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...