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...

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,...

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...

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 —...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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

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...

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...

But I don’t want to just believe it, I want it to be true.

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.

Puberty corrupts – that’s a fact, and it corrupts without consent – that’s the concern.

Adolescence is that time when I think, it can be- it’s the cruelest place on Earth. It can really be heartless.

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.

A TODOS, en algún momento, se nos ha revelado nuestra existencia como algo particular, intransferible y precioso. Casi siempre esta revelación se sitúa en la adolescencia. Eldescubrimiento de nosotros mismos se manifiesta como un sabernos...

Man has boyhood, adolescence, youth, middle age and senescence, as stages of growth; there are also corresponding stages in the growth of wisdom in him.

From my window I watched the full moon—a moon that reminded me of Brett—become shadowed, little by little until there was only a deep blackness in the woods at night. I would sit there wakeful,...

[As Shannon began seeking her identity during adolescence, she felt suffocated by her mother.] Religious extremism and black-and-white ideology don’t let people be people, … It doesn’t provide problem-solving skills. It sets people up to...

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...

He’d been given an assignment to write about teen beauty pageants […], which he’d accepted because he enjoyed blood sports as much as the next person.

Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.

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,...

In the next 10 years I see this wave of donor-conceived children cresting at adolescence or young adulthood and I think they’re going to start demanding change, … It’s their right as human beings to...

On a nightstand in a teenager’s room, a glass vase filled with violets leans precariously against a wall. The only thing saving the vase from a thousand-piece death on the hardwood floor is the groove...

For our own part, we learned a great deal about the techniques of love, and because we didn’t know the words to denote what we saw, we had to make up our own. That was...

I spent half my childhood trying to be like my dad. True for most boys, I think. It turns with adolescence. The last thing I wanted was to be like my dad. It took becoming...

make money, buy houses, take trips around the world? Why else do they dwindle into a little circle of close friends, a farm upstate, and become in the end mere businessmen, shop-owners, decorators who like...

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

Felicity ignores us. She walks out to them, an apparition in white and blue velvet, her head held high as they stare in awe at her, the goddess. I don’t know yet what power feels...

Stop looking at what everyone else has! You have to figure out who you are before you can be anyone!

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