Teen Life Quotes

1. "In his wretched life of less than twenty-seven years Abel accomplished so much of the highest order that one of the leading mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century (Hermite, 1822-1901) could say without exaggeration, 'Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years.' Asked how he had done all this in the six or seven years of his working life, Abel replied, 'By studying the masters, not the pupils."
Author: Abel

2. "My son, be worthy of your noble name, worthily borne by your ancestors for over five hundred years. Remember it's by courage, and courage alone, that a nobleman makes his way nowadays. Don't be afraid of opportunities, and seek out adventures. My son, all I have to give you is fifteen ecus, my horse, and the advice you've just heard. Make the most of these gifts, and have a long, happy life."
Author: Alexandre Dumas

3. "I didn't have a teen age at all. I didn't even look at boys, never mind... then suddenly it was like, 'Oh my god!' So I made up for a lot of lost time very quickly. It was kind of bonkers. Working hard, partying hard - but also experiencing life, you know."
Author: Anne Marie Duff

4. "Strauss admits to being obsessed by his mother's rejection, and with the resultant rents in self-esteem. The Game echoes with disturbingly abusive comments leveled at his adolescent self, a self he feels was unacceptable. With bravado, he expresses regret that he didn't rack up more sexual conquests in his teens; in person, he expresses a truer regret that he was intimidated by life itself."
Author: Antonella Gambotto Burke

5. "I'm excited for people to realize that I'm 25 years old and not a teenager anymore... even though I still look 18 and can't get into a bar to save my life!"
Author: Brittany Snow

6. "It seems so long ago that he was last afraid of anything. Seventeen, was he then? Eighteen? Sometimes he thinks he's missing a lot by being like this - fear gives life a fillip. He wonders how it is he lost it all, and what there is - if anything - ever to bring it back. ("Jane Brown's Body")"
Author: Cornell Woolrich

7. "But it doesn't happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century humanist to the contrary, each man is an island complete unto himself, and as he sinks, the moving feet go on around him, from nowhere to nowhere and with no time to lose. The world is long past the Boy Scout stage of its development; now each man dies as he was meant to die, and as he was born, and as he lived: alone, all alone. Without any God, without any hope, without any record to show for his life.("New York Blues")"
Author: Cornell Woolrich

8. "Mom, Dad, I'm fourteen, I see what the world is like. And, no, I did not get this from the psychologist...I came to this understanding on my own, from what I really see in myself and about life."
Author: Darryl Steven Markowitz

9. "These teenager looks aren't going to last forever, and that there are much better foundation to build a life upon than how attractive you are."
Author: David Levithan

10. "All young people worry about things, it's a natural and inevitable part of growing up, and at the age of sixteen my greatest anxiety in life was that I'd never again achieve anything as good, or pure, or noble, or true, as my O-level results."
Author: David Nicholls

11. "He took her hand in his and knelt before her. Valkyrie looked at him. He was serious. (...)'Dude, I'm sixteen.''I love you.''That doesn't make me any older. Stand up.''Not until you say yes.''You're going to shuffle around on your knees for the rest of your life? Stand up, for God's sake.''Be my wife.' 'Shut the hell up."
Author: Derek Landy

12. "At seventeen I'm waiting for my life to actually begin. I'm afraid I'll wake up tomorrow eighty years old and I WILL STILL BE WAITING."
Author: Frank Warren

13. "Immortality is often ridiculous or cruel: few of us would have chosen to be Og or Ananias or Gallio. Even in mathematics, history sometimes plays strange tricks; Rolle figures in the textbooks of elementary calculus as if he had been a mathematician like Newton; Farey is immortal because he failed to understand a theorem which Haros had proved perfectly fourteen years before; the names of five worthy Norwegians still stand in Abel's Life, just for one act of conscientious imbecility, dutifully performed at the expense of their country's greatest man. But on the whole the history of science is fair, and this is particularly true in mathematics. No other subject has such clear-cut or unanimously accepted standards, and the men who are remembered are almost always the men who merit it. Mathematical fame, if you have the cash to pay for it, is one of the soundest and steadiest of investments."
Author: G.H. Hardy

14. "My mother had a horrific life. At fourteen, she was in the Nazi concentration camps. Her sense about life now is, every day above ground is a good day."
Author: Gene Simmons

15. "I also happened to identify with Julien Sorel. Sorel's basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy."
Author: Haruki Murakami

16. "It's not easy to diagnose because depending where the endometrial deposits are, the symptoms can be quite different. It's an unrecognized problem among teenage girls, and it's something that every young woman who has painful menstruation should be aware of ... it's a condition that is curable if it's caught early. If not, if it's allowed to run on, it can cause infertility, and it can really mess up your life.[Author Hilary Mantel on being asked about being a writer with endometriosis, Nov 2012 NPR interview]"
Author: Hilary Mantel

17. "Fuck the pack. I gave them fifteen years of my life. I fought for them, bled for them, and the moment my back was turned, they attacked my wife. I owe them nothing."
Author: Ilona Andrews

18. "They traveled deep into far-flung regions of their own country and in some cases clear across the continent. Thus the Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world, where oppressed people, whether fleeing twenty-first-century Darfur or nineteenth-century Ireland, go great distances, journey across rivers, desserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land."
Author: Isabel Wilkerson

19. "Romeo and JulietRomeo and Juliet is a tragic play written early in the career of William Shakespeare about two teenage "star-cross'd lovers" whose untimely deaths ultimately unite their feuding households. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime and, along with Hamlet, is one of his most frequently performed plays. Today, the title characters are regarded as archetypal "young lovers". (From Wikipedia)"
Author: Jane Austen

20. "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."
Author: Jane Austen

21. "The same teen who can't legally operate a four-wheeler, or [ATV]...in a farm lane workplace environment can operate a jacked-up F-250 pickup on a crowded urban expressway. By denying these [farm work] opportunities to bring value to their own lives and the community around them, we've relegated our young adults to teenage foolishness. Then as a culture we walk around shaking our heads in bewilderment at these young people with retarded maturity. Never in life do people have as much energy as in their teens, and to criminalize leveraging it is certainly one of our nation's greatest resource blunders."
Author: Joel Salatin

22. "I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments."
Author: Julian Barnes

23. "A balanced life has a rhythym. But we live in a time, and in a culture, that encourages everyone to just move faster. I'm learning that if I don't take the time to tune in to my own more deliberate pace, I end up moving to someone else's, the speed of events around me setting a tempo that leaves me feeling scattered and out of touch with myself. I know now that I can't write fast; that words, my own thoughts and ideas, come to the surface slowly and in silence. A close relationship with myself requires slowness. Intimacy with my husband and guarded teenage sons requires slowness. A good conversation can't be hurried, it needs time in which to meander its way to revelation and insight. Even cooking dinner with care and attention is slow work. A thoughtful life is not rushed."
Author: Katrina Kenison

24. "Teenagers all think their life is a movie. If you break up with someone or you have a fight, you walk around with movie scores playing in your head. You sort of see yourself suffering as you're suffering. There's a lot of melodrama attached to the real events of your life."
Author: Kenneth Lonergan

25. "On the boardwalk the arcade jukebox plays all night surrounded by teenagers--sometimes twenty bodies deep, bare-skinned and full of energy for the music, for one another, for life, for the little bit of freedom they taste in the salt air and their skin. My father finds his place in this crowd. They are a force together. They don't do drugs. They don't drink. But they do music, and their power comes from their numbers and the thrill of being young on the beach at night."
Author: Laura Schenone

26. "As the proud father of two teens and past Chairman to the Presidents Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, I am committed to educating parents and especially young people on ways to live a long, healthy and active life."
Author: Lee Haney

27. "Later, she would remember these years, and realize with astonishment that she had, by fifteen, decided on most of the assumptions she would carry for the rest of her life: that people were essentially not evil, that perfection was death, that life was better than order and a little chaos good for the soul. Most important, this life was all. Unfortunately, she forgot these things, and had to remember them the hard way."
Author: Marilyn French

28. "The gene contains a single 'word', repeated over and over again: CAG, CAG, CAG, CAG ... The repetition continues sometimes just six times, sometimes thirty, sometimes more than a hundred times. Your destiny, your sanity and your life hang by the thread of this repetition. If the 'word' is repeated thirty-five times or fewer, you will be fine.Most of us have about ten to fifteen repeats. If the 'word' is repeated thirty-nine times or more, you will in mid-life slowly start to lose your balance, grow steadily more incapable of looking after yourself and die prematurely."
Author: Matt Ridley

29. "These guys fart a lot as well. I'm not saying that girls don't. We just aren't as passionate about them. The smell is sometimes overwhelming and I want to gag. They don't just limit these attacks to the classroom-they can come at you from anywhere around the school. The corridor, the stairwell, the canteen line. There's one area we call Fart Corridor because it belongs to the Year Eights and Nines, who are the biggest perpetrators. They make no apologies and feel no embarrassment. If a girl did one at St. Stella's she'd be an outcast for the rest of her natural life. Here, it's a badge of honor."
Author: Melina Marchetta

30. "Anybody who has a problem with 'Skins' obviously doesn't understand teenage life."
Author: Nicholas Hoult

31. "I call it our English Renaissance because it is indeed a sort of new birth of the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century, in its desire for a more gracious and comely way of life, its passion for physical beauty, its exclusive attention to form, its seeking for new subjects for poetry, new forms of art, new intellectual and imaginative enjoyments: and I call it our romantic movement because it is our most recent expression of beauty."
Author: Oscar Wilde

32. "It can't be done, old thing. Sorry, but it's out of the question. I couldn't go through all that again.""Not for me?""Not for a dozen more like you.""I never thought," said Bingo sorrowfully, "to hear those words from Bertie Wooster!""Well, you've heard them now," I said. "Paste them in your hat.""Bertie, we were at school together.""It wasn't my fault.""We've been pals for fifteen years.""I know. It's going to take me the rest of my life to live it down."
Author: P.G. Wodehouse

33. "I made these sonnets out of wood; I gave them the sound of that opaque pure substance, and that is how they should reach your ears. Walking in forests or on beaches, along hidden lakes, in latitudes sprinkled with ashes, you and I have picked up pieces of pure bark, pieces of wood subject to the comings and goings of water and the weather. Out of such softened relics, then, with hatchet and machete and pocketknife, I built up these lumber piles of love, and with fourteen boards each I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them. Now that I have declared the foundations of my love, I surrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life."
Author: Pablo Neruda

34. "But the Spackle War was over a long time ago, wasn't it?""Thirteen years now.""Thirteen years where you could have righted a wrong."She finally looks at me. "Life is only that simple when you're young, my girl."
Author: Patrick Ness

35. "I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally do, everything changes inside you, you can never be the same again. I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden, without the slightest flicker of a doubt, I understood that my life was my own, that it belonged to me and no one else.I'm talking about freedom, Fogg. A sense of despair that becomes so great, so crushing, so catastrophic, that you have no choice but to be liberated by it. That's the only choice, or else you crawl into a corner and die."
Author: Paul Auster

36. "Teen movies often have an unspoken underlying premise in which high school is seen as less serious than the adult world. But when your head is encased in that microcosm it's the most serious time of your life."
Author: Rian Johnson

37. "This man who in the pursuit of his aims could be so utterly ruthless—who would let nothing stand in his way; who, in the pursuit, deceived, and betrayed and cheated—would be deceiving and betraying and cheating on behalf of something other than himself: specifically, on behalf of the sixteen million Americans whose skins were dark. All through Lyndon Johnson's political life—as"
Author: Robert A. Caro

38. "Number one, I'd just seen my first zombies. Number two, there was no way to stop what was happening. Number three, the odds were I'd never live to see my nineteenth birthday. Life was over before I'd ever even got the chance to live it."
Author: Rose Wynters

39. "Mrs. Hamilton told me teenagers are resilient, that we'll bounce back," he scoffs. "And I'm thinking, Okay. When?"I don't remember Mrs. Hamilton saying that, but I've heard the theory before. That the younger you are, the quicker you can normalize an event and move on, because you don't know any other way of life. It just becomes a small part of your narrative as the years go by. But it seems to me the younger you are when something bad happens to you, the longer you have to carry it with you."
Author: Sarah Skilton

40. "Most teenage suicide attempts are cries for help; the teens survive, succeeding in bringing them the wanted attention. Mine was not a cry for help. I wanted to end my life and my misery."
Author: Sharon E. Rainey

41. "My big awakening happened when I was fourteen. I'd been trying to get into this older girl's pants for a while, and she finally let me come over to her house. We hung out, smoked some pot and listened to Aerosmith's Rocks. It hit me like a fucking ton of bricks. I sat there listening to it over and over, and totally blew off this girl. I remember riding my bike back to my grandma's house knowing that my life had changed. Now I identified with something."
Author: Slash

42. "Although emotionally delicate and eminently bruisable, teenagers are short on empathy. That comes later in life, if it comes at all."
Author: Stephen King

43. "If you organize your family life to spend even ten or fifteen minutes a morning reading something that connects you with these timeless principles, its almost guaranteed that you will make better choices during the day--in the family, on the job, in every dimension of life. Your thoughts will be higher. Your interactions will be more satisfying. You will have a greater perspective. You will increase that space between what happens to you and your response to it. You will be more connected to what really matters most."
Author: Stephen R. Covey

44. "They play in the Meadow. The dancing girl with the dark hair and blue eyes. The boy with blond curls and gray eyes, struggling to keep up with her on his chubby toddler legs. It took five, ten, fifteen years for me to agree. But Peeta wanted them so badly. When I first felt her stirring inside of me, I was consumed with a terror that felt as old as life itself. Only the joy of holding her in my arms could tame it."
Author: Suzanne Collins

45. "Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, grown men and women who've been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. Life has more than enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you with as soon as you're not looking, without you adding to the drama."
Author: Tana French

46. "You take a deep breath and you walk through the doors. It's the morning of your very first day. You say hi to your friends you ain't seen in a while, try and stay out of everybody's way. It's your freshman year and your gonna be here for the next four years in this town. Hopin' one of those senior boys will wink at you and say, "You know I haven't seen you around before." 'Cause when you're fifteen and somebody tells you they love you, you're gonna believe them. And when you're fifteen, feelin' like there's nothin' to figure out, but, count to ten, take it in. This is life before you know who you're gonna be. Fifteen."
Author: Taylor Swift

47. "How do we distinguish between the legitimate skepticism of those who scoffed at cold fusion, and the stifling dogma of the seventeenthcentury clergymen who, doubting Galileo's claim that the earth was not the center of the solar system, put him under house arrest for the last eight years of his life? In part, the answer lies in the distinction between skepticism and closed-mindedness. Many scientists who were skeptical about cold fusion nevertheless tried to replicate the reported phenomenon in their own labs; Galileo's critics refused to look at the pertinent data."
Author: Thomas Gilovich

48. "Now they came back to him, on this night he was seventeen years old. All the years and places of his brief broken life came within mind's reach and made a whole again. He knew once more, at last, after this long, bitter, waisted time, who he was and where he was. But where he must go in the years to come, that he could not see; and he feared to see it."
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

49. "Impressing a bunch of snooty teenagers is a pretty lame life goal to have."
Author: Vera Brosgol

50. "But when I was a teenager, the idea of spending the rest of my life in a factory was real depressing. So the idea that I could become a musician opened up some possibilities I didn't see otherwise."
Author: Wayne Kramer

Teen Life Quotes Pictures