We want to extend our adolescence as long as we can,

What drew him back was something altogether more personal, to a history where, in the pain and longing of adolescence, he was still standing on the corner of Queen and Albert Streets waiting for someone that he knew would never appear. He had long understood that one of his selves, the earliest and most vulnerable,...

The groove is so mysterious. We’re born with it and we lose it and the world seems to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the world unifies around us, and both stupid and cool fall away.I am grateful to those who are keepers of the groove. The...

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...

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.

You don’t have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone

With any child entering adolescence, one hunts for signs of health, is desperate for the smallest indication that the child’s problems will never be important enough for a television movie.

Elegance is innate. It has nothing to do with being well dressed. Elegance is refusal.

Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror...

So it was a crossroads summer, when the universe seemed to stand perilously still like an egg wobbling on a precipice, a regular rite of passage summer that saw us traverse the hazardous divide between the illusions of boyhood and the far more pernicious deceptions of maturity, et cetera.

For as long as I could remember, I had been transparent to myself, unselfconscious, learning, doing, most of every day. Now I was in my own way; I myself was a dark object I could not ignore. I couldn’t remember how to forget myself. I didn’t want to think about myself, to reckon myself in,...

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

A team is like a child. First it’s the infant stage then the adolescent stage. I think we’re in the adult stage. Hopefully, we don’t revert back to the adolescence stage.

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....

I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence...

It was possible, I saw now, to be a grotesque, to be huge and free, to wander the streets in utter freedom despite your atrocity, as long as you did it when everybody else was sealed inside their little lit boxes.Now it made sense – why monsters came out at night.

She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city

What was he? A mere human, stuck between the rungs of blended adolescence and nascent adulthood. What power did he command over the mysterious forces of love? Which sword could shatter the impenetrable armour of desire?

The big mistake that men make is that when they turn thirteen or fourteen and all of a sudden they’ve reached puberty, they believe that they like women. Actually, you’re just horny. It doesn’t mean you like women any more at twenty-one than you did at ten.

All You Need Is Love” in homage to their memory.

Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil…. Pretty soon all twenty of us – our...

Was she insane?! She would lose her head before she was 20!

So much alarmed that she is quite alarming, All Giggle, Blush, half Pertness, and half Pout.

That night I dreamed about flying turtles and forest fires and fucking the earth…The next morning I awoke and I listened to the tree company tearing away the woods and the timber. I heard the chainsaws ripping outside my open window and I heard the dynamite exploding all the mountain tops away for the black...

Young people, however, tend to ignore the customs of their elders. Adolescent rebellion has been responsible for all manner of absurd costumes. The more ridiculous a certain fashion is, the more adolescents will cling to it.

The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness.

Wanderess, Wanderess, weave us a story of seduction and ruse. Heroic be the Wanderess, the world be her muse.’…I jot this phrase of invocation in my old leather-bound notebook on a bright, cold morning at the Café **** in Paris, and with it I’m inspired to take the reader back to the time I first...

Children’s and YA books are about being brave and kind, about learning wisdom and love, about that journey into and through maturity that we all keep starting, and starting again, no matter how old we get. I think that’s why so many adults read YA: we’re never done coming of age.

One has to bear in mind that during my childhood and adolescence, I suffered the repression of the Somoza dictatorship in every way: economically, socially, as well as at the hands of the police — because if we went out on the street to play baseball, for example, the police would come and beat us...

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

I can do one of two things. I can be President of the United States or I can control Alice Roosevelt. (His 19-year-old daughter.) I cannot possibly do both.

No matter what your origin or beliefs, rather adolescent or full grown. Thoughts are scribed in pencil but actions are carved in stone

Is this as good as it gets?

we’re teenagers,” Sylvia said. “we’re all depressed.

Adolescence is like having only enough light to see the step directly in front of you.

So you try to think of someone else you’re mad at, and the unavoidable answer pops into your little warped brain: everyone.

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

When I was younger, I would cling to life because life was at the top of the turning wheel. But like the song of my gypsy girl, the great wheel turns over and lands on a minor key. It is then that you come of age and life means nothing to you. To live, to...

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.

Despite the fact that I have no regrets about how things turned out in my life, I still can’t help wanting to understand my intense relationship with Leo, as well as that turbulent time between adolescence and adulthood when everything feels raw and invigorating and scary-and why those feelings are all coming back to me...

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...

No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.

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...

If, as PJ O’Rourke ones quipped, giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys, giving actual money and power to teenage boys (and girls) is as predictably disastrous as you would imagine.

I’m so unhappy that I’m going to overdose on aspirin,” but they’d be awfully surprised if they succeeded. They have no intention of dying. At the first sight of blood, they panic.

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...

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.

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...

Everything was brighter and more colorful in those years, as if my youth was ending in an explosion of unreal passion. Memories like these make my life sacred and holy.

I think the fluidity of gender is the next big wave in terms of adolescent development,