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

Boys will be boys. And even that wouldn’t matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls.

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.

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...

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

Then there were long, lazy summer afternoons when there was nothing to do but read. And dream. And watch the town go by to supper. I think that is why our great men and women...

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

Partly James was jealous because he was a virgin, but mostly it just felt really weird being in a room with two people who’d spent the night having sex. It reminded him of the feeling...

It was a major and deeply embarrassing teenage revelation. It must be how straight teenage boys feel when they realize those boobs they like have heads attached to them.

We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.

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.

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...

They mustn’t know my despair, I can’t let them see the wounds which they have caused, I couldn’t bear their sympathy and their kind-hearted jokes, it would only make me want to scream all the...

My face seems too square and my eyes too big, like I’m perpetually surprised, but there’s nothing wrong with me that I can fix.

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...

One of the main tasks of adolescence is to achieve an identity—not necessarily a knowledge of who we are, but a clarification of the range of what we might become, a set of self-references by...

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

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...

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.

After all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any...

When you’re in your twenties in a new city where no one’s from here, we’re all sort of orphans. The only people that you can count on our bunch of people that you work with...

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...

young lady,” and no one was allowed to look at her because she thought she was fat. And how she really wasn’t fat. And how she was actually very pretty. And how different her face...

Era um dos efeitos colaterais da juventude: sair da inocência e ingenuidade da inf ncia e cair na alienação umbigocêntrica daquela fase em que acreditamos que já somos adultos. Mas é somente isso, achismo e...

It’s a wake-up call that although we’ve been investing a lot in adolescence, we can’t stop thinking about the health of our young people when they leave adolescence.

During childhood, it’s about trying to help develop who your kid’s going to be. During adolescence, it’s about responding to who your kid wants to be.

The hardest thing about adolescence is that everything seems too big. There’s no way to get context or perspective, ….. Pain and joy without limits. No one can live like that forever, so experience finally...

Many parents have experienced the fact that kids don’t seem to honor their parents the way that previous generations of children did. The question we need to ask is, how did we get to this...

First you have to survive adolescence; then your education. Finally, yourself.

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.

I’m most disturbed by the theory of rubber resilience in children; as if its much easier to bounce back with youth. I see them more like Steel. When heated, they can be bent either which...

…before I was going to college, my secret plan was to one day not tell anybody and just get on some bus to some random city and just move there and become this totally different...

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...

And she says she wants to expose me to all these great things. And to tell you the truth, I don’t really want to be exposed to all these great things if it means that...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...