalent attitude toward authority - rebellion against it coupled with acceptance and submission - is a basic feature of every middle-class structure from the age of puberty to full adulthood and is especially pronounced in individuals stemming from materially restricted circumstances. — Wilhelm Reich

Puberty is the sickest joke God plays on us. So you're just noticing members of the sex: "Girls girls, ooo". Naturally you want to look your best, and God says "No! You will look the worst you've ever looked in your life!" — Eddie Izzard

The limbic system explodes during puberty, but the prefrontal cortex keeps maturing for another 10 years. — Robin Marantz Henig

Muslim children should be raised with the understanding that once they hit puberty they are adults and Mukallaf (responsible for their actions). This understanding is crucial to assist them in passing the tests of youth. — Abu Muawiyah Ismail Kamdar

As girls go through puberty, their hormones will have a direct impact on how their facial features develop. Women with high levels of estrogen will end up with full lips and a large waist-to-hip ratio, while women with lower levels of androgen, the steroid hormones, will keep their short and narrow jaws from childhood, along with their flatter brows - giving them much larger eyes. And - surprise, surprise - this balance of female hormones is also positively linked to fertility. — Hannah Fry

Whuppins were like kid taxes we paid with our behinds. — Terris McMahan Grimes

Immanuel Kant believed that we humans, because we are so emotionally complex, go through two puberties in life. The first puberty is when our bodies become mature enough for sex; the second puberty is when our minds becomes mature enough for sex. — Elizabeth Gilbert

The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births. — John Holdren

Yes, and let's make sure every American gets a puberty ceremony, an impressive welcome to the rights and duties of grown-ups. As matters now stand, only practicing Jews get those. The only way the rest of us can feel like grown-ups is to get pregnant or get somebody else pregnant or commit a felony or go to war and then come back again. — Kurt Vonnegut

Holly winked. 'Do I look like a fly boy to you, Fowl?'
Artemis had to admit that she didn't. Captain Short was extremely pretty in a dangerous sort of way. Black-widow pretty. Artemis was expecting puberty to hit in approximately eight months, and he suspected that at that point he would look at Holly in a different light. It was probably just as well that she was eighty years old. — Eoin Colfer

Prison for the crime of puberty
that was how secondary school had seemed. — David Brin

There have been reports of many child marriages taking place in the Malabar region in Kerala, especially among the Muslim community. However, under Muslim Personal Law, a girl can be married once she attains puberty, and hence we cannot say that such marriages are not valid. — Girija Vyas

I am a father. My son's name is Max and my daughter's name is Billie Grace. Twelve years ago Max was born with Down Syndrome. His journey has been complicated by infantile seizures, sleep apnea, dietary challenges and now, puberty! — John C. McGinley

in 1762, Rousseau argued that puberty had such fundamental emotional and mental effects that it represented "a second birth. — Jon Savage

I can tell you that the book 'The Ugly Truth' is about puberty and all the awfulness that comes with that time in a person's life. It was definitely some different subject matter to be writing about, especially knowing some of my audience are second and third graders. — Jeff Kinney

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

First of all, I think that sex, like love, is a sacred thing..if I were going to live beyond puberty, it would be really important to me to keep sex as a sort of marvelous sacrament. And secondly, a teenager who pretends to be an adult is still a teenager. If you imagine that getting high at a party and sleeping around is going to propel you into a state of full adulthood, that's like thinking that dressing up as an Indian is going to make you an Indian. And thirdly, it's a really weird way of looking at life to want to become an adult by imitating everything that is most catastrophic about adulthood. — Muriel Barbery

I went through puberty late. I was a little, little, tiny kid. I was still growing in college. — Rob Riggle

Modern barber college, Smith eyes closed suffers a haircut fearing its ugliness 50 cents, a barber student olive-skinned 'Garcia' on his coat, two blond small boys one with feared face and big ears watching from seats, tell him 'You're ugly little boy & you've got big ears' he'd weep and suffer and it wouldn't even be true, the other thinfaced conscious concentrated patched bluejeans and scuffed shoes who watches me delicate, suffering child that grows hard and greedy with puberty. — Jack Kerouac

Puberty for me was graduating from Thousand Island salad dressing to Caesar salads. It was like going from hot dogs and hamburgers to beef stroganoff, or from ice cream in a cone to creme brulee. — Richard Simmons

The girl you were died; the potion of death was what all of us women swallow sooner or later. Have you noticed how at puberty the Amazon-like energy we are born with fades and we turn into doubt-filled creatures with clipped wings? The woman left trapped in the silo is also you, a prisoner of the restrictions of adult life. The female condition is a disgrace, Isabel, it's like having rocks tied to your ankles so you can't fly. — Isabel Allende

I usually say I left puberty at 58. — Ingmar Bergman

Nakedness is very common in the tribe. It is not a shameful thing; it is an expression of one's relationship with the spirit of nature. To be naked is to be open-hearted. Normally kids stay naked until puberty and even beyond. It was only with the introduction of cheap cloth from the West, through Goodwill and other Christian organisations, that nakedness began to be associated with shame. — Malidoma Patrice Some

When a new post-war generation has grown to puberty and to youth and to manhood and womanhood, it should read, and it should be realistically told, of the futility, the idiocy, the utter depravity of war. For that matter, this instruction could begin at the age of six with the taking of those toy guns out of those toy holsters and throwing them in the ash-cans where they belong. — Edna Ferber

I agree, Dad. I was just explaining to the woman why we don't look anything alike and why you would have been younger than me when I was born. It doesn't mean I don't love you 'cause you know I do. Make one snotty comment in anger when you're twelve years old going through puberty and getting grounded, and you pay for it for the rest of your life. Parents ain't got no sense of humor. (Omari) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

I always knew that adulthood didn't count; following puberty, all existence is but epilogue. — Amelie Nothomb

What is it that is done to our children that their puberty should deform them? They have the joy of movement; they have an enterprising curiosity; they are ready for sensible self-denial; they dream ahead, and they have a faithful memory, and, above all, great compassion. [ ... ] The well-meaning educator who flatters and humours the young not only does a disservice to the community, but also damages the individual by depriving him of the opportunities of self-discovery. — Kurt Hahn

I don't think wood was discovered in Britain until the 1970's. That's when I discovered it anyway. — Craig Ferguson

It was one thing to jack off. It was another thing to jack off and not secure your shit before you opened a goddamned door. That was like, Puberty 101. Or Being a Guy 101. Or Basic Fucking Common Sense 101. — Laura Kaye

'Twas strange that one so young should thus concern His brain about the action of the sky; If you think 'twas philosophy that this did, I can't help thinking puberty assisted. — Lord Byron

So Henry," Puck said as he kicked off his shoes and propped his smelly feet on the kitchen table. "I was wondering what you can tell me about puberty."
Henry turned pale and stammered.
Sabrina wanted to crawl under the table and die. — Michael Buckley

After puberty the personality develops impetuously and all extraneous intervention becomes odious ... Now it so happens that parents feel the responsibility towards their children precisely during this second period, when it is too late. — Antonio Gramsci

All those tough guys who want to scare the world into seeing them as men ... who don't know how to be a man with a woman, only abrute or a boy, who fill up the divorce courts; all those corporate raiders and rain-forest burners and war starters who want more in hopes that will make them feel better; ... are suffering from Father Hunger. They go through their puberty rituals day after day for a lifetime, waiting for a father to anoint them and say "Attaboy," to treat them as good enough to be considered a man. — Frank Pittman

Ever since puberty, ever since I was 11 or 12, I've had cyclical depression. That's something that has been a defining feature of my life as an adult. It's manageable. But it's real. And it doesn't take away from my joy or my work or my energy, but coping with depression is something that is part of the everyday way that I live and have lived for as long as I can remember. — Rachel Maddow

Rock n' roll! It's the music of puberty. — Suzi Quatro

Love stories are only fit for the solace of people in the insanity of puberty. No healthy adult human being can really care whether so-and-so does or does not succeed in satisfying his physiological uneasiness by the aid of some particular person or not. — Aleister Crowley

How much do you work out?"
"I don't," he said. "It's genetic." Which it was. Puberty had brought him many things unbidden, including height and weight and an extreme mesomorph physique, with a six-pack like a cobbled city street, and a chest like a suit of NFL armor, and biceps like basketballs, and subcutaneous fat like a Kleenex tissue. He had never messed with any of it. No diets. No weights. No gym time. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, was his attitude. — Lee Child

Most of what I've written songs about are things that come out of the confusing emotional, spiritual and psychological period of time when you're going through puberty. — Ian Anderson

When I dance, I look like I'm a dad at a prom. I never grasped my limbs. Ever since puberty I've just kind of felt like we don't understand each other. — Jennifer Lawrence

He scanned the page looking for an entry that read, "Help! I'm Almost Thirteen Years Old and I Still Have the Muscles of a Third-Grader!" but apparently Robert's condition was so freakish and rare, the authors of the book didn't even bother to include it. — Charles Gilman

As stated before, hypothyroidism may cause premature or delayed puberty. The majority of normal and hypothyroid females begin their cycle at ages 12 or 13. However, a growing number of those with hypothyroidism start their cycle years earlier or begin their periods at age 15 or later. Premature or delayed puberty in males is also becoming more common. — Mark Starr

Most of us have had that experience - at around puberty - of realising that, despite whatever efforts we put into our chosen sports, we will become at best competent. — Will Self

I was heavily into sport from 10 to 15, I was in all the teams, and it was everything to me. But I was very young for my school year and when puberty kicked in for my classmates I got left behind. — Ben Barnes

Asexual" and "aromantic" were different things. She liked holding hands and trading kisses. She'd had several boyfriends in elementary school, just like most of the other girls, and she had always found those practice relationships completely satisfying. It wasn't until puberty had come along and changed the rules that she'd started pulling away in confusion and disinterest. — Seanan McGuire