Adolescence Quotes

1. "I chose the specialty of surgery because of Matron, that steady presence during my boyhood and adolescence. 'What is the hardest thing you can possibly do?' she said when I went to her for advice on the darkest day of the first half of my life.I squirmed. How easily Matron probed the gap between ambition and expediency. 'Why must I do what is hardest?''Because, Marion, you are an instrument of God. Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can play the 'Gloria'?'But, Matron, I can't dream of playing Bach...I couldn't read music.'No, Marion,' she said her gaze soft...'No, not Bach's 'Gloria'. Yours! Your 'Gloria' lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you."
Author: Abraham Verghese

2. "Weeks went by, then months. I am speaking of a far-away time - a vanished happiness. It fell to me to befriend, to console with whatever words I could find, one who had been the fairy, the princess, the mysterious love-dream of our adolescence - and it fell to me because my companion had fled. Of that period ... what can I say? I've kept a single image of that time, and it is already fading: the image of a lovely face grown thin and of two eyes whose lids slowly droop as they glance at me, as if her gaze was unable to dwell on anything but an inner world. "
Author: Alain Fournier

3. "Just because I do what I do doesn't mean I escaped adolescence, all the bumps and bruises that go along with it."
Author: Anna Paquin

4. "Adolescence is such a fun time in your life, because you think you know it all, and you haven't gotten to the point where you realize that you know almost nothing."
Author: Anthony Kiedis

5. "You can certainly extend your adolescence. There's people that are very good at extending it indefinitely."
Author: Ben Mendelsohn

6. "Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
Author: C.S. Lewis

7. "Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period."
Author: Caitlin Flanagan

8. "Adolescence is just one big walking pimple."
Author: Carol Burnett

9. "I figure if Doc is right about the time I have left,I should wrap up my adolescence in the next few days, get into my early productive stages about the third week of school, go through my midlife crisis during Martin Luther King Jr's birthday, redouble my efforts at productivity and think about my legacy, say, Easter, and start cashing in my 401(k)s a couple weeks before Memorial Day."
Author: Chris Crutcher

10. "It is widely known that the effects of childhood poverty follow children through adolescence and into adulthood."
Author: Chris Van Hollen

11. "Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice."
Author: David Elkind

12. "Something went klunk. Like a nickel dropping in a soda machine. One of those small insights that explains everything. This was puberty for these boys. Adolescence. The first date, the first kiss, the first chance to hold hands with someone special. Delayed, postponed, a decade's worth of longing--while everybody around you celebrates life, you pretend, suppress, inhibit, deprive yourself of you own joy--but finally ultimately, eventually, you find a place where you can have a taste of everything denied."
Author: David Gerrold

13. "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, had never left this place, and this original and clearest view of things could be recovered only through what had first come to him in the glow of its ordinary light and weather...it was the light they appeared in that was the point, and that at least had not changed."
Author: David Malouf

14. "[...] passion is by no means the fuller life which it seems to be in the dreams of adolescence, but is on the contrary a kind of naked and denuding intensity, verily, a bitter destitution, the impoverishment of a mind being emptied of all diversity, an obsession of the imagination by a single image."
Author: Denis De Rougemont

15. "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 now."
Author: Emily Giffin

16. "We fall in love or stay in love with people who are unsuitable or who no longer love us and, conversely, we feel no love towards people who would be very suitable. Love is involuntary, that's the problem. Our personal histories prepare us to be attracted to people who unconsciously evoke emotions from our childhood or adolescence."
Author: François Lelord

17. "Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born."
Author: G. Stanley Hall

18. "For years it seemed to me that this period had become a recurrent nightmare that I had almost every night, because I would wake in the morning feeling the same terror I had felt in the room with the saint. During my adolescence, when I was a student at an icy boarding school in the Andes, I would wake up crying in the middle of the night. I needed old age without remorse to understand that the misfortune of my grandparents in the house in Catasa was that they were always mired in their nostalgic memories, and the more they insisted on conjuring them, the deper they sank."
Author: Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

19. "Speaking figuratively, the study of theology often produces overgrown youths whose internal organs have not correspondingly developed. This is a characteristic of adolescence. There is actually something like theological puberty."
Author: Helmut Thielicke

20. "There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:-- through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it."
Author: Herman Melville

21. "A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew."
Author: Ian McEwan

22. "In addition, Steinberg has found that adolescence is especially rough on parents who don't have an outside interest, whether it be work or a hobby, to absorb their interests as their child is pulling away."
Author: Jennifer Senior

23. "One's teachers all belonged to that generation who were imperialists, and the whole narrative throughout my adolescence was of countries leaving the empire. I find it extraordinary that this purpose which drove how we viewed the world is now considered to be something that has no effect upon us."
Author: Jeremy Paxman

24. "Between childhood, boyhood, adolescence and manhood (maturity) there should be sharp lines drawn with tests, deaths, feats, rites, stories, songs, and judgments."
Author: Jim Morrison

25. "Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom. Even when something important happens to you, even when your heart's getting crushed or exalted, even when you're absorbed in building the foundations of a personality, there comes these moments when you're aware that what's happening is not the real story. Unless you actually die, the real story is still ahead of you. This alone, this cruel mixture of consciousness and irrelevance, this built-in hollowness, is enough to account for how pissed off you are. You're miserable and ashamed if you don't believe your adolescent troubles matter, but you're stupid if you do."
Author: Jonathan Franzen

26. "Maturity is only a short break in adolescence."
Author: Jules Feiffer

27. "Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults."
Author: Julian Barnes

28. "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."
Author: Junot Díaz

29. "I feel like I flunked at adolescence really badly. I found it really difficult."
Author: Kate Beckinsale

30. "My entire adolescence was geared toward one thing: gymnastics."
Author: Kerri Strug

31. "As my children leave the protected parameters of the bay called childhood and enter the wavier seas of adolescence, I'm starting to get seasick."
Author: Kristin Armstrong

32. "Even the most impassioned devotee of the ghost story would admit that the taste for it is slightly abnormal, a survival, perhaps, from adolescence, a disease of deficiency suffered by those whose lives and imaginations do not react satisfactorily to normal experience and require an extra thrill"
Author: L.P. Hartley

33. "Any book that can help you survive the slings and arrows of adolescence is a book to love for life; 'The Catcher in the Rye' did just that, and I still do love it."
Author: Libba Bray

34. "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 your whole life happens in those years, and the rest of your life it's just the same story playing out with different characters. I could die tomorrow and have lived the main ups and downs of life. Pain. Loss. Love. And what you all so fondly refer to as wisdom. Wanna know the difference between adult wisdom and young adult wisdom? You have the ability to look back at your past and interpret it. I have the ability to look at my present and live it with my whole body."
Author: Lidia Yuknavitch

35. "The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research "childhood."There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher's heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises "adolescence." The feeling haunts people all their lives.Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness."
Author: Michael Chabon

36. "Crabtree's father was a Pentecostalist preacher somewhere out in Hogscrotum County, MO, and his mother was the editor-in-chief of a magazine for knitting-machine enthusiasts. 'She can make you anything,' went a favorite line of his. 'She made me a queer.' He had been lost to the clutch of Satan since early adolescence and hadn't seen them in years."
Author: Michael Chabon

37. "It is not a dream, it is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only expensive — blind, faint-hearted, doubting world! [...] Humanity is not yet sufficiently advanced to be willingly led by the discoverer's keen searching sense. But who knows? Perhaps it is better in this present world of ours that a revolutionary idea or invention instead of being helped and patted, be hampered and ill-treated in its adolescence — by want of means, by selfish interest, pedantry, stupidity and ignorance; that it be attacked and stifled; that it pass through bitter trials and tribulations, through the strife of commercial existence. So do we get our light. So all that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combatted, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle." – Nikola Tesla (at the end of his dream for Wardenclyffe)"
Author: Nikola Tesla

38. "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."
Author: Nora Ephron

39. "She wanted to dance with someone who would embrace her in the way she dreamed of since adolescence."
Author: Paulo Coelho

40. "My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London."
Author: Peter Shaffer

41. "Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for."
Author: Rex Stout

42. "I have always pondered a tragic law of adolescence. (On second thought, the law probably applies to all ages to some extent). That law: People fall in love at the same time—often at the same stunning moment—but they fall out of love at different times. One is left sadly juggling the pieces of a fractured heart while the other has danced away."
Author: Robert Cormier

43. "Even as kids reach adolescence, they need more than ever for us to watch over them. Adolescence is not about letting go. It's about hanging on during a very bumpy ride."
Author: Ron Taffel

44. "Americans invented adolescence. It is not a natural phenomenon. Adolescence is a social construct, created by an urban-industrial society that keeps its young at home far past puberty. Teenage angst is a luxury if a successful modern human conceit that isn't condoned by our superior species."
Author: Sarah Beth Durst

45. "Adolescence is a dreadful period. We tend to notice those youngsters who misbehave and call attention to themselves, but there are others, equally miserable, who receive no help simply because they are silent. (41)"
Author: Stephen Dobyns

46. "It´s like watching someone do a triple backflip dismount and land on two feet, solid, arms splayed in the air. I know I could never do it, don´t even know where I would begin to learn, but some people are built for it. He was handcrafted to leave, had practiced on other women since adolescence. I was one of an unnumbered series."
Author: Suzanne Finnamore

47. "We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity."
Author: T.S. Eliot

48. "I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity."
Author: Tom Lehrer

49. "Edward was always a good listener, since his own form of self-expression then consisted in making uneartly and to me quite meaningless sounds on his small violin. I remember him, at the age of seven, as a rather solemn, brown-eyed little boy, with beautiful arched eyebrows which lately, to my infinite satisfaction, have begun to reproduce themselves, a pair of delicate question-marks, above the dark eyes of my five-year-old son. Even in childhood we seldom quarrelled, and by the time that we both went away to boarding-school he had already become the dearest companion of thos brief years of unshadowed adolescence permitted to our condemned generation."
Author: Vera Brittain

50. "The upheavals of adolescence silenced 'A Christmas Carol' for a few years. I became a firebrand atheist. Christmas - humbug! Too commercial! Then I became an agnostic. Christmas was a pro-forma affair, basically a chore. Buy mother a book, dad a new tie, my brother and sister small gifts. Pretend thanks for the fountain pens and shirts I received."
Author: Whitley Strieber

Adolescence Quotes Pictures