When you’re a kid all you want to do is be somewhere else.

Until recently the locus of sexual fantasy was peopled with images actually glimpsed or were sensations actually felt, or private imaginings taken from suggestions in the real world, a dream well where weightless images from...

It’s hard not to be impatient with the absurdity of the young; they tell us that two and two make four as though it had never occurred to us, and they’re disappointed if we can’t...

Camus-boy, you’re always going to be the same you, just older. It’s not like there’s a moment when you wake up and go, Shit, I’m grown-up, I don’t feel like myself anymore.’ I don’t tell...

He felt a little lost, after that experience. Lost as the girls on their knees. It was a never-ending story of young girls losing themselves, such that they were no longer humans with any souls...

Tombstones covered the dale, the smooth marble surfaces bright. She had spent days here as a teenager, though not out of any awareness of mortality. Like every adolescent, she intended to live forever.

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.